A leak from the Oval office suggests it did not take US President Barack Obama long to grasp the enormity of the political disaster washing toward him with the oil spill in the Gulf.
The ordinarily unflappable president, reported the Washington Post, cut off a briefing by aides in the first week after the Deepwater Horizon sank with a terse command: “Plug the damn hole.”
A month later, and with the hole still unplugged, Obama is being forced to show he is in personal command of the environmental crisis. He imposed tighter new controls on offshore oil drilling on Thursday, following up the announcement with a visit to the Gulf on Friday.
The step-up in personal engagement comes amid signs that the US public is redirecting some of its anger at the spill from BP and the oil industry toward his administration. The slow-motion nature of the disaster — with crude only reaching the shores in significant quantities this week — has emboldened political opponents to try to capitalize on the seeming powerlessness of Obama and BP to cap the spill.
Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, a onetime rising young star in the Republican party, has accused the administration of sitting on his requests for berms to protect barrier islands in his state from oil.
Even former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, who coined the term “Drill, Baby, Drill,” felt emboldened to accuse Obama this week of being in thrall to the oil industry.
His appearance of public detachment has also frustrated some Democrats, who were hoping he would use the crisis to help push through energy and climate legislation.
Others were looking to Obama to reverse his decision last March to expand offshore drilling. But the administration said yesterday that it still saw offshore drilling in the US’ energy future — although more stringently regulated.
Democratic strategist James Carville attacked Obama yesterday for retaining his customary cool.
“I have no idea of why they didn’t seize this thing,” the Clinton loyalist told ABC breakfast television. “The president of the United States could have come down here, he could have been involved with the families of these 11 people who were killed in the explosion.”
Some of the outrage directed at Obama now could be overspill from public’s anger over economic and financial scandals.
“I do wonder whether Deepwater Horizon is the Wall Street of the ocean, privatizing profits while the public carries the risk,” Representative Nick Rahall, the chair of the House of Representatives’ Natural Resources Committee, told a hearing yesterday.
But the hands-off approach — which now seems to be unraveling — appears to have been a deliberate strategy by the White House to keep the focus on the spill and its clean-up firmly on the oil industry.
Unlike Hurricane Katrina — regularly compared to the spill by the Republicans — the Obama administration deployed resources early on to the Gulf, dispatching Cabinet secretaries and mobilizing cleanup teams.
But it was determined that the environmental disaster carry a BP or oil industry brand. Even the regular e-mail updates on Cabinet officials’ visits to the Gulf are branded “Deepwater Horizon.”
The administration has repeatedly put responsibility for the cleanup on the oil firm.
“We will keep our boot on their neck until the job is done,” Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar said this week.
But a CNN poll suggests the focus on BP has distracted from the administration’s own efforts, showing for the first time that the majority of Americans, 51 percent, disapprove of Obama’s handling of the crisis.
Commentators are also increasingly complaining about lax oversight by his administration before the spill, and a hands-off approach to the cleanup.
The shift follows official investigations and news reports suggesting widespread corruption within the government agency in charge of regulating offshore drilling, with inspectors being treated to free tickets to football games.
The minerals management service also repeatedly ignored environmental warnings from government scientific agencies about potential risks of such drilling. Salazar said the culture was a hangover from the era of former US president George W. Bush. That explanation has not satisfied critics, who say the Obama administration needs to be held to account for its management over the past 15 months.
“You were supposed to be the new sheriff in town,” Representative Mike Coffman, a Republican, said, accusing the secretary of failing in his duties.
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