[Home] [Headlines] [Latest Articles] [Latest Comments] [Post] [Mail] [Sign-in] [Setup] [Help] [Register]
|
Status: Not Logged In; Sign In
Obama Wars Title: Seven questions for President Obama Seven questions for President Obama By JOSH GERSTEIN & CAROL E. LEE | 5/27/10 9:12 AM EDT Text Size-+reset. President Obama's performance at the Q-and-A will determine if the spill will plague him for months. POLITICO 44By waiting 10 months to hold a solo, East Room press conference, President Barack Obama has raised expectations. By pegging it to the BP oil spill, Obama has upped the ante even further. He’s putting an issue that appears increasingly out of his control up for discussion in what has not always been his most successful forum. (At his last one-man East Room session, he said Cambridge cops “acted stupidly” in arresting a Harvard professor, and the “beer summit” was born.) Obama isn’t coming to the Q-and-A session empty-handed: officials say he’ll announce he’s extending a 30-day moratorium on new offshore drilling for the next six months, and cancel drilling in waters near the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, along with pending lease sales off Virginia and in the Western Gulf. He’ll also tighten the permitting and inspection process. Still, there’s no indication yet that he’ll do what some critics say he should – take control of the Gulf spill response away from BP and make it a federal project. Obama’s performance at the presser could go a long way toward determining whether the spill will continue to plague him for months, or become an unwieldy problem that he managed to wrestle under control just when it seemed to be slipping away. Here are some questions on the questions likely to dominate the exchange: 1. Mr. President, in light of the fact that your administration was responsible for approving the permit for BP’s offshore oil drilling and waiving an environmental impact statement, do you think someone needs to be fired? And shouldn’t you have addressed the misconduct and undue coziness with industry that seems to have been rife at the Minerals Management Service before you moved in March to give the same agency authority to open new areas to offshore drilling? Obama is expected to announce tougher safety standards for offshore drilling, but he can't completely fault the previous administration, as he has been inclined to do about other issues. The federal government’s fault for the oil spill is falling on Obama, and he has got some explaining to do. Just 18 days before the April 20 explosion on the oil rig, Obama dismissed safety concerns about his plan to allow oil new drilling 50 to 100 miles off the coast, where he said it’s “not risky.”. “It turns out, by the way, that oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills,” Obama said at an event in North Carolina. “They are technologically very advanced. Even during Katrina, the spills didn’t come from the oil rigs, they came from the refineries onshore.” The will-heads-roll? question is sure to come up early, but it seems unlikely he’ll have a high-level pink slip in hand at the presser. In fact, he seems to be embracing one person whose performance on this has been panned, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, who did the report Obama is announcing Thursday. 2. Mr. President, You were a fierce critic of Bush’s handling to Katrina, as a senator you cited his “unconscionable ineptitude” in his response. Do you now feel your criticism of Bush was at all unfair? Do you have any more sympathy for his predicament during Katrina? Even after Obama took office the criticism of Bush over Katrina continued. A post in the “agenda” section of the White House website cited the “unconscionable ineptitude” remark and vowed to “keep the broken promises made by President Bush to rebuild New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.” All mention of Bush has since been scrubbed from the site, and the White House has rejected any comparison – vigorously disputing the notion of “Obama’s Katrina.” For candidate Obama, “Katrina” became like a one-word epithet that encapsulated all that he saw wrong with Bush – managerial incompetence, cronyism and indifference to the plight to people, including minorities. By the end of Bush’s term, many voters saw it the same way – and that’s why it’s such a dangerous term for Obama as well. Now that Obama faces heat over a disaster in the Gulf, it’s a wonder if he sees things differently from inside the Oval Office. 3. Mr. President, the White House has insisted for weeks that the federal government is providing every resource needed to combat the spill. However, it’s clear that oil is nevertheless coming ashore in some areas. Is it time to start dispatching federal personnel, including the military, to do the manual cleanup and shore protection work? The White House has been boasting in recent days that Obama has sent 1,000 federal employees to the gulf, mostly managers and technical experts. But there are 2.8 million civilian employees in the federal government and 1.6 million men and women in uniform. And coordinating the frontline response has been left largely to BP. At the same time, federal officials have said they lack the equipment and expertise to handle the deep sea efforts to get the well under control—a battle being fought a mile below the ocean’s surface. But it’s clear that, as with Katrina or other disasters, the military could quickly put more boots on the ground if Obama gave the order. While the armed forces are stretched by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, some like Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) are urging the president to do just that. Some are also pressing the federal government to give permission for dredging work to erect sand berms off the Louisiana coast. Local officials say doing that could protect some of the most sensitive areas from oil, but some experts doubt the plan will work 4. Mr. President, why not just take over from BP? Does the law and the established practice of putting oil companies in charge of cleaning up any spill need to be changed, especially for spills of the magnitude the country is now facing in the Gulf? As the spill unfolded, the White House seemed pleased to pass the buck to BP and to downplay the federal role in the response. But as the crisis has spiraled out of control, Obama’s aides have discovered that shifting the blame to BP is not a strategy that is likely