So what happens when BP succeeds?
This morning Karl Rove has an op-ed (can we call it a column yet?) in the Wall Street Journal forwarding the increasingly silly and increasingly CW talking point that the BP oil spill is Obama’s Katrina:
As President Obama prepares to return to the Gulf Coast Friday, he is receiving increasing criticism for his handling of the oil spill. For good reason: Since the Deepwater Horizon rig blew up on April 20, a lethargic Team Obama has delayed or blown off key decisions requested by state and local governments and left British Petroleum in charge of developing a plan to cap the massive leak. Now the slow-moving oil spill threatens Mr. Obama’s reputation, along with 40% of America’s sensitive wetlands. Critics include some of his most ardent cheerleaders, who understand that 38 days without an administration solution is unacceptable. Obama officials have it backwards: They talk tough about BP’s responsibilities but do not meet their own responsibilities under federal law. They should not have let more than a month go by without telling BP what to do. And they should avoid recriminations against their partner in solving the problem until after the leak is sealed.
Rove’s analysis is good political point scoring, to be sure, but it shouldn’t be mistaken for a serious argument. Let’s think for a moment about the counterfactual: Obama spent the last month in BP’s war room, personally directing the operation, failing to use his Magical President Powers to fix the leak. Then Karl Rove would have written this:
As President Obama enters his fifth week embedded with BP’s senior management, he is receiving increasing criticism for his handling of the oil spill. For good reason: Since the Deepwater Horizon rig blew up on April 20, a hyperactive Obama team has interfered with and second-guesses every British Petroleum decision, making it impossible for the company to develop a plan to cap the massive leak.
Now the slow-moving oil spill threatens Mr. Obama’s reputation, along with 40% of America’s sensitive wetlands. Critics include some of his most ardent cheerleaders, who understand that 38 days without a engineer-led solution is unacceptable.
Obama officials have it backwards: They talk tough about the federal government’s responsibilities but do not allow BP to do what it knows, which is manage oil production. They should not have tried to take control of the situation from day one. And they should avoid recriminations against their partner in solving the problem until BP has really been given a chance to try.
Moreover, most of Rove’s criticisms have little to do with the president, but rather a big, complicated, inflexible, and opaque federal bureaucracy — the same bureaucracy that mucked up the response to Katrina, leaving political egg on Bush’s face.
Over at NRO’s Corner, Jonah Goldberg is a voice of reason:
Don’t get me wrong, I’m usually singing from the same “It’s Obama’s Fault and We Know It” songbook. But I just can’t bring myself to agree with the folks who think that the BP spill is a major indictment of Obama. He may have handled the politics of this thing badly, by which I mean the P.R., but unless someone can explain how Obama could have “taken over” and fixed this faster, I think a lot of the criticism is overboard. Not all of it; it sounds like Bobby Jindal has some legitimate complaints. But the notion that B.P. isn’t motivated to cap this thing as quickly as possible and so therefore Obama needs to lean on BP harder is nothing short of crazy talk. Obama could have been on vacation for the last month and I’d bet the tempo of the BP operation wouldn’t have been one minute slower.
What I wonder is whether there is a wrinkle in Goldberg’s argument that’s not the fault of the administration but of Congress. For weeks, BP has been trying to stop the leak with dome caps, junk shots (do they know that that phrase means?), and top kills. Nothing’s worked so far, but eventually something will. Maybe this week, maybe next; the flow will be staunched or at least contained.
At that point, every Congressional committee with jurisdiction over energy, public lands, commerce, and the environment will dragoon BP officials before them and ask sanctimoniously, “Why didn’t you do [insert whatever procedure ends up working] first?” Whichever engineer and manager organized the working solution will be hailed as heroes, while the developers of junk shorts and top hats will be publicly mocked.
To what extent does this change BP’s incentives to cap this spill? Who knows? Despite an ostensible $75 million cap on liabilities facing BP, it seems to be a bipartisan consensus that they’ll end up paying more, since we’re not really so much into the rule of law right now.
Whatever the result, though, it’s untoward to have Congress utilizing 20/20 hindsight to second-guess technical decisions after the fact. But at this point, I suppose we should be used to it.
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