Oil Spill Blame Game

Even conservative columnist George Will has acknowledged on ABC's This Morning that criticism by the GOP of the Obama administration's handling of the Gulf oil spill is unfair. As Steve Benen points out on Washington Monthly,

At this point, the discourse seems to boil down to a) those who want to see the president don a wetsuit and head to the Gulf floor; b) those who want to see the president don a cape and fly around the planet really quickly in order to reverse time; and c) those who want to see the president pound on podiums and lose his cool, as if that would make a difference. (Thanks, Maureen Dowd, for comparing Obama to Spock again. That never gets old.) Here's an idea for assignment editors: publish a piece with specific steps federal officials should take but haven't. Because at this point, unless we can fix the leak with useless media palaver, there's not much point to the breathless speculation, nebulous criticism, and finger-pointing.

As Frank Rich argues in The New York Times, comparing the Obama response here to the Bush response to Hurricane Katrina is absurd. Let me count the ways:

• Katrina was a natural disaster that anyone with a TV set could see coming for at least a week while the Gulf spill was a sudden failure of complex human technology.
• Adequate relief supplies for hurricanes (e.g. buses for evacuation, food, water, medical supplies) are simple and very accessible for the federal government while the know-how and equipment for plugging the deepwater well are rare and difficult to apply.

Interestingly, both the liberal Rich and the conservative Will think that the difficulty Obama is having finding a solution to the oil spill will harm him politically, however unfair that may be. Perhaps Elisabeth Rosenthal is right pointing out in The New York Times we may have an irrational faith in technology's ability to solve every problem.

Americans have long had an unswerving belief that technology will save us — it is the cavalry coming over the hill, just as we are about to lose the battle. And yet, as Americans watched scientists struggle to plug the undersea well over the past month, it became apparent that our great belief in technology was perhaps misplaced.

--Ballard Burgher