Barack Obama seems to have been eating his way around the Gulf of Mexico, munching through a plate of crawfish tails, crab claws and ribs at Tacky Jack’s in Alabama, posing with a super-sized ice cream in Mississippi. The message is, of course, that the Gulf coast is open for business. The wider message is that he ‘gets it’. The Washington media don’t get him. The qualities the President prizes, coolness and detachment, they see as un-American disengagement. In truth it is a little odd sometimes, for someone who got the job partly because of his empathy and ability to identify with the audience. At his final speech at a naval academy in Florida the men in khaki repeatedly holler in powerful unison when he mentions the words ‘marine’. He could have joshed them, name-checked them again or performed any one of a thousand politician’s tricks to cement a bond. He just ignores the interruption.
It’s this struggle that is at the root of the recent transatlantic misunderstanding. Those in Britain who accuse Barack Obama of aggressive anti-British rhetoric seem to have missed the build-up to his ‘kick ass’ comments. For weeks, in daily briefing after daily briefing, the President’s spokesman has had to defend his boss against charges that he is insufficiently angry. ‘Have you seen rage?’ the White House press corps asks with a straight face. The spokesman Robert Gibbs replies that he has, indeed, seen some presidential rage. He is pressed for evidence. Does the president shout, for instance? Gibbs had to answer, like a poker player throwing a couple of clubs on the table, that he’d seen Mr Obama clench his jaw. The president dislikes doing anger, but he has the political nous to hold his nose and do some anyway. So the harsh language has nothing to do with a desire to blame Britain and everything to do with satisfying an American media that want an empathiser-in-chief, not Professor Cool.
The fury on the coast — towards BP, rather than Britain — is not feigned. Take Grand Isle, a lovely place of rolling dunes, bright green marshes and little waterways, lined with pastel-coloured wooden houses on stilts. It should have thousands of tourists by now; instead, the beaches are empty save for signs saying ‘closed’. One householder has made up a mock cemetery on his front lawn. The scores of crosses bear words that add up to a way of life: sand castles, boiled shrimp, beach sunsets, speckled trout and ‘sand between my toes’ are among the remembered victims.
I come across a local councillor resplendent in a pair of sunglasses that would do Dame Edna Everage proud, who seems at first resigned and philosophical. ‘God is trying to teach us something,’ she muses. ‘I don’t know what yet. But it’s a lesson.’ But when I mention BP, the philosophy vanishes. ‘Don’t get me started — I’ll only want to kill ’em all over again.’ But anger at Britain? ‘No, no.’ She sounds horrified. A young man working for the local radio station chips in, ‘of course not, nothing like that.’
The British media desperately wants to write the ‘anti-Britain’ story, and as the BBC’s man in Washington I feel Canute-like against the tide. But I’ve been down to the Gulf four times now and seen nothing to suggest that the mood against BP has hit Britain’s reputation. One man, on hearing my accent, joked that the British were responsible not only for the spill but for expelling his Cajun ancestors from Canada 300 years ago. Neither he nor anyone else I met has held me or my country responsible for the actions of BP any more than they do for the actions of Lord Newcastle’s government.
I first saw the oil on a little beach just where the gulf of Mexico meets the Mississippi. Not black as you would think — the fresh stuff is the dark reddish colour of a well-made Sazerac, the cocktail of New Orleans. It occurs to me in the Sazerac bar of New Orleans’s Roosevelt hotel that one lover of that drink would have been able to turn a phrase to suit this crisis. The Kingfish, Huey P. Long, held court in this bar as Louisiana’s governor in the 1930s. A corrupt bully, a buffoonish demagogue often compared to Mussolini and Hitler, he hated Rockefeller’s Standard Oil and tried to make them pay for the free textbooks and thousands of miles of road with which he dragged the state into the 20th century. I ask a local historian what he would have done to BP. ‘He’d rant and rave, he’d be in their face, he’d have got things done.’ But I doubt if the President is one of the Kingfish’s admirers.
‘This is a war,’ I hear a man exclaim in the lounge of New Orleans airport. He reminds me of one of the captains in the Sopranos, fearfully out of shape but powerfully built. ‘If we were at war, would they put down their rifles for ten minutes because it’s 90 degrees?’ he exclaims. ‘This is Louisiana, it’s 90 degrees, we work through it. If they can’t take it, ship out!’ He snaps off the call in disgust and looks at his travelling companions.
I learn a tip from the bartender. The usual recipe for a Sazerac is sugar, rye whiskey, with a whiff of Herbsaint (a local absinthe) and three dashes of local bitters. But this is over the top. Leave out the sugar lump.
Mark Mardell is the BBC’s North America editor; he is covering the oil crisis in the Gulf.
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