Spare us please -- Turning a Crisis Into an Opportunity: The President brings up the oil spill to make his case to voters.
From The New York Times:
At a political fund-raiser on Thursday for a close friend running for his old Senate seat, President Obama brought up the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico to make his case to voters.
When the other side was in power, he said, they told the oil industry to “write your own rules.” More recently, he said, they “voted against holding oil companies like BP accountable for every dime of the spills they cause.” One leading Republican, he recalled, even “apologized to them.”
Now that the country’s worst oil spill in history has finally been stopped, expect a gusher of political debate over what it meant and whom to blame. For three months, Mr. Obama was tested in a way he had not been before, his seemingly detached initial response to the crisis evolving into a tougher approach to face down a multinational corporation.
He will spend the next three months until midterm Congressional elections trying to deflect questions about his administration’s effectiveness by turning them into questions about his critics’ coziness with the oil industry.
The spill managed to dominate much of the late spring and summer and at times forced Mr. Obama out of his comfort zone. He found himself challenged to exhibit more of the frustration Americans felt, and after nearly two months he finally used his first Oval Office address to confront the public uncertainty.
What lessons Mr. Obama drew from the oil spill, he has not discussed much in public. No doubt had he to do it over again, he would have thought twice about announcing an expansion of offshore drilling just before the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded off the coast. And he has said he wished he had moved more aggressively to clean up the regulatory agency monitoring oil exploration.
But Mr. Obama is not someone to be rushed into moving before he is ready. Asked once why he took a couple of days to express anger at large bonuses by a bailed-out Wall Street firm, he said, “Because I like to know what I’m talking about before I speak.”
At a political fund-raiser on Thursday for a close friend running for his old Senate seat, President Obama brought up the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico to make his case to voters.
When the other side was in power, he said, they told the oil industry to “write your own rules.” More recently, he said, they “voted against holding oil companies like BP accountable for every dime of the spills they cause.” One leading Republican, he recalled, even “apologized to them.”
Now that the country’s worst oil spill in history has finally been stopped, expect a gusher of political debate over what it meant and whom to blame. For three months, Mr. Obama was tested in a way he had not been before, his seemingly detached initial response to the crisis evolving into a tougher approach to face down a multinational corporation.
He will spend the next three months until midterm Congressional elections trying to deflect questions about his administration’s effectiveness by turning them into questions about his critics’ coziness with the oil industry.
The spill managed to dominate much of the late spring and summer and at times forced Mr. Obama out of his comfort zone. He found himself challenged to exhibit more of the frustration Americans felt, and after nearly two months he finally used his first Oval Office address to confront the public uncertainty.
What lessons Mr. Obama drew from the oil spill, he has not discussed much in public. No doubt had he to do it over again, he would have thought twice about announcing an expansion of offshore drilling just before the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded off the coast. And he has said he wished he had moved more aggressively to clean up the regulatory agency monitoring oil exploration.
But Mr. Obama is not someone to be rushed into moving before he is ready. Asked once why he took a couple of days to express anger at large bonuses by a bailed-out Wall Street firm, he said, “Because I like to know what I’m talking about before I speak.”
posted by Sid Cottingham | 5:57 AM
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