For Republicans, Nothing Succeeds Like Failure on Oil Spill

On May 7, 2001, press secretary Ari Fleischer uttered the four words that came to define the Bush administration's approach to the U.S. addiction to oil. Asked if Americans needed to "correct their lifestyles" to address the nation's energy vulnerability, Fleischer snapped, "That's a big no." And so, a government of the oil men, by the oil men and for the oil men pushed through the secret Cheney energy plan, virtually gave away U.S. oil leases, loosened regulations on offshore drilling and perverted the federal agency overseeing it, all while breaking Bush's promise to "jawbone" OPEC into lowering prices.


And now that the Gulf of Mexico is being killed by an almost inevitable oil disaster, the party of "Drill, Baby Drill" and its media echo chamber tell us, it's pretty much all Barack Obama's fault.


The polls suggest BP's carnage in the Gulf is taking a similar toll on President Obama's standing. A DailyKos/Research 2000 survey found that Obama's favorability rating has taken a beating, dropping a net six points from 54%-41% to 51%-44%. A CBS News poll released Friday provided more bad news for the administration:


Sixty-three percent of those surveyed said the Obama administration should be doing more in response to the spill, while 28 percent believe the government is doing all it can. BP scored slightly worse - 70 percent feel the company should be doing more while 24 percent believe it's doing everything possible to contain the crisis...


Forty-four percent of respondents disapprove of the White House's handling of the spill, with 38 percent satisfied with the government's response.


Republican glee hardly ends with those numbers. Even as their pet industry dumped nearly 50 million gallons of crude into American waters, the media has faithfully regurgitated the GOP talking point that an emotionless Barack Obama neither comforted the nation nor led it in rising up in righteous indignation. While early on AP documented President Obama's rapid reaction to the unfolding disaster destined to disfigure the Gulf for decades, commentators like Maureen Dowd branded him "President Spock."


And that label, like the oil on Gulf Coast beaches, is starting to stick. As Howard Kurtz summed up the soon-to-be unshakable narrative on CNN:

"We have heard this refrain in the media before that Barack Obama is too passive, too passionless, too much the uninspiring technocrat. But with concern over the BP oil spill rising by the day - and I've lost track of the company's botched attempts to stop this leak - this was the week when the President's allies in the press really turned on him."


And helped turn reality on its head.


In Congress, Darrell Issa (R-CA), a long-time proponent on drilling off the California coast, emerged as a critic of the Minerals Management Service (MMS) gutted and corrupted under Bush and Cheney. On Sunday, Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour, who previously compared being smothered in oil to being covered in toothpaste, announced "the Coast is clear, come on down!" as he joined Bobby Jindal (R-LA), John Conryn (R-TX) and David Vitter (R-LA) in calling for an end to the drilling moratorium now.


Some erstwhile Obama allies are now suggesting that after 8 years of Republican oil gluttony and malfeasance, the President should have corrected the cozy relationship and culture of collision in 15 months. "Deepwater Horizon was preventable," Tim Fernholz wrote in the left-leaning American Prospect, adding, "Obama should take the heat."


The real failure here was in prevention. It was clear when Obama took office in 2009 that the Mineral Management Service, which regulates offshore oil drilling, was in desperate need of reform.

Of course, many of President Obama's wounds have been self-inflicted. In March, he endorsed a partial end to the moratorium on offshore drilling, ominously claiming just 18 days before that "oil rigs today generally don't cause spills...They are technologically very advanced." Until very recently, Obama has tried to walk a tightrope, hoping to pin responsibility on BP while deferring the solution to the same company which, as Fernholz noted, "told the government in 2008 that it could handle a spill 10 times larger than the current spill, a claim that was most certainly wrong and was alarmingly lacking in details about responding to a deep-water spill." (On Friday, New Orleans.com released an internal BP document from June 2009 detailing the damage - and PR campaign - a Gulf Coast oil spill could unleash.) As the calamity unfolded in April and May, the government soon learned that between BP and Transocean, no one was in charge of the Deepwater Horizon. It's no wonder Frank Rich counseled Obama Sunday, "Don't get mad, Mr. President; get even."


Now, Barack Obama finds himself up to his neck in it. Sadly, the BP catastrophe should have capped a perfect storm for regulatory reform of the Republican predator state. After all, the month of April alone highlighted unbridled Wall Street greed, corporate mismanagement of a devastating oil spill, corruption and death in the nation's coal mines, and the cruel practice of rescission by health insurers dropping patients with conditions including AIDS and breast cancer.


Instead, as the presidential popularity and pre-election polls seem to suggest, the party which aided and abetted these wrongs will likely be the beneficiary of them. As summed up by "Getting Away with Murder: How the GOP Killed Trust in Government":


"The Republican Party whose anti-government rhetoric and incompetence in office helped kill trust in government may now be rewarded for it."

Or as Thomas Frank described the Republican governing philosophy in The Wrecking Crew:

"The chief consequence of the conservatives' unrelenting faith in the badness of government is...bad government...

...And remember. None of it is accidental. These are the fruits of the free market theory of government."

Nevertheless, the emerging conventional wisdom is that it's all Barack Obama's fault. Put another way, for Republicans, nothing succeeds like failure.