Obama and BP: The Oil Summit
Jules Witcover

It wasn't Ali-Frazier, or Louis-Schmeling or even Dempsey-Tunney. The much-awaited confrontation between President Obama and the BP bigwigs at the White House was more like Grant and Lee at Appomattox. The oil barons handed over their swords in a submissive mea culpa.

It could not have been otherwise, in the face of the fact of BP's total responsibility for the gigantic oil spill that threatens to cripple Gulf Coast fishing, tourism and many associated enterprises well into the future. If BP Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg's expressed concern about "the small people" in the region was ill phrased, his acceptance of the blame was complete.

As for Obama, his Oval Office talk to the nation the night before had been widely judged an unsatisfying defense and window-dressing of his crisis leadership. The subsequent meeting enabled him to project a greater sense of decisiveness. His announcement that BP would set aside $20 billion to pay claims of the financial victims put an impressive figure on the obligation.

In return, the president tossed a life preserver of questionable significance to the oil industry giant, saying "BP is a strong and viable company and it is in all our interests that it remain so." With that, he countered some Republican wailings that he was out to subvert holy American free enterprise.

At the same time, however, he extracted from Svanberg the suspension for the next three quarters of planned dividends to stockholders. It is supposed to channel nearly $8 billion into the relief escrow account, payment of which would have certainly rubbed raw the already wide resentment of BP.

The president's appointment to run the oil claims operation of Kenneth Feinberg, the watchdog on the payouts to 9/11 victims and on executive bonuses by bailed-out Wall Street banks and firms, was obviously designed to calm Gulf Coast claimants upset over BP delays in payouts.

But taken together, the Oval Office presidential speech and the White House meeting probably constituted only a mild public reassurance that Obama has finally grasped control of the disaster that initially he seemed willing to leave in the lap of BP.

At the outset, he brushed off the considerable public and media criticism that he was failing to invest sufficient emotional commitment to the worst environmental calamity in the nation's history, saying it would serve no purpose to yell and scream when cool-headed response was required. Yet in the end he provided more visible evidence of his engagement, making a fourth visit to the Gulf just prior to the White House meeting.

Tactically, the president sought to use the speech and the meeting to pivot from the immediate Gulf challenges of sealing the massive oil leak and cleanup of the four-state shoreline, to reviving his pitch for alternative energy sources.

"The tragedy unfolding on our coast is the most painful and powerful reminder yet that the time to embrace a clean energy future is now," he said. "Now is the moment for this generation to embark on a national mission to unleash America's innovation and seize control of our own destiny."

To naysayers about the possibility of freeing the country from its dependency on oil, Obama compared the current challenge to two others of the past. "The same thing was said about our ability to produce enough planes and tanks in World War II," he said. "The same thing was said about our ability to harness the science and technology to land a man safely on the surface of the moon."

But putting the nation on a wartime footing in terms of sacrifice was rejected by Obama's predecessor and there are no signs yet he's willing to do it either. The most he did the other night was to call for enactment this year of the comprehensive energy and climate change legislation already passed in the House.

The immediate roadblock to putting Obama's own agenda for change back on track is "plugging that damn hole," which remains beyond all his rhetoric and trips to the Gulf. The best he can do now is maintain a clear-headed engagement and prod from the White House, as he juggles all the other critical demands of his office.

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