Posted by
Bill Crawford on Monday, June 07, 2010 11:25:19 AM
I told you I was a couple of updates short of guessing at an engineering solution for the BP problem. The political situation is easier to surmise. For starters, the government and FEMA are not taking the situation over from the oil company, which speaks volumes. Also, the various government spokesman are starting to float the notion that this problem will be with us a more than a few months. You won't hear this from Obama's mouth anytime soon (which is politics 101), but this movement flies in the face of his political philosophy here.
That being, government is the answer. The spreading oil slick is bad icing on the Obama cake: a made for TV reminder of the notion that "yes, we can" may not be all it was supposed to be. The BP disaster comes on top of the other two walls he has run into, the unemployment rate that doesn't seem to get any better, and the rapidly piling public debt that is now large enough to scare the crap out of even the non-accountant voters out there.
The swing voters that carried him into office have been a problem for him for a while. Many local races this year will be decided on the fact that the incumbents spent over a year dickering on health care (still largely provided by employers) while the unemployment rate was a huge problem. However, Barrack's base seems to be able to live with the public debt and double digit unemployment- after all, aren't they both a constant in Europe? To them, the only missing piece there is to raise the taxation level here to European levels, and things will stabilize.
The problem with the spreading oil slick is that it is an environmental problem, and (along with abortion) there is no single better way to explode the blood pressure of his base than to have an environmental problem that the government can't do anything about. Every time a dying pelican appears on CNN, the people that scream the loudest are the ones that gave him money first in 2008.
That's my simple political calculation, folks: while it is probably safe to say that many of the people Obama has surrounded himself with have the engineering acumen of a cinder block, they are wary political animals. If they could step in and solve this today, you could bet your children that they would. In other words, they don't know what to do.
There is advice, and there is advice. It's easy enough to tell somebody that when you are in a ditch, stop digging and climb out, but that assumes that the advisor is the only one with the God's eye view. Every accomplished politico is searching for the genius path out, and Obama may be onto something that nobody else sees. More to the point, he may think he is.
Obama's problem is that he needs his base to survive, and many of them are painting "incompetent" signs to hang around his neck. That can't be good.