to satisfy Gulf residents in the long term. After the Exxon Valdez spill in 1990, Congress rushed to fix the problem by passing a law that formally designated ship and offshore well owners as the “responsible party” for cleaning up any spill (a term the public has heard a lot from Team Obama about BP). The law also required companies to create a “response plan” for any mishap. The idea was that taxpayers wouldn’t get stuck with the tab for costly cleanups. In practice, however, it’s left oil companies in charge of containing and remediating the damage they’ve caused. Experts say the system has worked pretty well for small spills and even larger ones from tankers and refineries. But with a spill from a powerful well like the one in the gulf, this quickly becomes a triage situation where decisions have to be about to proceed and environmental concerns. These are decisions that seem fundamentally governmental, not corporate. Yet, the current system seems to put a foreign petroleum company in charge of that process, with the government looking over its shoulder. Some say that, at least with a spill of this magnitude, that system needs to change. 5. Mr. President, your senior adviser David Axelrod said this week that it would be a “serious breach of the law” if a White House official offered Rep. Joe Sestak a job, like Secretary of the Navy, in order to get him out of the Senate primary in Pennsylvania. However, Axelrod also said that the White House had concluded the allegations were “unwarranted.” Are they “unwarranted” because no one ever discussed a job with Sestak or are they “unwarranted” because lawyers decided there’s nothing legally or ethically wrong with such an offer? And do you support the call all seven Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans made this week for appointment of a special counsel to investigate? It’s become an intriguing D.C. whodunit where everyone’s said a little, no one’s said a lot and Obama's never said a word. It seems clear that some White House official, reportedly Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, at least hinted at the possibility of a job for Sestak. Sestak himself has public described this sort of offer, which he said seemed to be aimed at getting him out of the primary race with Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.), to whom Obama had pledged “full support.” More than a week after Sestak handily dispatched the five-term incumbent and former Republican Specter, Obama has yet to comment on the flap, or the White House’s inability to forestall Specter’s loss. The alleged job offer has drawn sternly worded complaints from Republicans, along with demands for a special counsel. But a variety of Republican and Democratic lawyers say that even if such a job offer might run afoul of the letter of some federal statutes, such cases are never prosecuted. “This is just goofy stuff,” said veteran defense attorney Stan Brand. “People make deals all the time in politics. It’s not all criminal.” Regardless of the legalities, Obama has particular vulnerability here because of the purer-than-driven-snow image his administration has sought to cultivate on ethics. A continuing swirl of questions about the issue could also taint Sestak in what's looking to be a tougher-than-expected race. With Axelrod indicating that the facts will come out soon, now might be as good a time as any for Obama to try to put this one to rest. 6. Mr. President, when you announced Elena Kagan as your nominee for the Supreme Court, you praised her for bringing intellectual diversity to the Harvard law faculty by recruiting conservative professors. If she deserves credit for bringing intellectual diversity to the school, why shouldn’t she be held responsible for failing to recruit any African-American or Latino professors to Harvard’s tenured faculty during her six years as dean? When Obama introduced Kagan back on May 10, he praised her for bringing some ideological balance to his alma mater. “At a time when many believed that the Harvard faculty had gotten a little one-sided in its viewpoint, she sought to recruit prominent conservative scholars and spur a healthy debate on campus,” the president said. However, as Duke professor Guy-Uriel Wright and colleagues observed in Salon: “She did not hire a single African American, Latino, or Native American tenured or tenure track academic law professor. She hired 25 men, all of whom were white, and seven women, six of whom were white and one Asian American.” White House officials and Kagan allies have responded that her commitment to diversity is evidenced by increases in minority student rolls at Harvard while she was dean. Kagan’s colleagues insist that she urged faculty offers to minority scholars, but that few took them. Still, it’s not clear why Kagan’s powers of persuasion proved more effective with conservatives than minorities. 7. Mr. President, how do you plan to operate differently next year if Republicans control the House or the Senate? The notion of Republicans winning the House or the Senate is something Obama will increasingly have to contend with, as polls show the GOP likely to make major inroads in both houses of Congress. The president’s contentious meeting with Senate Republicans this week raises the question of whether he would be able to accomplish much of anything if Democrats are no longer in charge on Capitol Hill. Mike Allen and Glenn Thrush contributed reporting Read more: www.politico.com/news/sto..._Page4.html#ixzz0p8mB8KWP
Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest
#1. To: Badeye (#0)
Someone was.
#67. To: war (#48) Keep hiding behind the bozo, bozo. (laughing) You've always been a world class pussy. Badeye posted on 2010-01-14 16:12:48 ET Reply Trace
Katrina was predicted days before the event. The actual event was a few hours long. It was a natural disaster which had previously occurred and had a set of prodecures that had been practiced and tried several times previously. The explosion was wholly unplanned and the event continues to this moment. It was not a natural disaster. It was caused by human error the results of which have never been seen. How are the two in any way even remotely similar?
#67. To: war (#48) Keep hiding behind the bozo, bozo. (laughing) You've always been a world class pussy. Badeye posted on 2010-01-14 16:12:48 ET Reply Trace
|
|
[Home] [Headlines] [Latest Articles] [Latest Comments] [Post] [Mail] [Sign-in] [Setup] [Help] [Register]
|