| And the Times is wrong again, if BP lied to Barack Obama and misled him that is not his fault. The spill itself and even, at the moment, the seemingly futile attempts to stop the spill is the result of Republicans, down to using Halliburton's technology over another technology that is more successfully employed in Europe.
However their is something here that I think that is Barack Obama's burden and ultimately the Democratic party's burden. I think that most progressives bemoaned this, (especially because he had seemed to learn the lesson of health care,) and then a month ago, Barack Obama embraced, or he thought he cleverly "coopted", Republican ideas for how to solve our energy future.
He is wrong there on the merits. And on the merits I think there is little disagreement. It was supposed to be another clever way to disarm right wing arguments. But it has boomeranged back into the President's face and the face of the Democratic party.
I think this is now the recurring riff of this presidency. I hate to say it, but it is political malpractice.
Once again the president embraced Republican ideas to be/look bipartisan and open minded. But being Republican ideas, they have all the weaknesses of Republican ideas - just like with the health care bill being a system built on Republican ideas of the health care system - a LOOSELY REGULATED PRIVATE SYSTEM.
So now the president has endorsed offshore drilling, which he still had the opportunity to repudiate clearly yesterday...but he merely temporized with an appeal to a temporary moratorium until "safe" ways are found. Are there any safe ways?
If this takes even 90 days to cap, that is 18 million gallons of oil filling the Gulf of Mexico - I can't do the math but does that fill the Gulf ---what is the visual of that from space???
Barack Obama is not just the President of the US, he is the head of the Democratic Party. I hesitate to be just political, especially since this is potentially an ecological disater of vast proportions, but a Gulf full of oil through the summer,. A Gulf that voters would have seen endlessly on their TV screens, would have been enough to beat the Republicans back with as well as over the head with in the midterm elections. They would have been crucified on their oil rigs.
But now is that possible? I don't think so. The Democrats running in the midterms are now hobbled in their ability to trash the Republicans, because they have to tiptoe around their own President's position. He had handcuffed them, he has almost forced them to zip their mouths shut on the issue. Indeed the inchoate anger will wrongly accrue to him , and the only thing the Democrats running may have to do is either defend him or run away from him.
He is redefining the positions of the Democratic party in ways that many of us progressives are unhappy with on the merits. But in this case he is also losing the political benefits of being on the right side for all of us. |
