The leak was in Obama's Presidency, not just the Gulf

At the NRO Campaign Spot blog, Jim Geraghty asks who benefits from the capping of the Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico:

On Obama, clearly it’s better for him that the oil stop leaking than that it continue leaking, as it is for everyone else. But I think the damage has been done, and in fact the likelihood of additional political damage to the president from the slow spill response was pretty minimal. The second month of this mess was when the public began concluding Obama wasn’t moving with much urgency or improving the situation; in the third month, disapproval of how Obama handles this issue increased by only four points. That’s about 1 percentage point for every eight days. For Obama’s approval rating, I suspect the issue of the spill is now baked in the cake.

If the cap holds, it’s not likely that voters will see Obama’s response as any quicker or more effective; most will continue to wonder why the federal government creaked and groaned and took so long to respond to Louisiana’s plans and requests and why skimmers sat in port for Coast Guard inspections. Obama ripped his predecessor’s response to Katrina and repeatedly promised a more effective, more efficient, more confident and active federal government. In the spill response, many Americans saw the same old, same old. Of course, the fact that the president seems to be on the golf course more frequently than Tiger doesn’t help.

I think the political damage to Barack Obama from the Gulf oil spill goes far beyond the voters' reaction to his Administration's lackluster, even lackadaisical, response.

Until the Deepwater Horizon disaster, Obama was managing to make the "I inherited it from Bush" ploy work. Around half of the electorate bought the idea that whatever the problem, since Obama inherited it from Bush, they needed to cut him more slack in solving it -- maybe it was bigger than he thought, maybe Bush had set him up somehow to make a solution more difficult.

But the Deepwater Horizon happened on Obama's watch, and as such, he owned it. His effort to blame it on the Bush-era holdovers at the Minerals Management Service fell flat. The electorate watched to see how he would handle this disaster, the first one of his Presidency that they felt was in no way Bush's fault, and he failed. One might say he failed spectacularly; though he didn't order a specific effort that crashed and burned, like Kennedy's Bay of Pigs or Carter's Desert One, he did something even worse: he demonstrated total impotence, combined with incompetence and inattentiveness.

That gave voters a reason to reflect back and reevaluate the "Bush did it" excuses of the prior year and a half. No longer could they take it as given that a competent, powerful Obama was overmatched by problems created and amplified by an ineffectual or even diabolical Bush. They were faced squarely with the possibility that Obama had been unequal to the challenge of being President from the start.

And now we see that even those polls with the strongest Democrat sampling bias are showing Obama's disapproval above his approval -- in some instances, above 50 percent -- with large numbers of those polled expressing little or no confidence in his leadership on the economy, the most important issue on which Obama drew a contrast with the "policies that got us into this mess." This isn't just dissatisfaction with a three-month-long oil spill, it's a fundamental reevaluation of his entire Presidency.

Legislator + Regulator + Disaster = Quagmire

In the two months since the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded and sank, the ruptured wellhead has been spewing crude oil and gas at a terrifying rate. At the same time, news reports about the Obama Administration's response to the spill have more resembled water torture: they've come out in a slow dribble. But we've finally seen enough to detect a pattern:

• Despite early offers of help from the Netherlands and other nations, the Jones Act prevents foreign-flagged and foreign-crewed ships from joining the containment and cleanup effort in the early days of the disaster.



• The Environmental Protection Agency decrees that when skimmer ships fill with oily water and allow the oil to float to the top, they cannot discharge the cleaned water into the ocean because it doesn't meet EPA standards for discharge water purity.



• The national inventory of skimming equipment, pre-positioned around the country in case of oil spills, stays largely where it is because of the regulations that call for it to be available for potential disasters rather than redirected to a single catastrophic spill.



• The State of Louisiana is prohibited from building temporary sand berms between offshore barrier islands to block the oil from reaching coastal wetlands because proper environmental impact analysis of the sand dredging and alteration of coastal current hadn't been done. When the Administration relents, it does so reluctantly and only partially, and when Louisiana finally begins constructing berms, regulators shut down the sand dredging essential to supplying the construction, again due to environmental impact concerns.



