BP spill: Obama got bad news early

06 June 2010 |permalink | email article

THE conventional wisdom among critics has been that President Obama was slow to seize the political initiative in confronting the BP oil spill in the Gulf Coast, now considered the worse environmental disaster in U. S. history.

But now, Richard Wolffe reports in The Daily Beast, the White House has, in fact, being vigilant, releasing a timetable of events showing that the president was briefed – and deploying the Coast Guard – within 24 hours of the Deepwater Horizon blowout.

More interesting in what has not been previously disclosed – that the president was not only briefed on the real-time events of the spill, but also just how bad it would be, and how hard it would be to plug the hole.

“That early briefing (in April) on the scope of the spill – and the enormous technical challenges involved in fixing it – might explain the sense of fatalism that has infused Obama’s team from the start,” wrote Wolffe who covered Obama’s entire campaign for Newsweek, and whose book, “Renegade, The Making of a President,” was published by Crown last June.

The latest CBS News poll indicates that the approval and disapproval ratings of Obama’s performance on the spill are more evenly split than expected but only a marginal improvement from a week earlier.

In his two previous visits to the region the president did not engage with locals. But on Friday he met for an hour in Grand Isle, La., with the mayor, owners of a marina, a convenience store and bait shop, and a shrimper and oysterman around a small waterfront table – a scene memorably captured by CSPAN.

Unlike the tardy initial President Bush response to Hurricane Katrina the White House has learned a valuable lesson and made their response far more visible, including daily briefings by savvy Coast Guard Rear Admiral Thad Allen.

On the roads Obama was met with generally waving and friendly crowds. One family held up a sign saying “Help Us!” It captured the real fears confronting hundreds of thousands of Gulf residents far into the foreseeable future. 

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