The Gulf Spill: Exactly What Obama Did Wrong

Everybody but the most ardent Obama Bum Kisser knows by now that the administration bungled the disaster in the Gulf. But it’s been hard to pin down exactly what they have done wrong. Obama points out, correctly, that he can’t put on a Superman suit, dive down to the sea floor and cap the leak himself. And yes, despite his earlier claim that his election marked the moment when the seas would cease to rise, he can’t suck it all up with a straw. But he still screwed up – we just feel it in our bones, even if we can’t quite put our finger on it. We know his response has been unsatisfactory. But how?

First we have to go back a few weeks when the Worm first turned. This was the moment when Liberals became openly critical of their Messiah. Most of these opinion pieces began in the same way: “How could a man who ran such a savvy, disciplined campaign in 2008 be so hapless today?” What these writers didn’t realize at the time (and probably still don’t now) is the answer to their question is contained in the actual question itself.

DEMS TURN ON OBAMA
By DICK MORRIS & EILEEN MCGANN
Published on DickMorris.com on June 16, 2010

To the left, the oil spill is not an index of presidential competence or an issue in the political sphere. It is a daily gushing of poison into the Earth’s waters as a direct result of the president’s failure to stop it. They blame BP. But they already hate oil companies. And they blame Obama, too. And they are coming to dislike him.

When Obama attempts to recoup this damage to his political base by pushing new legislation on the environment or by resurrecting his cap and trade legislation or by bringing criminal charges against BP or by setting up a liability fund for the spill’s victims, it does not solve his political problem. With each day, 60,000 gallons gush into the Gulf, Obama’s equivalent of the body count in Iraq that caused the left to loathe George W. Bush. Rhetoric or programs or visits to the Gulf or posturing won’t assuage the negatives. Only plugging the hole in the bottom of the ocean can do it.

The right and center of American politics turned off Obama over health care. And now the left is leaving him over the oil spill.

Why can’t Obama plug the hole?

Because he has no administrative experience. I often saw Bill Clinton, as governor and as president, call in experts and ask the tough questions when he faced a new disaster. In Arkansas, it was tornadoes or floods or fires. In Washington, it was Oklahoma City. But, each time, he thoroughly familiarized himself with all the technical issues. He took a bath in the science and substance of the hazard and became as knowledgeable as those who had spent a lifetime studying it. So he knew what questions to ask.

Any CEO or COO or manager has similar experience. But a community organizer, law professor, state senator, US Senator, and president doesn’t have the requisite experience. He doesn’t know not to trust his own bureaucracy. He hasn’t been burned enough to realize that he needs to intervene to waive restrictions, set aside regulations, and open up the process to new solutions. He’s like JFK during the Bay of Pigs. He doesn’t know how to avoid being betrayed by his own bureaucracy and the industry it’s supposed to regulate.

Why did he not waive the Jones Act (he still hasn’t) to allow foreign vessels to ply our waters to clean up the spill? Not because he was against it. He couldn’t have been against so obvious a course as waiving it. It was likely because nobody told him about it and he never knew to ask.

Why did he let the bureaucracy use only US contractors to dredge the Gulf and build the berms that Louisiana wanted? Why did he spurn the offer of Dutch assistance (half the country has been dredged from the sea and is below sea level)? Not because he wanted the jobs to go to Americans. That would have been an insane consideration in the face of this crisis. it is probably because he never realized that our capacity for dredging needed augmentation. Because he never asked.

To the right and the center, these failings show that Obama is in over his head. But to the left, which bleeds for each drop of water in the Gulf and cries over every turtle or shrimp or sea bird, it is an unpardonable sin.

It is the nature of things that presidential mistakes metastasize into presidential character flaws. Bush’s inaction over Katrina comes across as insensitivity. Now Obama’s incompetence and inexperience is causing liberals to see him as arrogant, aloof, removed, conceited, suspicious of outside advice, and even lazy. Long after the oil has stopped spilling, these supposed character defects will haunt the president, just as Carter’s reputation of timidity and inability lasted long after the Iran hostages came home. These defects will last until 2012 and beyond.

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THE BLAME GOES BACK TO BUBBA
By DICK MORRIS & EILEEN MCGANN
Published in the New York Post on June 15, 2010

The Gulf oil spill that’s so bedeviling President Obama has its roots back in the Clinton years.

In 1995, President Bill Clinton signed the Outer Continental Shelf Deepwater Royalty Relief Act, which exempted oil wells drilled deep in the Gulf from the normal royalty payments to the government.

Usually, these payments amount to between 12 percent and 16 percent of their revenues, so the exemption did a great deal to catalyze drilling in deep waters in the Gulf of Mexico.

The Deepwater Horizon well, where drilling began in 2001, was one of those catalyzed by the Clinton legislation. Overall, deepwater oil production in the Gulf shot up from 42 million barrels in 1996 to 348 million in 2004.

The latter figure represents about 6 percent of total US oil consumption and about 15 percent of domestic production. Natural-gas production from deepwater Gulf drilling increased tenfold during the same period.

