With November elections just 20 weeks away, Republicans are scrambling to trash President Obama and his tattered electoral coattails from virtually every angle. But Texas Rep. Joe Barton’s appalling apology to BP CEO Tony Hayward on Thursday for President Obama’s determined negotiations to secure the oil giant’s creation of a $20 billion compensation fund was beyond belief.
The money will go directly to Gulf Coast residents and businesses for their economic losses due to BP’s interminably tragic oil spill. Rep. Barton’s misplaced criticism just underscores just how extreme and blindly partisan the nation’s political dialogue, if it can charitably be called that, has become.
“I’m ashamed of what happened in the White Hous e yesterday,” Rep. Barton told the BP chief in Thursday’s congressional hearings, referring to Mr. Obama’s efforts to secure the company’s commitment to the compensation fund.
“I think it is a tragedy of the first proportion that a private corporation can be subjected to what I would characterize as a shakedown, in this case, a $20 billion shakedown,” Rep. Barton continued. “I apologize. I do not want to live in a country where any time a citizen or a corporation does something that is legitimately wrong is subject to some sort of political pressure that is — again, in my words — amounts to a shakedown. So I apologize.”
Rep. Barton owes a larger apology for his comments to the multitudes of Gulf Coast victims of BP’s disastrous spill. BP apparently caused the spill, now in its 62nd day, by cutting corners on safe operating standards. It then egregiously underestimated the size of the spill for more than half of that time.
BP finally admitted last week that the spill may be upwards of 60,000 barrels a day, or 2.5 million gallons a day, or more. That stunningly dwarfs the Exxon Valdez spill of 10.8 gallons in 1989. The scope of the damage is epic: it is rapidly destroying the natural resources, cultural and economic fabric which have nurtured the coastal communities’ way of life for generations. The damage will last for many years to come, and may never be entirely remediated — all because BP’s management endorsed or tolerated risky operating procedures.
That Texas’ Rep. Barton would explicitly attack the president’s role in securing BP’s commitment to a compensation fund is wildly inane and utterly wrong. BP has paid out barely $50 million so far in compensation to people and businesses that it has put out of work. The $20 billion fund it has now promised to finance will not be enough to cover the final damages. Victims badly need compensation immediately to carry on with their lives. How Rep. Barton can criticize the president’s role in expediting such necessary aid escapes us.
In fact, Mr. Barton’s action likely owes to two factors. One is his long and cozy relationship with the oil and gas industries, which have poured roughly $1.5 million into his campaigns since he was elected in 1989, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
The other is the Republican quest to denigrate Mr. Obama’s every action, regardless of its merit. Such spurious attacks have become illogical and unending. Mr. Obama is being blamed both for the BP spill and for not stopping it, for not acting fast enough and not doing enough, to “stepping on BP’s neck” and, now, to shaking the company down to compensate its victims.
His pressure on BP to make it begin paying for its inexcusable Gulf Coast spill is admittedly far different from former Vice President Dick Cheney’s closed meetings with oil company executives to quietly arrange their cozy drilling agreements with the previous Bush White House. Mr. Obama’s meeting with BP officials was for a more just purpose. If Republicans will criticize him for that, their knee-jerk obstructionism knows no bounds.