Rep. Joe Barton of Texas broke an iron law of Washington last
week. He described the elephant in the room that no one was
supposed to see. In this case, it was the strong-arming Obama
& Co. applied to BP to get it to “voluntarily” set up a $20
billion fund to compensate Gulf citizens adversely affected by
the oil spill. Barton used the inelegant term, “shakedown.” He
was promptly made to eat humble pie by his party’s Congressional
leaders, fearful that if they didn’t clamp down, the Democrats
would use it to tie the entire party to an unpopular company.
Mr. Obama’s attorney general had already taken the unusual
step of publicly announcing in advance a criminal investigation
of the oil spill. This built pressure on BP, as did the concerted
effort by everyone in the administration with access to a
microphone to demonize it, as if it had deliberately caused the
Deepwater Horizon rig to explode and unleash a flow of oil from
the sea bed.
The night before the BP meeting, the president delivered an
uninspiring speech from the Oval Office, once again insisting
that BP “would be made to pay” for everything. The tone of his
voice suggested that if it weren’t for him, BP would run for the
hills.
Obama also wrung out of BP a commitment to set aside $100
million to cover lost pay of the estimated 27,000 deep-water rig
operators who will be out of work for six months, thanks to the
president’s hasty, ill-advised moratorium on their operations. In
their rush to score public relations points, neither he nor his
advisers bothered to learn that oil rig jobs are
fungible. If a federal judge hadn’t overturned the
moratorium yesterday, those workers would have gone where the
jobs are, for example, to Brazil and Indonesia. At the end of six
months, many of these workers would have been long gone.
Meanwhile, Louisiana’s economy, which rests on oil, sugarcane and
seafood, could have ill afforded losing about one-third of its
mass.
Let’s hope the Obama Administration has learned a simple
lesson from this: As with all presidential decisions, think
through beforehand the consequences of the one you are
considering.
A troublesome theme has run through the nearly
year-and-a-half of his presidency. Obama has
consistently spoken about businesses — especially large
businesses — as if they were motivated by “greed.” He has pushed
that nostrum of the Left that government is inherently “good,”
“fair,” and decent in its behavior. This is not surprising
considering that most early influences on his thinking came from
the Left and his stint as a community organizer in Chicago
involved preaching the tactics of the radical Saul Alinsky to his
low-income constituents in order to get them to hound banks to
lower their credit-granting standards and thus provide loans to
people who could not afford them. You might say that he, along
with Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and their Greek chorus among
Congressional Democrats, all contributed to the housing bubble’s
collapse (and, yes, so did some Wall Street types whose pursuit
of big fees trumped good sense as they created exotic investment
vehicles).
Mr. Obama’s antipathy toward business is undisguised. His
drive to put the federal government in control of health care,
his championing of the cap-and-trade legislation (a device for
enriching carbon emissions brokers who will be favored by
government dispensers of patronage) and his demonizing of BP are
all of a piece. Government is good; the private sector (except
for mom-and-pop stores) is bad unless it is very tightly
regulated by the government.
On November 2, his desire for a country governed from the
Left will meet head on with the voters of a country that has, for
years, been determined to be center-right.