The legislation was pushed avidly by Republicans in Congress, particularly those representing the very Gulf states now engulfed by the BP spill.

Unfortunately, the Clinton administration — and the Bush and Obama administrations that followed — failed to consider seriously what to do if things went wrong.

In contrast to the licensing of nuclear power plants, which we require to spend vast amounts of time and money to develop failsafe systems, very little thought was given (obviously) to how to stop an explosion that would trigger a vast spill, how to plug the hole or how to stop the oil from reaching Gulf and Atlantic coast beaches. Instead, the industry took its cue from Washington and went full speed ahead into drilling and production in deepwater wells.

This decision to embark on vast Gulf oil drilling was, of course, the correct one. But the failure to think through how to avert a disaster like what’s now on our hands is the height of irresponsibility.

All three administrations — Clinton, Bush, and Obama — bear the blame for this abject failure. None took the danger of a massive spill seriously or sought to hold up the massive expansion of offshore drilling until failsafe measures could be developed.

Ironically, the crisis that arguably put Obama in the White House was also rooted in the Clinton era: The road to the mortgage meltdown begins with the ‘90s drive to greatly loosen mortgage-lending standards in the pursuit of increasing homeownership.

As we suffer now for past failures of foresight and planning, perhaps it’s time to start taking closer looks at what Washington’s doing now that may lead to future disasters.

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OBAMA: AN INCOMPETENT EXECUTIVE
By DICK MORRIS & EILEEN MCGANN
Published on DickMorris.com on June 14, 2010

Contrary to what the Constitution says, the president does not run the executive branch of the federal government. It runs itself. Following Newton’s Laws of Motion, it is “a body in motion that tends to remain in motion in the same direction and at the same speed unless acted upon by an outside force.” The bureaucracy keeps doing what it is programmed to do unless someone intervenes.

And that intervention is the proper job of the president. He has to step in, ask the right questions, get inside and outside advice, and decide how to intervene to move the bureaucracy one way or the other. President Clinton had an excellent sense of how to do this and when to get involved. President Obama does not.

When the spill started, he and his campaign staff - now transplanted to the White House - reacted the way a Senator or a candidate would, blaming British Petroleum, framing an issue against the oil company, and holding it accountable. But what he needed to do was to review the plans for coping with the disaster and intervene to move the bureaucracy in untraditional but more appropriate directions. Instead, he let business as usual and inertia move the process.

The president’s tardy requests for international assistance and his government’s bureaucratic response to their offers demonstrates his lack of command and control. The Washington Post reports that the Obama Administration initially “saw no need to accept offers of state-of-the-art skimmers, miles of boom or technical assistance from nations around the globe with experience fighting oil spills.” Arrogantly, State Department spokesman Gordon Duguid told reporters on May 19th “we’ll let BP decide what expertise they do need.”

Two weeks after the spill started, the State Department and the Coast Guard sought to figure out what aid they could use from abroad. On May 5th, the Department reported that thirteen international offers of aid had been tendered and the government would decide which to accept “in the next two days.” Two weeks later, it said that it did not need any of them.

Now, when it is too late, the U.S. has finally accepted Canada’s offer of 10,000 feet of boom. In late May it took 14,000 feet from Mexico, two skimmers from Mexico, and skimming systems from Norway and the Netherlands. Too little too late.
Why didn’t the Administration act sooner?

Bureaucratic obstacles stopped it and the president was not involved or active enough to sweep them aside.

Coast Guard Lt. Cmdr Christopher T. O’Neil said that “all qualifying offers of assistance have been accepted.” But this bureaucratic-speak did not mention that the Jones Act - an isolationist law passed in the 1920s that requires vessels working in American waters to be built and crewed by Americans - disqualified many of the offers of assistance. But Obama could have waived the Jones Act whenever he wanted to.

A Norwegian offer of a chemical dispersant was rejected by the EPA - more bureaucracy.

When Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal sought to create sand berms to keep oil away from the coastline, the Washington Post reported that he reached out to “the marine contractor Van Oord and the research institute Deltares...BP pledged $360 million for the plan, but U.S. dredging companies - which have less than one-fifth the capacity of Dutch dredging firms — objected to foreign companies’ participation.”

An activist, involved chief executive would have swept aside these impediments and demanded immediate action. He would have ridden roughshod over bureaucratic and political objections and gotten the cleanup underway.

But this president is no executive. He is a legislator - he is now pushing new environmental legislation. He is a lawyer - his Attorney General is investigating criminal charges against BP. He is a populist - he is quick to blame BP. He is a big spender - he wants a fund to pay the spill’s victims. He is all of these things. But he is no chief executive and that, unfortunately, is the job he was elected to do.

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BP to Start Burning Captured Gulf Oil at Sea

BP plans to boost its ability to capture hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil gushing from a well at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico — and start burning it — by early next week
A semi-submersible drilling rig will capture and burn about 420,000 gallons of oil daily, BP executive Kent Wells said Thursday.

