Americans are tired of talk on the Gulf oil spill. What they want now is results, writes LARA MARLOWE
Other presidents have used the solemnity of a speech from the Oval Office to announce they were taking the country to war.
But when President Barack Obama devoted the first Oval Office address of his 18-month-old presidency to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico on Tuesday night, the war metaphors fell flat. He was there “to speak with you about the battle we’re waging against an oil spill that is assaulting our shores and our citizens”, Mr Obama said.
The speech was a rehash of earlier Obama statements. Americans are tired of hearing the president refer to “Dr Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and our nation’s Secretary of Energy”. They want results.
Unfortunately for Mr Obama, reaction to his speech – and the fact that oil continued to gush into the Gulf for the 58th consecutive day yesterday – showed he’s losing this Gulf War.
The president has repeatedly questioned the reliability of BP. Yet he naively parroted the company’s claim that it would be able to capture up to 90 per cent of the leaking oil in the coming weeks.
Remember: in the plans it filed, BP said it could handle a spill of 240,000 barrels per day. Initial estimates said the Macondo well was leaking 1,000 barrels per day. Now it’s up to 60,000, and BP is two months away from shutting it down. Why would anyone believe anything BP promises?
In congressional hearings on Tuesday, it emerged that BP, Exxon Mobil, ConocoPhillips and Chevron all filed safety response plans for oil spills that referred to protecting walruses.
“There aren’t any walruses in the Gulf of Mexico and there have not been for three million years,” Representative Edward Markey noted.
The oil companies had filed near identical plans, in which three listed the telephone number of a marine scientist who’d been dead for four years.
Forcing BP to set up a $20 billion compensation fund seems to be Mr Obama’s idea of “kicking ass” – his term last week. But it probably won’t satisfy public opinion.
Last Friday in Louisiana, the president said plaintively: “So I can’t dive down there and plug the hole. I can’t suck it up with a straw.” The president’s critics seem to expect him to don a wetsuit and goggles and dive in. The fact is, he is in the impossible position of being responsible for an oil spill that he is powerless to stop.
The president has attempted to snatch victory from the jaws of his Gulf defeat, by using the spill to push for a climate Bill. Yet he approached the topic timidly in his speech on Tuesday night, never once mentioning climate change or the cap-and-trade programme contained in the House Bill. Nor did he single out Senate Republicans who have blocked all progress on a climate/energy bill.
Democrats fear a backlash in the November mid-term elections if they vote for a tax on carbon emissions. So cap-and-trade looks likely to go the way of the single payer system in healthcare legislation – sacrificed on the altar of bipartisan support that is not attainable.
Having promised to govern differently, to tell Americans hard truths, Mr Obama has become a prisoner to political expediency.