Six weeks and counting into the Deepwater Horizon mess, it does seem to be well and truly on its way to being, as Dmitry Orlov has called it, America's Chernobyl. From BP's ongoing series of monkeyfuck "fixes", each more hare-brained than the last, to Obama's diffident responses to the catastrophe, it is clear that this will be years in the undoing.
Mostly the "debate" seems to center around the sufficiency and appropriateness of Obama's reactions, whether or not this is his "Katrina". But this is to misapprehend the situation on several levels. The issue with Bush's tepid response to Katrina had to do with government levels of preparedness to an entirely foreseeable disaster; Mike Brown's indifference, incompetence, and lack of prior experience as head of FEMA; and Bush's immediate response in the wake of the disaster (going to John McCain's birfday party and thence to San Diego, where he gave some self-serving batshit speech comparing his Iraq war to World War 2, finally heading back in the general direction of New Orleans three days after the storm had demolished the city).
Obama's response to the oil spill, on the other hand, has been of a piece with how he responded to Wall Street shenanigans -- stand back, let the people who caused the problem "work" on it, and offer to shovel money and resources in their direction if they want. Really dropping the hammer there, Chief.
Seriously -- no mention of a criminal investigation to figure out whose negligence caused the deaths of 11 people; no mention of a fat fine and sanctions for BP, after years of racking up industry high levels of safety violations; no mention of how maybe we oughta make sure that damage-control technology keeps pace with damage-causing technology; no mention of immediately demanding rigorous external inspections of every other offshore platform. Hell, how about imposing a deadline for BP to get this shit figured out, or the feds step in? How about even a token nod to the notion of conservation, of finding ways to consume less oil, even a little bit?
The problem is that Obama is politically intimidated by everyone. He's afraid to piss off Big Oil, afraid to be portrayed as "anti-business" (as if modest regulatory policies -- to prevent catastrophes like this one, and deal with them more effectively when they do occur -- are anti-business rather than pro-common-sense), afraid to be portrayed as a tree-hugger should he dare to endorse modest steps toward fossil-fuel conservation. He's even afraid to tell Sarah Palin to go fuck herself after she lies about which party takes more money from the oil industry. And not even a word about the foolishness of the stupid "drill baby drill" chant, Exhibit A destroying the Gulf of Mexico right this second.
Nobody's expecting Obama to don a wet suit and go plug the damned hole himself, and we all know he got dealt a ludicrously bad hand by the previous regime. But it's been eighteen months, and all he can hang his hat on is an industry-written ass-spelunking health-care boondoggle. Everything else has been foxes put in charge of henhouses, continued wars and secret wars, gutless incrementalism and unforced errors and ankle-biting diversions.
Bobcat Goldthwait once said something to the effect that blaming the president for every single thing that goes wrong is like getting pissed at Ronald McDonald when you get a bad Big Mac. There's some truth to that, that there are a lot of bureaucratic layers and unanticipated consequences between event and action and response. But the power of the bully pulpit is still considerable, and Obama seems to prefer to use it on pet projects and SCOTUS mediocrity rather than the grand, transformative visions he ascribed to himself.
The repeated lament from the enviro left -- or the usual centrists, for that matter -- was that the US needed a national commitment on the scale of the Manhattan or Apollo projects, to address necessary concerns about non-renewable energy, to mitigate the impending effects of waste, gluttony, and eventual resource depletion. No intellectually honest person can deny the necessity and the utility of such an effort, which would create millions of jobs and enhance national security as well as environmental quality. It would be simple to make it an effort of broad political popularity, if one has the guts to call liars what they are, and to not let it turn into a nationwide pork project.
The problem is not that Obama hasn't accomplished truly great things, it's that he hasn't even tried.
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