Beyond White House Control

Thad Allen is right and James Carville is wrong. In the Washington Post Bjorn Stromberg summarizes two views of White House involvement in the Gulf Oil spill:

For an Obama administration spokesman on the BP oil spill, Adm. Thad Allen, the Coast Guard commandant and national incident commander, is admirably straightforward. Working on behalf of the president who ran a campaign based on the mantra, “Yes We Can,” Allen awkwardly insists that, in this case, no, the government can’t.

“There are very few circumstances where the government does not have the means or national power to influence something this large,” Allen said said in an interview with me at the White House on Wednesday. “I think that’s a source of immense frustration to everybody.”

Commentators increasingly lambaste the administration for not “taking over” the cleanup effort. In a politically calculated response, some administration officials have ratcheted up their rhetoric about keeping the federal government’s boot on BP’s neck; they have now threatened to push BP “out of the way,” which just fuels the anger.

But what many of the critics, inside and outside the administration, don’t offer is much sense of what the federal government could really do better if it pushed BP aside, other than symbolic actions of questionable value, such as insisting that President Obama visit the Gulf of Mexico again and, as James Carville put it Wednesday, “take control,” whatever that means. (For what it’s worth, the president will return to the gulf on Friday.)

Under the water and on the surface, Allen says, there simply isn’t much that the federal government can add to what BP is already doing, beyond providing some supplemental brain power, advanced imaging technologies and review of BP’s proposals to plug the leak. Things the government has already furnished. “The private sector owns nearly all the means to deal with this problem and fix the leak and stop the source.”

The ongoing spill which as of this writing appears to be slowing, filled by tons of drilling mud, is uncharted territory. There are currently nearly 5,000 U. S. oil wells in the Gulf of Mexico plus an unknown number of Mexican and other oil wells. In the 70 years of experience with offshore oil wells in the Gulf of Mexico no event like this and certainly no event of this scale has ever occurred.

All of the experience, expertise, and equipment relevant to dealing with the spill are in the hands of BP and other oil companies. Given the rareness of the occurrence it makes no sense for the federal government to have a trained staff and equipment prepared and on standby just in case and an inexperienced and unprepared federal government intervening in something in which they can only get in the way is absurd.

Mr. Carville is right in that the White House can only lose, however unjust that might be, by what’s going on in the Gulf. There are some things that are simply not under political control and one of them is unfolding right now in the Gulf of Mexico. Like the rest of us all the White House can do now is wait and see if BP’s latest attempt will succeed. If it doesn’t BP will try something else.