In the dying days of the Bush Administration Saturday Night Live ran a skit featuring Kenan Thompson, the “financial expert”, yelling “Just Fix It” into the screen.. It was a hilarious riff on media analysis of the unfolding financial crisis and the complete impotence of financial tycoons, government regulators and global banking structures to stem a coming economic catastrophe. Of course nobody could just “fix it.” We all knew that.
Yet the “fix it” expert represented the impotent rage at the heart of most of us watching our financial fortunes ruined by forces we neither controlled nor understood.
In the Gulf of Mexico we are at another “Fix It” moment. Americans have spent countless hours staring glass-eyed at the live feed of oil gushing from the sea floor. Despite claims – probably accurate – that BP has corralled all of the expertise on the globe to plug the hole, the geyser still forces unwanted dinosaur juice into the rich ecosystem of the Gulf. And despite the calls from impatient environmentalists on the left and hypocritical partisans on the right (desperate to tie “Katrina” on Obama even though the comparisons fail the laughter test) that Obama must DO SOMETHING NOW, most people realize that there is literally nothing else that he can do at this point. Maybe he can “look more sympathetic” or “be seen” in the marshes or with oystermen. But none of that really matters. Images matter only if they are tethered to a plausible underlying reality. Obama may, in fact, stay up every night in tears over this. But that’s not the image we care to see. Yet, the image we DO want to see – a competent manager developing a real solution to the problem – is impossible and, frankly, would look laughable in the face of the Administration’s obvious limitations in dealing with a massive oil spill. Even the President of the United States is powerless to stop a gaping wound off the Southern coast. Pretending that he has the resources or the technological capabilities to stop the leak would set him up for a bigger political fall. We don’t want images of false assurance, of the sort BP has been shoveling us throughout the “top kill” process (and Admiral Thad Allen has foolishly repeated). We want somebody to plug the damn hole.
There surely are lessons to draw from this. For one, deepwater drilling is not well enough understood as of now. And considering the catastrophic consequences of an incident that “nobody could have ever imagined” happening, the oil industry has no ability to prevent environmental catastrophe. Obama must stop deepwater oil drilling immediately and require all future drillers to drill relief wells before they begin to tap the undersea hydrocarbon reservoir. This is the least the Federal government can do to ensure that if another “unexpected” disaster strikes – often generated by cost-cutting corner-cutting – we don’t have to wait four months until an alternative well is tapped.
Obama should also use this incident to kill “Drill Baby Drill” for good. Yes, offshore drilling (at shallow levels) will need to be a part of the energy solution going forward. But he needs to harness this catastrophe to build an emotional case for massive investments in clean energy.
BP is the easy villain. And it may not even survive financially from this. Obama can hold up BP as an example of the oil industry’s stranglehold on American energy policy up to now. Add Massey’s execrable Don Blankenship of the coal industry and Obama has two perfect fiends to rally the nation against. If this is all about politics, then Obama has all the props he needs to push forward with comprehensive energy reform. Especially with cheap oil these days (caused mostly by the strong US dollar), Obama can challenge conservatives on moral AND economic grounds: Should we risk another Deepwater Horizon, or should we move NOW toward alternative fuels?
But that will have to wait. Right now Americans, from President Obama on down, must wait and seethe in impotent rage as the relief well is completed in August. And all we can do is scream “Fix It” at the television screen.