Obama's Measured Gulf Spill Response

Despite attempts from conservative commentators to depict the Gulf oil spill as “Obama’s Katrina”, the President should be commended for not overreacting to the situation.

We can safely classify most of our nation's political commentators as partisan automatons who would cast a ballot for Pol Pot if he had the right letter behind his name. If the economy is performing poorly while your favored party is in power, then there's little that the ruling class can do about it. If the economy is booming, then it's thanks to the ruling class. And so on.

With that in mind, one should consider that the conservative response to the BP oil spill has been roughly the same as the president's daughter's: "Daddy, have you plugged the hole yet?"

Dick Morris -- who, in his post-Clinton career, has metamorphosed into Stephen Colbert without the jokes -- has declared that the administration's response is proof that Obama "doesn't have a clue," and that the spill could end up turning into the equivalent of the Bush Administration's response to Hurricane Katrina, if not Jimmy Carter's response to the Iranian Hostage Crisis. Rush Limbaugh has been shouting from the rooftops that the situation has turned into "Obama's Katrina," which could actually be read as some kind of tacit admission that he believes that the Bush Administration was truly incompetent during the response -- even though he, like Sean Hannity, spent most of 2005 blaming Ray Nagin and Kathleen Blanco for the failure. Even the normally-reliable Rudy Giuliani, who has commendably refused to join the anti-banking lynch mob, has lunged at the president, stating that he has "made every mistake he could possibly make."

Now, President Obama is not a Certified Expert like James Cameron, but he at least has the brains needed not to overreact. He has soberly sat back, allowing BP to do its job. He is to be commended for what he hasn't done: he has not engaged in rabble-rousing, he has not called for the heads of corporate officials, and he has not bumblingly involved the federal government. This incident should also definitively put to rest the lunatic idea that the president is some kind of closet socialist: the Socialist Party USA has declared that the spill is a corporate crime proving that the industry should be nationalized. Obama has correctly pointed out that only the oil companies have the technology and expertise to get this done.

The truly conservative response to this -- and by conservative I mean temperamentally so, not ideologically so: skeptical, sober, and realistic -- is to say: shit happens; don't freak out, don't expect overnight solutions, and don't expect the president to be able to wave a wand and make it all go away. That this type of demagoguery remains the norm amongst the right is proof that we're not going to see any substantive change in focus if the GOP takes back the House this November.