Our political Quote of the Day comes from Philadelphia Inquirer columnist and blogger Dick Polman on Texas Rep. Joe Barton’s apology for apologizing to BP’s CEO Tony “I can’t recall” Hayward:
Nobody should be fooled by Joe Barton’s staged apology yesterday afternoon. Granted, the Texas Republican congressman disavowed his morning lament about how the Obama White House had engineered “a $20-billion shakedown” of poor old BP. And, granted, he said he wished to “retract” his morning statement that had reeked of sympathy for BP without offering a single syllable of sympathy for the people whose lives have been devastated by BP’s behavior.
Polman recounts what happened after Barton’s statement: the political furor (from Democrats, some Republicans and most mainstream media analyists of the left, center-right and center), House GOPers quickly moving to stem the damage and get Barton to take back the words, and the bumpiness of Barton’s initial retractions. He then writes:
But here’s the bottom line: The apology is just a fig leaf – not just for Barton, but for a large segment of the Capitol Hill GOP.
What Barton said to Tony Hayward at the outset of the energy committee hearing yesterday – and, more importantly, what the 100-member House Republican Study Committee said in a statement late Wednesday afternoon – is a testament to what GOP conservatives genuinely believe. What they believe is that any attempt to hold this corporation (or, as Barton put it, any corporation) fully accountable for damage wrought on regular people is nothing more than a shakedown…especially if Barack Obama deems it necessary.
Indeed, while the House GOP leaders came down hard on Barton yesterday, it’s noteworthy that they have said squat about the Wednesday statement issued by the RSC, on behalf of its 100 House conservative members. Their take on the BP escrow fund is virtually identical to Barton’s take – and they said it first. Here’s a reminder of what the House conservatives crafted in their Wednesday email: “BP’s reported willingness to go along with the White House’s new fund suggests that the Obama administration is hard at work exerting its brand of Chicago-style shakedown politics.”
Why haven’t the House GOP leaders demanded that the 100 conservatives apologize for that email? Because it’s only an email, whereas Joe Barton was caught committing candor on camera. But the mentality is the same, and it can’t be masked by a fig leaf. It’s an intrinsic ingredient in the Republican brand, and the leaders’ biggest regret yesterday is that it was publicly exposed at the worst possible time.
Barton’s comments were coupled by talk show host Rush Limbaugh saying the escrow account was an Obama “slush fund,” implying it would be used for political purposes. Again, no evidence — but it’s a further mirror image of what John Avlon details and documents in his must-read book as “Obama Derangement Syndrome.”
First Read’s Mark Murray and Domenico Montanaro:
*** Barton’s three different apologies: For Republicans, yesterday might have been their worst day since health care passed in March. Barton’s statement that BP’s $20 billion fund was a White House “shakedown,” and then his apology to BP, made it seem that he was more concerned about the oil company than about relief for Gulf residents. Barton’s “shakedown”/”slush fund” remark wasn’t isolated. Republicans Tom Price and Michele Bachmann said similar things about the $20 billion account, and a writer from the Heritage Foundation also justified Barton’s comments. But realizing that political damage had been done, GOP House leaders — who rarely back down from a political fight with the administration — said that Barton was wrong and threatened to strip his plum position on the House Energy Committee if he didn’t retreat. The Texas congressman eventually apologized twice (once for being misconstrued, the other time retracting his apology to BP).
CBS chronicles the partisan dynamics:
House Republican leaders released a statement calling his words “wrong,” while some Republicans even agreed with Democrats that Barton should relinquish his chairmanship. Yet liberal commentators are insisting Barton was simply saying out loud what most conservatives really think.
“Barton’s quasi-retracted remark was no accident; it was an airing of strong partisan and ideological sentiments shared by his GOP comrades,” David Corn of Mother Jones magazine wrote at Politics Daily.
The Republican Study Committee, comprised of more than 115 House conservatives, agreed in a statement with Barton that the escrow fund amounts to “Chicago-style shakedown politics.”
Meanwhile, Conn Carroll penned a column for the Heritage Foundation called, “Joe Barton is Right: There Was a $20 Billion Shakedown in the White House.”
Daniel Foster at the National Review Online also sided with Barton.
“Oh, and for the record, I agree in part with Rep. Barton that the establishment of the escrow fund — over and above the claims process that is already in place, and run by an Obama administration hack sold as an “independent third party” — is, if not illegal, than at least extra-legal,” Foster writes, “and another example of Democrats’ selective disdain for the rule of law when it gets in the way of a government-run redistribution scheme.”
Judson Phillips, the leader of Tea Party Nation and chief organizer of the upcoming National Tea Party Unity Convention, told the Washington Post that the escrow fund was “extortion.”
Meanwhile, Jon Stewart offered his view (warning: some adult language):
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The Washington Post’s Karen Tumulty notes the problems for the GOP:
This is not the moment to be seen as coddling Big Oil. The GOP leadership has laid out a set of talking points that spread blame in all directions — toward the company, the White House and the regulators who looked the other way.
But some Republicans are having trouble bringing themselves to say anything bad about an industry that has been so good to them. It was notable that in their statement distancing themselves from Barton, House Republican leaders John A. Boehner (Ohio), Eric Cantor (Va.) and Mike Pence (Ind.) referred to the spill — caused by the explosion of an oil rig — as a “natural” disaster.
The oil industry “has deep pockets, and they have a long history of supporting Republicans,” said political consultant John Weaver, a former strategist for John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign. “Like any kind of addiction, it’s a terribly difficult thing to break.”
To some Republicans, the defense of the oil industry has more to do with their belief in free enterprise and their wariness of regulation. The debate over drilling has been a core part of their argument for less government. This may not be the best moment to be making that argument, either.
For the GOP leadership, it hasn’t been easy to get their people to stick to the script: Blame Obama, but scold BP. (The problem with message discipline is, it requires discipline).
For the most part, media coverage of Barton — which noted either the hefty campaign contributions he has gotten from oil companies or his oil background or both — was devastating.
Here’s how the New York Daily News played it — with the news lede of the day:
By bipartisan agreement, Texas GOP Rep. Joe Barton set a new standard in stupid Thursday by apologizing to BP for President Obama’s “shakedown” of the company.
Furious GOP leaders scrambled to cap a gusher of outrage ranks over Barton’s misplaced mea culpa. By late afternoon, they made him eat his words.
Even the recipient of the apology, BP chief executive Tony Hayward, wanted no part of it, though the uproar diverted some attention from his own rough ride in the witness chair.
Barton, a former oil company executive, stunned the House energy committee hearing in the morning when he called BP the victim of a “$20 billion shakedown.” He was referring to the agreement between Obama and BP Wednesday on a compensation fund for the Gulf Coast’s oil-spill victims.
UPDATE: Why isn’t thisReuters report more of a surprise?
Republican Joe Barton, who accused the White House Thursday of a $20 billion “shakedown” of BP, is the biggest recipient of oil and gas money in the House of Representatives.
The 60-year-old Texas lawmaker, who later apologized for using the word “shakedown,” has collected at least $1.7 million in political contributions from oil and gas interests over the past two decades, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.