Barack Obama Is Less Popular Than Offshore Drilling: BP News Round-Up
BP oil spills into the US Gulf. Barack Obama tries to sound Churchillian, talking of an “assault” on America’s beaches and nation under “siege”. Obama wrests £13.5bn from BP as compensation down payment. BP chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg says BP will not pay a dividend to its shareholders. The news:
Most Americans still support offshore drilling and believe it is critical to making the U.S. competitive, despite the growing oil spill along the Gulf coast, a new poll showed on Wednesday …
In a national survey of 522 adults, on a scale of 0 to 10, the average show of support was 6.3 when asked if the government should allow offshore drilling.
An Anorak readers writes:
Obama is milking this for all it is worth to the American people and starting to come across as quite disgusting and it is not helping his low ratings, since BP had already stated weeks ago it would take care of everything.
A Record 57% Of Americans Disapprove Of Obama’s Performance
Daniel Hannan On The Isolated Obama
Not that we should feel singled out. The Obama administration has scorned America’s other established friends. It has betrayed Poland and the Czech Republic, whose Atlanticist governments had agreed to accept the American missile defence system at immense political cost, only to find the project cancelled. It has alienated Israel and India. It has even managed to fall out with Canada over its “Buy American” rules and its decision to drill in disputed Arctic waters. Never has there been a worse time to be a US ally.
Cameron said he wouldn’t enter into “megaphone diplomacy” with Obama in the face of calls from listeners to the show for him to take a more aggressive stance in defense of the London- based company.
Mr Obama gave a televised address in which he once again attempted to rescue his own faltering popularity by attacking what his administration has been careful to characterise as a foreign oil company.
What we should learn from this transatlantic spectacle is that if the stock of a huge corporation is held by enough pension funds, the misdeeds of that corporation are to be forgiven no matter how heinous they may be. A company can cause the worst environmental catastrophe in U.S. history but it doesn’t really matter if retirees are awaiting their dividends: Hands off BP!
Should the situation get worse—for BP, I mean, not for the Gulf of Mexico—we will probably even begin to hear, from those who know our “traditional values and interests” better than we do ourselves, urgent demands for a BP bailout. Think of the pensioners!
The Queen Talks to David Letterman
“If Britain had beaten America, what with BP, which to my mind stands for bloody p***-poor… “I don’t think I could have come on this show. I would have been so embarrassed and mortified at being British.”
To get a measure of the hypocrisy with which Mr Obama is being assailed from the Republican right, it is worth returning to those heady days in 2008 when Sarah Palin, explained in strident hockey mom mode, why America needed to produce more of its own oil and gas. She added: “And take it from a gal who knows the north slope of Alaska, we’ve got lots of both.” America has indeed lots of oil, as shrimp fishermen are now finding. The same people who chanted “drill, baby, drill” at that Republican convention stand aghast at the ineffectiveness of a president coping with consequences of their policies.
Most Washington analysts believe that the speech, which was his first from behind the HMS Resolute desk in the Oval Office, did little to rectify the impression that the situation remains beyond Mr Obama’s control.
“The oil crisis threatens to turn into a killer symbol of a president who is not in control of events,” says Bill Schneider at the Third Way think-tank in Washington.
“Just like the Iranian hostage crisis branded President Jimmy Carter as hapless, and hurricane Katrina branded George W. Bush as indifferent, Deepwater Horizon threatens to brand President Obama as a bystander to the big events taking place on his watch.”
Janet Daley On The End Of Hope
The BBC reports of Barack Obama’s speech last night are about as derisive as it would be possible to be about someone you were describing only a few months ago as the incarnation of Hope and Optimism. Yes indeed, the romance is over. The British media have decided that it was all a cruel deception: Obama is just one more ranting populist president who will do anything to divert attention from his own failure to get a grip. And this is not just about BP and the fate of all those pension funds.
Image: People’s Cube
Posted: 17th, June 2010 | In: Politicians Comments (8) | TrackBack | Permalink
