Obama and the Oil Spill

Now that oil spill in the gulf has continued for over 50 days, there has been chatter about whether this is "Obama's Katrina" referring to the seemingly ineffectiveness of Bush in providing leadership during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

So is Obama to blame?

Can Obama propose the engineering solution to fix the leak? No, but he could do more than just leave it to BP. He could coordinate bringing in other experts, other companies, even BP's competitors. More importantly he could help lift the bureaucracy that is standing in the way of preventing environmental damage. There are twelve bureaucracies involved in the oil spill and they often get in they in the way. As the Chief Executive, he could get them out of the way!

Human Events: On May 11, [Louisiana Gov. Bobby] Jindal applied for 24 permits to create sand barriers for the coastal marshes; the administration did not respond until eight days later. Even worse, they waited for 15 days to approve just six of the permits, and to this day, BP has only funded one so far.

The government/BP reaction horror stories continue. Terrebonne Parish requested 180,000 feet of hard boom. The Coast Guard approved 90,000 feet, but, under BP orders, didn’t deploy it all, and the hard boom was left on the docks while the oil hit the beaches.