Is Obama Getting a Pass On The Oil Spill? (Poll)

Opinion: An Oil Spill Free Pass for Obama? Not Hardly

Updated: 14 hours 38 minutes ago

Bob Maistros Special to AOL News

(May 25) -- Rare and wise in this day of 24/7 hype is the business executive who counsels his team -- as then Time Warner CEO Richard Parsons did in the early 2000s when his company was skidding through a bad patch -- to "under-promise and over-deliver."

The politician who offers or follows such sage advice? Nonexistent.

Which leads to the question: Is the media giving President Barack Obama a free pass in not subjecting his administration's response to BP's endless gusher of bubbling crude to the same withering criticism faced by his predecessor in the wake of Hurricane Katrina?

Of course not. Obama, like President Bush before him, is getting much more than the amount of criticism he deserves. Which, as much as it pains me to say it, is basically ... none.

Dude. Stuff happens. Once or maybe twice every 100 years, a Category 5 hurricane blows into a city that's cradled next to vulnerable levees well below sea level. When that happens, old, poor, minority neighborhoods get inundated and washed away. Terrible things ensue. Government moves in and does the best it can. But the president's particular power to fix things, let alone fix them fast, is limited. And the time to address the risks was decades before (when action was blocked by political wrangling and bureaucratic inertia involving the very state and local officials quick to point the finger at the Big Boss).

Stuff happens. Once every 40 years or so, something goes terribly wrong on an offshore drilling platform off the Gulf Coast. Some company or contractor miscalculates nature and fails to follow the right procedures, while the "fail-safe" shutoff valve fails. Oil shoots out of the resulting hole in the seafloor with the force of a megaton bomb at a depth of a mile or so, where it's a mite inconvenient to stuff a cork in or drop a canopy over it.

The company in question, the Coast Guard and every fisherman in sight deploy and work to plug the leak, contain some oil, burn off some more, spray (potentially toxic) dispersant on some more and pray fervently that the rest heads out to sea and not to the wetlands of Louisiana (too late), the beaches of Key West (too late) and the Gulf Stream (on your knees, boys).

What can the president do about it? Other than fly over the mess in Air Force or Marine One, ask from time to time how the response is going and pose menacingly in front of a TV camera and vent against evil Big Oil, basically ... nada.


Full Oil Spill Coverage
Liz Condo, Pool / AP

The problem is that politicians of all shapes, stripes, sizes and political persuasions have turned Dick Parsons' nostrum on its head. For years, they've over-promised. Obama and the Democrats, of course, were the worst offenders. They pledged that they would cut the price of our health insurance $2,500 a year while massively expanding coverage; turn back global climate change; wave a magic stimulus wand and prevent massive unemployment; stop our implacable enemies from hating us; put the auto industry back on its feet; stop the financial industry from doing what the financial industry does, which is take risks in pursuit of rewards; and perform other assorted miracles that defy both history and nature, of the human and Mother variety.

Having so overshot reality, the only thing Washington can do is ... under-deliver.

But their biggest mistake was blaming George W. Bush when Murphy's Law kicked in with devastating effect, whether in New Orleans or Baghdad or Wall Street or even on 9/11. Not to say that the previous administration had no faults in any of these areas, but in blowing W's culpability so wildly out of proportion, they raised the bar outrageously for themselves the first and every time events careen out of control.

Maybe it's unfair, but our president now finds himself uncomfortably close to the devil BP in a media hell of his own making. Having created such outsized expectations for himself and his government, Obama is getting exactly the level of accountability he asked for: The muck stops here.

Bob Maistros is a speechwriter, crisis communications consultant and satirist who contributes regularly to The North Star National.