I am certainly one of President Obama’s strongest supporters when it comes to his response to the oil spill. I think most of the criticisms leveled against him represent either the impotent rage of environmentalist frustration or partisan hypocrisy from his enemies seeking to avenge the media treatment accorded Bush after Katrina. And the Dowd-esque rants about Obama’s lack of “feel your pain” empathy and visible anger are almost too silly to consider. As if Obama walking the marshes or “being seen” would – by itself – make things better.
No, the problem was caused by BP. And sadly, given the technological challenge of capping a leak 5,000 feet under water, the only resources available to plug the leak are owned by BP and the oil industry. The Gulf Coast is almost certainly ruined and it is the fault of BP and the powers of government that enabled BP to drill at such depths with so little regulation.
On that last score the crimes of the Bush-era Minerals Management Service are so legion . Like Nancy Pelosi, I blame Bush more than anybody else for the culture of corruption at the MMS that enabled the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe. And if there is anything that I DO blame Obama for it is his failure to flush the Bush-era filth from that agency fast enough – it was after all under the Obama Administration that Deepwater Horizon’s contract was approved. (Of course, had he reformed that agency there would have a parade of oil industry executives/regulators on Fox News complaining about socialism).
But all of that begs the question: how long can Bush really be blamed for this? And that goes for other issues too, including the economy, Afghanistan, Israel, immigration or any other unresolved issue. I believe that Bush’s Administration was historically disastrous for America.
But at what point does the statute of limitations on blaming Bush run out?
History provides little guide here. Democrats successfully blasted Herbert Hoover for decades after 1929. Republicans successfully assailed Jimmy Carter for decades after 1979.
For Democrats like me Bush will serve as an easy villain for decades too. And he may yet serve in that capacity for the nation as a whole.
But what ultimately helped Democrats after Hoover was not the existence of Hoover the bogeyman. It was the policies of FDR and Truman that made people appreciate the alternative to Hooverism. Similarly, it was the low-tax, low-regulation policies of Ronald Reagan that endeared him to so many people – not just the fact that Carter was a failure in himself.
And that’s Obama’s challenge right now. There are a lot of people who have a vested interest in returning the Bush-style Republicans to power. They show up on Fox News every day. Their ambition is only matched by their serial mendacity. They will not go away, and their followers will remain as obnoxious and obtuse as ever.
But therein lies the opportunity for Obama to be the transformative President most of his supporters want. The unreconstructed Bush Republicans – and I don’t want to hear about all the criticisms they supposedly leveled at Bush for excessive spending, only a tiny handful of which seem to surface in the blogospheric archives of the Bush years – really do want a world where corporations can do as they please. Rand Paul let the cat out of the bag when he accused Obama of being “un-American” for talking so tough about BP. That so many conservative Republicans now call for a vigorous Federal response is not a sign of their pragmatism. Rather, it reveals the cynicism and moral bankruptcy of an ideology that believes government can do no right with respect to the economy. After all, limited government advocates insist that they only want the government to perform the specific jobs it is tasked with efficiently. But when those tasks mean intervening in the private sector in a preventative way – the only way the Deepwater Horizon disaster could have been averted – the charge of “socialism’ rears its ugly head. As if government should spend no time regulating the oil industry but then should magically commandeer a vast armada of private oil tankers in a moment’s notice. Now which would constitute more limited government? Enforcing proper regulations of offshore rigs or seizing private ships by the thousand-fold?
As I noted after the 2008 election, this was – and still is – a historic opportunity to move on from the Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush era of deregulatory excess. Obama’s agenda has, to a large extent, been an exercise in just such an ideological shift. The backlash has been swift – as it usually is in moments of historic change – but, I firmly believe, will settle out as newer progressive policies take effect.
And the next major issue in Obama’s agenda – energy reform – is perfectly appropriate for the Administration and the Senate to pursue at this exact time. When else will America see so vividly the biocidal effects of our dependence on oil. Yes, it will take time to transition away from oil. But it is far from impossible. Even if you don’t believe in the apocalyptic predictions of climate change scientists, there is plenty of other evidence on display in the Gulf of Mexico today that our reliance on oil – addiction to it as even Bush noticed – is ecologically, morally and economically catastrophic.
Obama will ultimately be judged, then, not on his ability to cry with the oystermen, or to plug the leak with his own bare hands. He will be judged on how he uses this disaster as leverage to move us toward a non-oil dependent economy. The talk of “peak oil”, or oil-based terrorism, or climate change has done little up to now to push us toward a fundamentally new energy policy. And that’s what the oil companies hope will continue, as they arrogantly and condescendingly tell us to leave them alone if we deign to use any petroleum products whatsoever. But the elimination of the petropoly on our national psyche would only be an ancillary benefit of a renewable-centric energy policy. It is no longer the hyperbole of “environmental wackos” to say that our very livelihoods depend on it.
And if Obama delivers on THAT, the statute of limitations on blaming Bush can happily run out.