In the president’s prime-time address a few days later, there was still talk of war, but the ammunition was sanded down to bullet points: “a clean energy future,” “a long-term gulf coast restoration plan” and, that most dreaded of perennials, “a national commission.” Such generic placeholders, unanimated by details or deadlines, are Washingtonese for “The buck stops elsewhere.”...Frank Rich
Apparently all it takes is conversation with aides and political consiglieri, and we're back in the soup again. We're back in the great, bland soup of the aftermath of an Oval Office performance in which the president laid down only one marker.
The sole sentence that really counted on Tuesday night was his prediction that “in the coming weeks and days, these efforts should capture up to 90 percent of the oil leaking out of the well.” He will be judged on whether that’s true.
One good thing did come out Tuesday's speech, though -- that $20 billion -- a potential political benefit to a president who is being dragged down by criticism and opposition.
Maybe. I'm not so sure -- though I think he did the right thing. That $20 billion must first be seen as a sign that the people, not corporations, plan to have the power in this country as well as being an important step in restoring the Louisiana coast and cleaning up the rest of the mess from Texas to Florida.
Being able, finally, to seeing the Gulf as an important and treasured asset rather than a free-for-all in which Big Oil is always the winner would, in itself, be a huge victory. That the victory was achieved by successful action on the part of the federal government would be a victory as well. The federal government, decimated by a succession of administrations hasn't got a lot going for it at the moment.
Many Americans -- and most notably the Tea Party -- take the easy way out by blaming Obama the results of thirty years of Reagan-through-Bush2 corrupt, skeletal government.
In this 9/11, it’s not just the future of the gulf coast, energy policy or his presidency that’s in jeopardy. What’s also being tarred daily by the gushing oil is the very notion that government can accomplish anything. The current crisis in that faith predates this disaster. In the short history of the Obama White House, two of its most urgent projects, reducing unemployment and pacifying Afghanistan, have yet to yield persuasive results. The dividends on the third, health care reform, won’t be in the mail for years.Given that record of incompletes, the government’s failure to police BP and the administration’s seeming impotence once disaster struck couldn’t have been more ill-timed. And there’s no miracle fix.
Like it or not, summer solstice is this weekend. End of June. Then only July, August, September and October -- a blur of months -- lie between now and midterms. If only Obama were to show that he feels the urgency many of us feel.
While Obama ended his speech with an exhortation for prayer, hope for divine intervention is no substitute for his own intercession. He could start running his administration with a 9/11 sense of urgency. And he could explain to the country exactly what the other side is offering as an alternative to his governance — non-governance that gives even more clout to irresponsible corporate giants like BP. As our most popular national politician, Obama still has power, within his White House and with the public, to effect change — should he exercise it.
Rich points to the Department of the Interior as a sign of Obama's failure to use the power he has and cites Tim Dickinson's piece in Rolling Stone as the parallel to the muckraking reporting by McClure's that woke up Teddy Roosevelt a century ago. Obama really needs to take strong and visible action at Interior and in the office of Ken Salazar.
The next crisis Obama is not, apparently, prepared for, is Afghanistan. Not to mention the rise of the Tea Party, whose candidates are gaining support for their promise to kill off Reagan-through-Bush2's victim -- good governance. They openly advocate killing off whole government departments along with Social Security, Medicare, and anything that smacks of oversight of corporate actions.
[Nevada Tea Party candidate Sharron] Angle has also called for processing highly radioactive nuclear waste at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain. If Americans abhor poorly regulated deepwater oil drilling, wait until they get a load of nuclear waste on land with no regulatory agency in charge at all. The choice between inept government and no government is no choice at all, of course. But there would be a clear alternative if the president could persuade the country that Washington, or at least its executive branch, can be reformed — a process that demands him to own up fully to his own mistakes and decisively correct them.
There's no question about Obama's ability to rise to the occasion, even when his opposition is far worse and more virulent than even the worst predictions. You could say there's no alternative to serious reform and restoration of good government, agency by agency.
These tribunes of the antigovernment right and their Tea Party auxiliaries are clamoring for a new revolution to “take back America” — after which, we now can see, they would hand over America to the likes of BP. Let Deepwater Horizon be ground zero for a 9/11 showdown over the role of government. There couldn’t be a riper moment for Obama, as a man once said, to bring it on.
