For a while there, it looked as though the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill was going to be the Obama administration’s springtime curse. There are two reasons why it won’t be.
First, something worse looms far more threateningly on the horizon: the specter (no pun intended) of possible lawbreaking in the attempt to lure Rep. Joe Sestak out of the Pennsylvania Senate primary.
The second reason the oil spill will not keep the Obama regime awake night is that they secretly embrace it.
I don’t say that lightly. In fact, as low as my opinion of this administration is, I do not lunge at such a damning conclusion reflexively.
Some will chalk up the White House’s clumsy handling of the crisis to incompetence, and they will not be wrong. This is a government run by policy wonks and bookish activists They have little experience in any matters of business, especially the oil business, which they hold in darkest contempt.
But if cluelessness explains part of the mishandling of the spill, the rest is explained by an even sadder prospect: the worse the story gets, the greater the boost for the Obama agenda of demonizing oil so that the public will lose its thirst for additional domestic exploration.
When White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel issued his famous quote, “Never let a serious crisis go to waste,” he was referring to the economy, which he and his boss portrayed as more desperate than it was in order to jam an 825-billion dollar “stimulus” package down the throat of a nation that never would have bought it if saner heads were prevailing.
Now, the crisis they can exploit is environmental. They know that every day of stories and images sickens millions of Americans, some of whom might just start to sour on oil as our primary energy source. The thought of voters growing more receptive to green technologies brings gives them a shudder of excitement as they seek to leap the hurdles of cost and reliability that keep many Americans skeptical.
We should all be willing to embrace green technologies that actually work. But these people don’t care about that. Fish, birds and human jobs are a small price to pay if they can advance their agenda of muscling us away from oil.
They want this to be oil’s Three Mile Island, an event that freaks us out so mightily that we abandon an energy source that does not deserve abandonment.
So now to the muck that actually will give the President some sleepless nights. Even his loyal handmaidens in the media are tired of being hosed with contradictions and non-answers. It’s never good when a White House faces questions of “What did the President know and when did he know it?”
In this case, we want to know what the President’s involvement was in the effort to lure Joe Sestak away from running against Arlen Specter, the recent turncoat who stood to serve as the 60th vote on many items on the Obama to-do list.
Sestak is actually more liberal than Specter, but the White House (properly) believed that he was more vulnerable to Republican Pat Toomey. So Specter was their boy and they wanted him unchallenged.
But pesky Joe Sestak actually wanted to be in the Senate and felt he could poison Specter with campaign ad images of the rare moments when he actually acted and voted like a Republican. He wound up being right, but back in the cold days of winter, Bill Clinton shows up to offer something to Sestak to make him want to drop out. What a gift from the talk show gods.
What was offered? Was Bill Clinton sent as a “fixer” to give Obama and others the ability to distance? (“WE didn’t offer him anything!”) The answers to these questions will provide the answer to to the question that the President dreads more than another month or another year of oil spill: Did the White House try to bribe Joe Sestak?