Why President Obama just drank the water in Flint

Halfway through President Obama’s speech in Flint, Michigan, on Wednesday — after he’d praised the volunteers who helped in the city’s water crisis, and before he argued the crisis shows the limits of private action — he started coughing. His next words were probably inevitable: “Can I get some water?”

After he took a (filtered) sip of the city’s infamous water, contaminated with lead since September 2015, Obama pivoted to an argument greeted much more skeptically than his condemnation of the “carelessness and callousness” that created the crisis: What happened in Flint was a moral outrage, but it was no longer a medical emergency. And residents shouldn’t give up hope for their kids.

Obama’s speech summed up why Flint was such a compelling tragedy, particularly for liberals: The crisis, he said, was the result of an ideology that frames small government as more important than clean water, an attitude that leads to indifference to the concerns of the poor and powerless:

But he also said that the national outrage had produced needless anxiety and panic in Flint itself. The kids of Flint, provided that they’ve been tested for lead exposure and are getting continuous health care, are going to be fine, he argued:

The reason I can say that with some confidence is not just based on science but based on the fact that… it wasn’t until the ‘80s where we started banning lead in paint, lead in toys, lead in gasoline.

So if you are my age or older, or maybe even a little bit younger, you got some lead in your system when you were growing up. You did. I am sure that somewhere where I was two years old, I was taking a chip of paint and tasting it, and I got some lead. Or sometimes toys were painted with lead and you were chewing on them.

Obama drinking the water was mostly a stunt, if a well-intentioned one, as was Gov. Rick Snyder’s pledge to drink Flint’s water for 30 days. Lead isn’t particularly harmful to adults who are not pregnant, at least not until it’s at much higher concentrations than in Flint’s water.

Still, Obama has a point: In the late 1970s, before lead was banned in paint, toys, and gasoline, 88 percent of children ages 1 to 5 had at least 10 micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood. That’s double the CDC’s current threshold of concern, and now only 4 percent of children meet that threshold.

It’s true that even low levels of lead have been shown to produce drops in IQ, lower test scores, and higher rates of attention and behavior problems. And the crisis in Flint was clearly a man-made, avoidable disaster.

Still, both recent history and other cities show how much worse the situation in Flint could be. Kevin Drum at Mother Jones, who’s been arguing that Flint’s crisis is being blown out of proportion, pointed out that the share of kids with high blood lead levels in Flint was higher in every year before 2010 than it was even at the peak of the crisis. Vox’s Sarah Frostenson found 18 cities in Pennsylvania alone where the percentage of kids with lead in their blood is higher than it ever was in Flint.

Flint residents seemed skeptical of Obama’s argument, and it’s easy to understand why. The lead crisis still isn’t over, and a handful of homes still have water that’s undrinkable even with filters.

But Obama, who was invited to Flint by an 8-year-old girl who he met with after his arrival in the city, is clearly concerned about the effect the rhetoric is having on kids. “I don’t want anybody to start thinking that somehow all the kids in Flint are going to have problems for the rest of their lives because that’s not true,” he said in the speech. “I don’t want that stigma to be established in the minds of kids.”