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Once on board, the oil and gas collected from the well will be sent down a boom and burned at sea, said Wells, BP’s senior vice president of exploration and production.
A drill ship at the scene now can process a maximum of 756,000 gallons of oil daily that’s sucked up through a containment cap sitting on the well head.
The containment effort played out as BP stock continued to plunge amid fears that the company might be forced to suspend dividends and find itself overwhelmed by the cleanup costs, penalties, damage claims, and lawsuits generated from the biggest oil spill in U.S. history.
But markets also began to heed warnings from analysts who said Wednesday’s 15.8 percent sell-off of BP shares in New York was an overreaction. BP shares dropped as much as 11 percent to a 13-year low at the open in London on Thursday, then recovered some ground by early afternoon, trading 6.1 percent lower at $5.39. In New York, the stock opened 9.8 percent higher at $32.05.
BP has lost around half its market value since the spill began with the April 20 rig explosion that killed 11 workers and set off the spill in the gulf. In a federal filing Thursday, the company said the cost of its response to the oil spill has grown to $1.43 billion.
The latest slide came after Interior Secretary Ken Salazar promised a Senate energy panel to ask BP to compensate energy companies for losses if they have to lay off workers or suffer economically because of the Obama administration’s six-month moratorium on deep-water drilling.
Meanwhile, during an interview Thursday on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu reiterated her call to end the moratorium, saying it will cause economic hardship in the region.
“Every one of these 33 deep-water wells employs, directly, hundreds of people and indirectly thousands,” said Landrieu, a Democrat.
Cleanup continued along the Gulf Coast. In Orange Beach, Ala., reddish-brown globs of oil the size of credit cards littered the beach at the tide line as a blue farm tractor loaded with shovels and other cleanup equipment chugged down the beach. Dozens of workers in orange vests and bluejeans prepared to start their day combing the beach for oil.
Shrimpers, oystermen, seafood businesses, out-of-work drilling crews, and the tourism industry who have filed damage claims with BP also are complaining angrily about delays, excessive paperwork, and skimpy payments that have put them on the verge of going under as the financial and environmental toll of the 7-week-old disaster grows.
“Every day, we call the adjuster eight or 10 times. There’s no answer, no answering machine,” said Regina Shipp, who has filed $33,000 in claims for lost business at her restaurant in Alabama. “If BP doesn’t pay us within two months, we’ll be out of business. We’ve got two kids.”
BP spokesman Mark Proegler disputed any notion that the claims process is slow or that the company is dragging its feet.
BP has cut the time to process claims and issue a check from 45 days to as little as 48 hours, if the necessary documentation has been supplied, Proegler said. BP officials acknowledged that, although no claims have been denied, thousands and thousands had not been paid by late last week because the company required more documentation.
At the bottom of the sea, the containment cap on the ruptured well is capturing 630,000 gallons a day and pumping it to a ship at the surface, and the amount could nearly double by next week to roughly 1.17 million gallons, said Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, who is overseeing the crisis for the government.
A second vessel expected to arrive within days should greatly boost capacity. BP also plans to bring in a tanker from the North Sea to help transport oil and an incinerator to burn off some of the crude.
The additional system will use equipment previously employed to shoot heavy drilling mud down the well in an attempt to stop the flow, although this time the process will work in reverse. Oil will flow in lines from beneath the blowout preventer, a stack of piping on the sea floor, to a semi-submersible drilling rig called the Q4000.
Oil and gas siphoned from the well will flow up the rig, where it will be sent down a boom, turned into a mist and ignited using a burner designed by Schlumberger Ltd. BP opted to burn the oil because storing it would require bringing in even more vessels to the already crowded seas above the leaking well.
“It was going to become too congested,” Wells said. “It was not the safest way to do it,”
Testing on the oil-burning system should begin during the weekend, and full production should start early next week, Wells said.
The government has estimated that 600,000 to 1.2 million gallons a day are leaking, but a scientist on a task force studying the flow said the actual rate may be between 798,000 gallons and 1.8 million. A better estimate could come Thursday or Friday, a task force member said.
Crews working at the site toiled under oppressive conditions as the heat index soared to 110 degrees and toxic vapors emanated from the depths. Fireboats were on hand to pour water on the surface to ease the fumes.
Allen also has confronted BP about the complaints about the claims process, warning the company in a letter: “We need complete, ongoing transparency into BP’s claims process including detailed information on how claims are being evaluated, how payment amounts are being calculated and how quickly claims are being processed.”
Under federal law, BP is required to pay for a range of losses, including property damage and lost earnings. Residents and businesses can call a telephone line to report losses, file a claim online and seek help at one of 25 claims offices around the Gulf.
To jump-start the process, BP initially was offering an immediate $2,500 to deckhands and $5,000 to fishing boat owners. Workers can receive additional compensation once their paperwork and larger claims are approved. BP said it has paid 18,000 claims so far and has hired 600 adjusters and operators to handle the cases.
Associated Press writers Harry R. Weber in Houston, Jay Reeves in Orange Beach, Ala., Eileen Sullivan and Seth Borenstein in Washington contributed to this report. Ray Henry reported from New Orleans.

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