James Carville — love him or hate him or both — perfectly expressed the public’s frustration with Barack Obama and his handling of the BP oil spill.
What Obama must do, Carville said on CNN, is to tell BP, “I’m your daddy. I’m in charge. You’re going to do what we say.”
It’s typical cable-TV news bombast. It makes no sense, really, but what did you expect?
It’s not as if anyone can possibly think that BP is dragging its feet and somehow wants the spill to continue. It’s not as if the feds know more about plugging deep-water wells than the oil companies do. It’s not as if anyone misses the point that this has become an environmental and political nightmare — least of all Obama, who gets that there’s more than one meaning to “top kill.”
What Carville apparently wants is for Obama to come down to the Gulf Coast (he’s arriving today) and direct traffic like Patton did — in the movie, anyway — when his tanks got bogged down in the mud as they raced toward Germany.
It’s an appealing, if entirely unrealistic, image — the take-charge leader parts the seas and plugs the hole and kicks a little BP butt in the process.
Obama, understanding the politics, actually held a rare news conference to say he was “in charge” of the situation. The truth is the president has to say he’s in charge whether he can do anything about a situation or not.
After the news conference — in which Obama showed obvious command of the issues — the pundits decided he didn’t show enough anger, meaning he may never get his own cable-TV news slot. The polls, meanwhile, are saying that Obama is doing a poor job on the spill, meaning — as Obama himself pointed out — that the spill hasn’t been plugged yet.
But where Carville veers off the track — and what Obama couldn’t quite bring himself to say — is this:
Obama is not BP’s daddy.
(And note to Ken Salazar: When you put your foot on BP’s neck, watch out for the oil slick.)
The big oil companies and those who work for them are the ones who understand how to cap a well that begins at 5,000 feet under water and extends another 18,000 feet.
The government, meanwhile, does not have this expertise. That’s by design. The oil companies obviously don’t want spills — and so, the theory goes, that’s sufficient incentive for them to make sure they get these things right. Until, of course, they don’t, at which point they’re spilling great globs of oil on our beaches.
The big oil companies are also the ones who basically make the risk assessments on a well like this. That’s also by design. The law allows the Interior Department only 30 days to review an exploration plan.
It gets worse. The law says that offshore drillers are liable for only $75 million in damages. While BP has said it will pay for all damages, some senators want to change the rule. But James Inhofe (R-Okla./Big Oil) blocked the unanimous request to raise the cap to $10 billion, saying it would endanger all those small-business, deep-sea offshore drillers.
You see, it’s all by design.
And yet, House Minority Leader John Boehner charged that Obama had “failed” in his duties as president. He didn’t say it was an epic fail for Obama, not being quite that hip.
But Boehner must be hip enough to get the irony: Some of those who blame Obama for government takeovers and so-called creeping socialism now want him to micromanage an oil company.
I don’t want to let Obama off the hook here, though. He’s hip deep in the big sludgy. It was Obama who threw in with the offshore drillers in order to help the prospects for his cap-and-trade bill. He knew the problems — that oversight is lacking, that regulators are, in Obama’s words, “scandalously close” to the oil companies, that we’re relying on multinational firms to keep our beaches safe.
At the news conference, Obama credited Salazar for identifying the problems at Minerals Management Service but conceded they haven’t been fixed quickly enough. On the same day, the head of MMS, uh, resigns. I’m guessing Salazar isn’t feeling too secure himself.
In any case, Obama knows the real questions. There’s risk in offshore drilling. Are we satisfied with the level of risk or not? Are we satisfied with the level of regulation or not?
As we answer these questions, Obama ordered a moratorium on drilling, pending a report from a commission on safety standards. He made a push for alternative energy — although, I’m thinking, he could have pushed harder — and against the drill-baby-drill mentality.
But he also made clear he knew what he was up against in the who’s-your-daddy sweepstakes.
Obama said his daughter Malia knocked on the bathroom door that morning while he was shaving to ask: “Did you plug that hole yet, daddy?”
He didn’t say what he answered, but I’m assuming it was something like this: “Honey, you’ve got to keep away from Mr. Carville.”
Mike Littwin writes Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-5428 or mlittwin@denverpost.com.
