Alex Massie Alex Massie

Cult of the Presidency: BP Edition

While Britishers have been getting used to coalition government, some things in America never change. In fact, if anything the Cult of the Presidency* is stronger than ever. True, the Obama administration has not always, or even often, done much to acknowledge any limits** on Presidential brilliance but the response to the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has been wearying nonetheless.

Apparently – and since almost every question at yesterday’s White House press conference was devoted to the spill the prisoners inside the Press Room agree – the President should have done more to “own” the spill and never mind the fact that the United States government is hardly equipped to deal with this kind of rare event and, for that matter, has no greater incentive to deal with it than does British Petroleum. Never mind the facts, sir, show us you care! Say something, anything that proves you’re in control of a situation that can’t possibly be yours to control!

Now it may well be that there’s been a certain laxness in American regulation of deep-water drilling and it does seem curious that safeguards deemed mandatory in, say, the North Sea are considered optional in the Gulf of Mexico but that’s an entirely different matter from the question of whether the federal government could reasonably be expected to have done much more once the oil started to leak. Remember that a similar incident in 1979 took ten whole months to fix.

More typical has been the antics of hacks such as James Carville, squawking like some demented parakeet, that “we’re dying down here” and all the rest of it.

Strange too that so many Republicans seem determined to argue that this oil spill is somehow “Obama’s Katrina”.

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