Opportunity in the Oil Spill

Jules Witcover

What took President Obama so long to start trying to make lemonade out of the lemon that is the horrible oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico?

Only now has he seemed to recognize the political opportunity the crisis has presented him, issuing a full-throated call for greater development of the alternative energy resources he championed so enthusiastically as candidate Obama.

Much is being written now about how this man-made environmental disaster is distracting the president from the agenda for change on which he was elected in 2008. That he has become a captive of events not of his making has become a political cliche.

Obama up to now had been reacting to the tragedy by first assigning the blame to the author of the spill, British Petroleum, assuring Americans the giant oil firm would pay big time, and only later saying he is in charge after all.

The president has backpedaled to a degree on his earlier unwise acquiescence to the oil industry in its call to broaden offshore drilling as a way to satisfy the mammoth U.S. thirst for oil and reduce our dependence on Middle East suppliers.

Finally, he or his celebrated message-makers have awakened to the fact that the Gulf oil spill offers the ideal rationale for pumping much more public awareness into the need for other fuel sources that will do much less violence to the environment.

In his speech Wednesday at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Obama promised to "make the case for a clean-energy future wherever I can, and I will work with anyone from either party to get this done." He pledged that "the next generation will not be held hostage to energy sources from the last century."

Central to the push will be intensified efforts to win congressional passage of pending climate-change legislation. One of its principal sponsors, Democratic Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, hailed the president's remarks as the kind of visible White House involvement that brought enactment of the previously stalled health-care reforms.

From the purely tactical perspective, the president's remarks enabled him at least temporarily to shift from the defensive, and from a posture casting him primarily as an unwitting ally of BP in the failed effort to cap the leaking underwater oil well.

In promising to address more aggressively the development of alternative energy sources and climate change, Obama is stepping up actions that portray him as a stern taskmaster against the oil industry giant. His dispatch of Attorney General Eric Holder to the Gulf to investigate possible corporate failures and abuses counters the early impressions of White House-BP partnership in coping with the crisis.

Nevertheless, as long as the well continues to pour millions of gallons of the black gold into the Gulf waters, Obama's political ownership of the dilemma will be detrimentally cemented in the public mind. Television network reporters and analysts have taken to counting down the number of days the episode has lasted as an inevitable indictment of the president.

It's all reminiscent of the news media countdown of the Iran hostage crisis of more that three decades ago, wherein American embassy personnel held in Tehran haunted President Jimmy Carter, contributing to his landslide defeat for reelection by Ronald Reagan. That episode ended with the release of the hostages timed as Carter watched the swearing-in of Reagan as his successor.

It's questionable whether Obama's efforts to make political lemonade out of the Gulf oil crisis lemon will effectively counter the growing impression that his low-voltage style of leadership is not equal to this latest challenge not of his making. Americans by their nature are not a particularly patient people.

As with the other major obstacles thrown in his way, the president badly needs to be seen not as a mere mediator but as a strong advocate of the interests and concerns of Main Street Americans. That means getting tougher not only with BP but with his own bureaucracy dealing with Big Oil as well.

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BP Gulf Oil Spill: Opportunity in the Oil Spill