PERMANENT OCCUPATION
The White House has already made the decision to keep virtually
all of its BP oil spill personnel in place — regardless of the
situation on the ground and in the Gulf — through the 2012
election cycle, says a White House source familiar with the
planning, with the unstated goal of creating a kind of “Gulf
Potemkin Village” that the Administration can use for political
effect.
“This is now a political situation, not just environmental,
and guys like Rahm
[Emanuel] and
[David]
Axelrod aren’t going to let it get
out of control again when it is most important to us,” says the
source.
According to a Department of Homeland Security source,
virtually all federal employees deployed to work on the BP oil
spill now possess DHS email addresses, regardless of which agency
they work for, to ensure coordination. “We are going to keep all
of these people on the ground there as long as it is deemed
necessary,” says the DHS source. “If that’s through January 2013,
then so be it.”
Politico
over the weekend posted a story that outlined the White
House’s political calculations with the oil spill for — at the
least — the 2010 election cycle, detailing the political
personnel deployed mostly to Florida to create the impression
that President Obama and his administration are engaged in the
issue.
The deployment of political personnel is also telling as
more details from the Coast Guard’s formal investigation into the
early hours and days of the BP Deep Horizon spill are coming to
light. “There is a real fear that there is more damaging
information about what the White House knew and when they knew
about it,” says the DHS source. “There is also a real concern
that after bashing BP for months, the Obama Administration is
going to have change its story yet again.”
The White House political cleanup crew is different from
the one already in place across Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama
and Florida, where a host of Coast Guard, DHS, Energy Department,
Environmental Protection Agency, and other “alphabet agency”
employees are now based, not to mention those working the issue
from Washington, D.C.
“The White House wants to be able to point to all of those
staffers during the 2012 cycle to serve as a reminder of just how
catastrophic this spill was, and how much time and energy the
Administration has put into it,” says the DHS source. “Of course,
it won’t be clear that any of those people are even needed down
there at that stage of the game, but they will be there
regardless.”
DUEL IN VEGAS
This
year’s dueling conservative-Marxist conferences in Las Vegas
revealed the marked challenges the Republican and Democrat
parties face in the upcoming mid-term 2010 elections.
At the NetRoots Nation conference at the unionized Rio
Hotel, the far left activists sought to re-energize their base,
which had already begun to show signs of strain and
disillusionment at last year’s conference in Pittsburgh.
Disgraced Obama environmental policy advisor Van
Jones was a headline at Friday’s events,
speaking to a lukewarm audience that seemed to barely muster the
energy to give him a standing ovation. That was a trend for much
of the conference’s breakout sessions.
A NetRoots attendee connected to ActBlue said her
impression was that numbers were down from last year and were
markedly down from the 2008 conference. NetRoots organizers,
however, were more than happy with the turnout. Meanwhile,
sources from the rival Americans for Prosperity (AFP) say they
believe their overall registration numbers indicated that they
had surpassed NetRoots numbers for the first time since the two
organizations began holding dueling conferences.
When Jones said that progressives were living in a time of
“hope and heartbreak,” it was difficult to tell if he was
referring to the heartbreak progressives claim to be feeling over
a disappointing Obama and Democrat political season or the hope
that was being felt across the Vegas Strip at the free-market
Venetian resort, where employees are some of the best paid on The
Strip … and without unionization. There the AFP’s RightOnline
conference was packed, with Rep. Mike
Pence teeing up the crowd on Friday,
followed at dinner by a barn-burner from Rep. Michelle
Bachmann.
The highest profile attendee at the AFP conference may have
been businessman and radio host Herman
Cain, who had a full team traveling with
him, including his PAC director. Much of the talk around him is
that he intends to formally launch a presidential exploratory
committee perhaps as early as this fall.
HE MEANS IT
When former
House speaker Newt Gingrich said he
was serious about considering a run for the GOP presidential
nomination, he wasn’t kidding. Gingrich — as he did in 2007 and
2008 — has a number of his advisers looking at the 2012 race.
“Newt doesn’t do anything without really peeling back the layers
of the onion in a very analytical way,” says a former staffer for
Gingrich’s American Solutions. “There is no way someone like him
could look at this political environment and not see a good
opportunity to run.” Gingrich has gone so far in his planning,
according to sources, that he has undertaken a series of test
videos that would be used to re-introduce himself on a political
level to voters. He has also had his legal team working out just
what parts of his “Newt.org” organization, which includes his
American Solutions organization, can be leveraged for an
exploratory or full-blown presidential campaign.
