"Obama Knew the Spill Was Hopeless in April"
"Obama Knew the Spill Was Hopeless in April"by Richard Wolffe
"Critics have bashed President Obama for being slow to seize the political initiative in combating the BP oil spill in the Gulf Coast, now widely believed to be the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history. The White House has battled back, releasing a timeline of events showing that Obama was briefed—and deploying the Coast Guard—within 24 hours of the Deepwater Horizon blowout. What has not been previously disclosed: The president was not only briefed on the real-time events of the spill, but also on just how bad it would be—and how hard it would be to plug the hole.
Carol Browner, director of the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy, told Obama at one of the earliest briefings in late April that the blowout would likely lead to an unprecedented environmental disaster, senior White House aides told The Daily Beast. Browner warned that capping a well at such depths had never been done before, and that they ought to expect an oil spill that would continue until a relief well was drilled in August, the aide said. That early briefing on the scope of the spill—and enormous technical challenges involved in fixing it—might help explain the sense of fatalism that has infused Obama's team from the start.
Little that has happened since has changed their mind-set. Now six weeks later, the president’s top advisers expect the oil spill—and the negative stories—to continue through August. The fact that Team Obama was warned of the extent of the disaster so early on suggests that White House officials were aware of the environmental challenge long before they decided to demonstrate concern via presidential visits to the Gulf.
When asked about the prospects for the new cap fitted over the leaking well earlier this week, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs voiced little optimism. “I’m long out of the prediction business on this,” he told reporters on Air Force One on Friday. “Everyone is hopeful that this works.” His comments were echoed by Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, the national incident commander for the BP spill—who warned reporters against “over-optimism.” Given the lack of technical capabilities on the sea floor, there’s not much the White House can do to plug the hole. And there are limited options for effectively preventing the oil from reaching large stretches of coastline. Instead, Obama’s team is focusing on the options at their immediate disposal—methods of news management and presidential communication.
Obama’s aides have grown increasingly frustrated with the public criticism that the president has failed to express sufficient anger. As Gibbs put it at a recent briefing, “If jumping up and down and screaming were to fix a hole in the ocean, we’d have done that five or six weeks ago. We’d have done that the first night.” That frustration has boiled over in dealing with some of their most high-profile critics—especially the ones on the Democratic side.
Case in point: James Carville, the Democratic strategist, whose TV eruptions have helped focus attention on the president’s response. Carville recently chanced upon Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen eating dinner with BP CEO Tony Hayward at a New Orleans restaurant, the senior White House aide says. Allen had called Carville after his first TV outburst to talk about the administration’s response, but Carville failed to return the call. When Allen asked why, Carville said he had been busy, the aide says (Carville did not reply to requests for comment). That does not sit well with administration officials who suggest that Carville’s readiness to go public with his criticism is not matched by his private willingness to offer concrete suggestions about what they could do differently.
Amid the frustration, the White House has taken steps to make their response more visible in recent weeks. In addition to daily briefings by Allen, the White House has staged two presidential visits to the Gulf over the last week. As they plot course, Obama’s team is determined to avoid two scenarios. They’re mindful of BP’s habit of scheduling rounds of TV interviews to tout a new development—only to discover that the news was more disappointing than expected. And they want to avoid the perception that the president is focused exclusively on the oil spill, at a time when both public and private polling shows Americans have greater concerns—and care far more about the economy at this stage than they do about the oil spill.
That, of course, could change as shocking pictures of oil-covered animals begin to surface on TV. But for now, the latest CBS News poll—released Friday—shows that approval and disapproval ratings of Obama’s performance on the oil spill are more evenly split than expected, given the news coverage and the scale of the disaster. The poll showed 44 percent disapproval and 38 percent approval, a marginal improvement from a week earlier, when the numbers were 45 percent disapproval and 35 percent approval. When asked about priorities in a recent Economist/YouGov poll, respondents ranked the environment in eighth position of “very important” issues, after the economy, health care, social security, the budget deficit, taxes, terrorism and education. The environment ranked “very important” with 50 percent of respondents, compared to 82 percent saying the economy."
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Richard Wolffe is a Daily Beast columnist and an award-winning journalist. He covered the entire length of Barack Obama's presidential campaign for Newsweek magazine. His book, "Renegade: The Making of a President," was published by Crown in June.
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