• The Coast Guard inspects skimming barges operating off the Louisiana coast and shuts them down for a day due to insufficient fire extinguishers and life preservers on board.

The pattern, of course, is the slavish adherence to regulatory regimes during this catastrophic spill without regard to the scale and nature of the disaster.

The question has been asked widely: why didn't President Obama issue an executive order waiving the Jones Act restrictions, as President Bush did in the wake of Hurricane Katrina? Some speculate that he's been reluctant to offend the maritime unions due to his reliance on support from organized labor.

But that doesn't explain why he has also failed to issue executive orders to waive EPA restrictions and other regulations. After all, doing so would facilitate workers getting onto containment and cleanup jobs, even if it would potentially dismay environmentalists. And even environmentalists must be at a loss to understand why the regulations that protect wetlands and coastal ecosystems in normal times should prevent defensive measures against a massive flood of oil.

Maybe it's not his obligations to special interest groups that make President Obama reluctant to waive these regulations. Maybe he just likes regulations.

President Obama had little executive experience before ascending to the Presidency. His public service was as a legislator. Legislators create laws, which become regulations. That's as far as legislators go: the implementation of laws and regulations fall to the executive.

So a politician with legislative experience but no executive experience becomes conditioned to believe that all you need to solve any problem is a law and the regulations that translate that law into specific instructions. The legislator isn't tasked with implementing that law in the real world, nor is he directly exposed to the direct results of the law and the measures of its success or failure -- there may be many years and obfuscating factors separating the passage of the law and the first election after its failure becomes evident, so the verdict of the ballot box is an inefficient tool for teaching legislators how to craft laws that work.

So here is President Obama and his coterie, trained up in the belief that laws and regulations solve problems. The idea that solving a problem might require waiving regulations never enters their minds.

And here's David Axelrod on The Daily Show, confronting Jon Stewart's question about whether the Obama Administration has demonstrated sufficient competence to be trusted with ever more regulation of Americans' lives:

JON STEWART, HOST: It's clear that this administration believes that government can have a stronger hand in regulating Wall Street, in regulating energy, in doing these things. But, has government during this time proved itself competent? And are our only two choices sort of an incompetent bureaucracy that doesn't quite regulate properly or free market anarchy? Before you can make the case that this administration and government can effectively regulate shouldn't they, you know, the MMS case makes a pretty clear point that the regulatory system is somewhat broken, and you guys had a chance to...

DAVID AXELROD, SENIOR OBAMA ADVISOR: The answer Jon is not to abandon the notion that there have to be rules and oversight. The answer is to make it, to make it work better. There's a long legacy there at MMS, and frankly at other agencies of government because the last administration wasn't really interested in regulating.

STEWART: But why then, why not then go in and really, with the urgency? You know, the fear is the government is not agile enough, is not urgent enough to deal with things like a catastrophic oil spill.

AXELROD: There is, there is no doubt that in retrospect we would have liked to move faster on the MMS situation, but understand that we were also dealing with the economic crisis, and, and, and, and, and the wars, and a whole range of issues, and we, that was, that was a defect that we're correcting and moving aggressively to correct now. But the answer isn't to walk away from it. I think we tested the proposition of what no regulation means. What you get, you get the leak, you get the mine disaster in West Virginia, and you get an economic crisis. And everybody recognizes that government has to play a role. It shouldn't be an oppressive role, but there has to be some firm oversight and some rules of people respond to. These, you know, it's pretty clear the oil industry is not going to regulate itself.

STEWART: But do you think, I guess my point is before you have the opportunity, before you can earn the ability to go in and, and, and do that, don't, don't we have to show a certain baseline level of competence.

Note that Axelrod mentions both the Deepwater Horizon disaster and the West Virginia mine disaster as "what no regulation means." But here's the thing: there were and are plenty of regulations on offshore oil drilling rigs and on coal mines. The problem was not the absence of regulation, but the Obama Administration's blind belief that merely having regulations in place ensures that those regulations will be followed properly.

So have a little sympathy for President Obama. When he refuses to waive Federal regulations in order to allow an all-out effort to contain and clean this ever-burgeoning catastrophe, it may just be because he doesn't know any better.