For the young Presidency of Barack Obama, and for the nation, this hellish summer of discontent started in balmy spring, on the evening of April 20th, forty miles off the Louisiana coast in the Gulf of Mexico. At first, after the explosion aboard the giant oil rig Deepwater Horizon, the rig’s operator, BP, estimated the resulting flow at a thousand barrels a day. A nasty business, yes. But at that rate it would have taken eight months to approach the level of the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill and eight years to equal the record for the Gulf, set in 1980 at Ixtoc, off the Mexican coast.

Illustration by Tom Bachtell

By May 17th—the day that the chief executive officer of BP predicted that “the environmental impact of this disaster is likely to have been very, very modest”—it was obvious that what was unfolding was the single biggest environmental catastrophe in the history of the United States. By last Tuesday, June 15th, when President Obama commandeered the networks for his first address to the nation from the Oval Office, the per-day estimate had been ratcheted up to sixty thousand barrels—a thousand every twenty-four minutes. The surface muck was fouling Florida beaches and Louisiana wetlands, leaving doomed seabirds shrouded in black; just as ominous, huge subsurface blobs were leaching oxygen from the depths, threatening to suffocate an entire ocean ecosystem. The Times was describing the governmental response as chaotic, “bedeviled by a lack of preparation, organization, urgency and clear lines of authority among federal, state and local officials.” And Obama himself was under attack from all sides, with even admirers berating him for seeming coolly detached and not angry enough.

Against this background, Obama’s speech was bound to feel unequal to the occasion. What “people” wanted to hear was an answer to Malia Obama’s now famous question—“Did you plug the hole yet, Daddy?”—and the answer they wanted to hear was yes, or, failing that, real soon. This the President could not provide. Plugging the hole is beyond his power, or, apparently, anyone else’s. By Labor Day, perhaps, relief wells, now being drilled at maximum speed, will still the gusher. Or so we are told.

The emotional catharsis that some were hoping for from the President did not materialize. No drama from Obama this time. No blood, either, and no tears, and only a soupçon of sweat. The speech was coherent—give it that. It had three parts. It began with an account, or defense, of the Administration’s actions in the crisis thus far. Second came the unveiling of new steps, among them a long-term project to restore the Gulf Coast, to be planned under the auspices of Ray Mabus, the Secretary of the Navy, who, although a former governor of Mississippi, is an enlightened and competent public servant. Finally, the President issued a call, unencumbered by much detail, for a “national mission” to achieve a “transition away from fossil fuels.” This was the part that stirred much of the ire that emanated from the right. Prominent Republicans accused the President of using the crisis—“seizing on” it, “exploiting” it, “leveraging” it—in order, the Party chairman, Michael Steele, said, to deploy “Chicago-style politics” to “manufacture knee-jerk political support for cap-and-trade energy taxes.” Meanwhile, some liberal commentators slammed Obama for timidity, including, precisely, not mentioning cap-and-trade.

“See, I told you, we’ve been going around in circles. That’s us twenty minutes ago!” Facebook

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The President was right, of course, that the ultimate cause of the Gulf disaster is out-of-control consumption of a dwindling resource that must be extracted in increasingly dangerous ways. The most effective, most efficient way to rein in that consumption and make clean energy price-competitive would be to slap a heavy tax on carbon. (Ideally, much of the revenue would be rebated to the public as a cut in the payroll tax, since it makes more sense to tax things we want to discourage, such as oil use, than things we want to encourage, such as work.) This is what some European countries have done, and it may well be what Obama would do if he had the kind of legislative power that European prime ministers have and that many Americans, of all political persuasions, assume that he has, too.

But he doesn’t. As he did with health care, Obama is trying for the maximum that, in his judgment, our rusty, clanking legislative sausage-maker is capable of delivering. As he noted in his speech, a year ago the House passed “a strong and comprehensive energy and climate bill.” That bill languishes in the Senate, where its weaker counterpart is on life support, with the filibuster poised to cut it off. If part three of Obama’s speech was cautiously, even uninspiringly, worded, that is because it is part of the delicate legislative strategy of a President who knows that, while the perfect is out of reach, the good (and maybe even the so-so) is its ally, not its enemy.

The day after his speech, Obama made up for its deficit of drama by jawboning BP, which under federal law is liable for only seventy-five million dollars in damages, into putting twenty billion dollars in escrow for an independently administered fund to pay for damage claims. The day after that, at the outset of a hearing of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, the committee’s ranking Republican, Joe Barton, told the assembled BP executives that he was “ashamed” of what Obama had done. He called it—the escrow fund, not the oil spill—“a tragedy of the first proportion.” The fund, he said, “amounts to a shakedown,” adding, “I apologize.”

Public outrage forced House Republican leaders to distance themselves from Barton’s “shakedown” remark. Barton himself was forced to say, one more time, “I apologize.” But this was hardly a spontaneous gaffe. It followed a script that had been laid down the day before, in a press release from the chairman of the House Republican Study Committee, Tom Price, of Georgia, which called the escrow agreement not just a shakedown but a “Chicago-style shakedown.” The morning after all the distancing and renouncing, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, the guardian of Republican ideological purity, attacked the agreement as having been reached “under what Texas Republican Joe Barton rightly called the pressure of ‘a shakedown’ yesterday.”

The confused lines of authority that the Times noted are still too muddled. Though it’s clear that the President was personally engaged from the start, allowing the opposite impression to take hold was a failure of governance, not just of public relations. And, as he acknowledged in his speech, his Administration was laggard in cleaning up the corrupt mess it inherited at the Minerals Management Service. But, unlike his most vociferous Republican critics, he is trying to move the country away from its abject subservience to oil. A shakedown? What Obama is trying for, in his methodical, sometimes maddening way, is a shakeup. ♦