Before becoming president, Barack Obama had been a steadfast opponent of expanded deepwater oil drilling. He had made his position clear while a Senate candidate in 2004, and again during the early stages of his presidential run.
“Believe me, if I thought there was any evidence at all that drilling could save people money who are struggling to fill up their gas tanks . . . I would consider it,” he said at a June, 2008, stop in Jacksonville, Fla. “But it won’t. . . . When I’m president, I intend to keep in place the moratorium here in Florida and around the country.”
However, by this past March — the month before BP’s deepwater drilling disaster in the Gulf of Mexico — Obama announced the lifting of the drilling moratorium in previously protected areas of the Outer Continental Shelf. (A follow-up deepwater drilling moratorium, imposed after the Deepwater Horizon spill, was lifted this week.)
An analysis of Obama’s turnabout by The Washington Post, based on dozens of interviews with people directly involved in the decision, found that the president was swayed by political considerations, including the prospect of winning climate change legislation, and an overconfidence in the oil industry’s safety record. What was lacking was an examination of the engineering risks of energy exploration at once-unimaginable depths.
The process began, the Post found, in the summer of 2008, when gasoline prices were hovering around $4 a gallon. By August, presidential candidate Obama signaled that he could support some new drilling, in large part because he saw that concession as a way to win Republican support for a climate change bill.
After his election that November, Obama decided on centrist Democrat Ken Salazar, then a Colorado Senator, as his new interior secretary, passing over more vocal opponents to drilling such as U.S. Rep. Raul Grijalva, D-Ariz. Obama also appointed a newly moderate, former foe of deepwater drilling as his energy adviser in Carol Browner.
Salazar and company subsequently got started on their study of whether and how to end the deepwater ban, a process that lasted more than a year. Administration officials now concede that throughout the process, worries about the safety of deepwater wells were not given enough attention. David Hayes, the deputy interior secretary, said in an interview that the risk of a major oil spill in the gulf “wasn’t in the top 30″ on his lengthy list of worries.
While Salazar’s study began as an open inquiry, soon the debate was framed by the question of where to allow new drilling, not whether to end the ban. This allowed some flexibility to cut deals and please individual senators. For instance, Bill Nelson, a Democratic senator from Florida, succeeded in beating back a proposal to open up to drilling areas within 50 miles of Florida’s coastline.
All of the deal-cutting was supposed to make passage of a climate-change bill, the heart of the administration energy agenda, more realistic, but the effort to stitch together a compromise collapsed, meaning that the Obama administration essentially traded an end to the drilling ban for nothing.
The formal announcement to lift the drilling ban came on March 31. “This is not a decision I’ve made lightly,” the president said. “It is one that Ken — Secretary Salazar — and I, as well as Carol Browner, my energy adviser, and others in my administration looked at closely for more than a year.”
But it is a decision that the administration reassessed, after BP’s well exploded not quite three weeks later.
Okay, Obama repealed “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (sort of)
[ Source: http://gravelle.us/content/out-closet-barracks ]
…while still being able to tell conservatives he DIDN’T.
Bravo.
AND he gave the thumbs-up to drilling in the gulf (sort of)
[ Source: http://www.dailyscoff.com/?p=2798 ]
…while still being able to tell liberals that he didn’t do THAT, either.
For a guy with no political savvy, this seems politically savvy.
“Slick” Willy Clinton may have to surrender the title…
-jjg