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A crew replaces absorbent boom near a rookery to protect if from oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill, Saturday, June 12, 2010, in Barataria Bay near East Grand Terre, La. (Eric Gay / AP Photo) He ditched a Churchill statue and botched a gift to the queen, but it took the Gulf oil spill for the president to clinch his anti-British credentials—and for love-struck Britain to finally turn against him.
Britain’s love affair with President Obama has come to a grinding halt. His handling of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has turned the relationship sour, almost overnight. Nobody in Britain doubts that the Gulf shores of the United States face an environmental catastrophe or that BP is culpable and should pay for the mess it has created.
The company’s hapless chief executive, Tony Hayward, is regarded here as an embarrassment, clearly not up to the task at hand. His invisible Swedish chairman, Carl-Henric Svanberg, is generally depicted as useless. (Nobody in Britain has ever heard of him, everybody is puzzled about why this dull Eurocrat got the job in the first place, and the British media have excoriated him for being silent throughout the crisis.) Nobody in Britain will shed any tears if neither CEO nor chairman survives the spill; indeed, there’s a clamor for them both to go.
British politicians are complaining that the president is taking cheap shots at the Brits to mask his own inadequate response to the spill.
But widespread anger with BP, horror at events unfolding in the Gulf—pictures of oil gushing uncontrolled from the seabed appear nightly on our TV sets, just as they do in America—and heartfelt sympathy for those affected are rapidly being replaced by near-universal disgust at what is perceived as the president’s anti-British rhetoric, which is deeply resented on this side of the Atlantic.
This weekend, Obama and our new prime minister, David Cameron, spoke on the phone. Obama claimed that “national identity” had nothing to do with his approach to the crisis. Our prime minister was too polite to say that nobody believed him.
The first sign that the Brits were going to take the rap for the oil spill came with Obama’s constant references to “BRITISH Petroleum,” a name that was dropped more than a decade ago, after the merger with America’s Amoco turned the British oil company into a transnational conglomerate. The British media quickly concluded that the president wanted to make out that the spill was all the fault of evil foreigners, if only to hide his own administration’s inadequate response to the crisis. Even the normally mild-mannered and very pro-Obama Financial Times urged the president to “stop treating BP as a hostile and alien entity.” BP, after all, employs more people in America than it does in Britain and is 40 percent-owned by U.S. institutions; it even provides the U.S. military with most of its fuel.
The Spectator magazine, which prides itself on its pro-American credentials, complained that the Obama administration was speaking as if a “British pirate expedition had sailed over and drilled a wildcat well” before going on to point out that the disaster was caused by an American-owned, Korean-built rig leased by BP’s U.S. subsidiary.
The British expected BP and the U.S. government to work together to stem the leak. So they were appalled when Obama talked about needing to know “whose ass to kick” and his administration vowed to keep its “boot on the neck” of BP. He disparaged Hayward on network TV, refusing even to talk to him. Suddenly a president widely regarded by the British as sophisticated and civilized was being seen as a vulgar populist with a deeply embedded anti-British strain.
Now the gloves have come off on this side of the Atlantic. The British tabloids have been urging Cameron to “stand up for Britain” and tell Obama to stop slagging us off. Influential commentators have weighed in, with one accusing Obama of “crass populism which shows very poor statesmanship.” The airwaves, public prints, blogs, and websites are crammed with attacks on the president that would have been inconceivable only a month ago.
Even normally sober voices are getting in on the act. The former British ambassador to Washington, Sir Christopher Meyer, told the BBC it was time for Cameron to take on the White House: “The survival and ultimate prosperity of BP is a vital British interest, and I think the time has come to point it out, at a senior level, to the U.S. administration.” Various politicians, from former foreign ministers to members of parliament to peers of the realm, have piled in, all complaining that the president is taking cheap shots at the Brits to mask his own inadequate response to the spill.
It has long been feared that Obama had an anti-British streak running through him. The removal of the bust of Winston Churchill, which his predecessor had proudly displayed in the Oval Office, caused consternation. The inappropriate gift to the queen, an iPod loaded with 40 show tunes, provoked puzzlement. The references in his autobiography to his grandfather being mistreated by the British in colonial Kenya, despite any evidence being proffered to substantiate the claim, was taken to be the source of his hostility to America’s most loyal ally.
12 June 14, 2010 | 12:08am Twitter Emails
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BP appears to have been "penny wise and pound foolish" with their expense cutting culture and poor risk management. No excuse for a safety record far inferior to other "best in class" majors. BP leadership will pay less of a price than the hapless shareholders and those retirees who rely on dividends. Obama and Big government have also failed. Since the Exxon Valdez disaster millions and millions of dollars have been paid in taxes and fees to the US government for contingency planning and disaster recovery for oil spills.that money appears to have been wasted. This can't be blamed on any one admin. but is a failure of the civil service and the permanent gov. class that Obama has such faith in. In fact the Coast Guard (like in Katrina) seems to be the only part of the USGov. that is working well. Obama and his team have failed in several ways- poor communication, delay in calling on all oil companies to provide expertise to help fix this, rejecting offers from other countries, and overall poor coordination. What do you expect from a man who has never held an executive position in his life. My suspicion is Obama has waited to let BP and business in general look as bad as possible. It's their problem, let them fix it. Unfortunately, when a disaster of this magnitude happens, it is all hands of deck and you use every resource available (public, private, NGO) to help fix it- and let BP know the bill is coming. That is the job of government-when damage occurs to public lands. Rather than reporting goals and objectives and tasks being used Obama says he is out to "kick some ass" and sounds like Hugo Chavez or a union boss. Obama forgot that is is helpful to been seen as part of the solution, not the problem.
right on standfast, this crisis hit obama right out of the blue and he is incapable of dealing with it. him and his dormmates are great at blaming everybody else for everything, but when it comes time to do something, they are typical politicians. instead of insulting the brits by giving them back their churchill statue, he should be studying winston's example of leadership and emulating it. but he is an angry little half kenyan and will never forgive the brits for colonizing africa. i've come to realize that barry doesn't see himself as president of the us, he sees himself as the president of the world. scary stuff
Obama's boot grinds deeper into the neck of the squirming BP. Squeals erupt as he continues to kick ass again and again with his awesome leadership and deft lunges into their pocketbook. Tomorrow, with a final linguistic bash he will pummel them into submission. Go Barry go.
Funny thing, innocentcitizen. I seem to remember you guys loved George W. Bush when he declared himself the world's boss.
This is Dick Cheney's fault. You want Obama to just ignore it the way George HW Bush ignored Exxon Valdez.
innocentcitizen: Your opinion means nothing as it is inspired through bigotry!
it's too bad British Petroleum spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to convince the world that they were Beyond Petroleum rather than paying for necessary saftey measures on their rigs. British Petroleum is who they are and a multi billion dollar multinational oil conglomerate is what they are. Obama should'nt dance around this and the Brits should'nt take it personally.
Conservatives want small government and then complain when the government can't stop an oil spill! Please! It was the job of BP to prepare for contingencies in case of a blowout and they didn't do it. The best thing the government can do is to increase regulation to make sure it doesn't happen again.
There is a very good and complete riposte to this nonsense in today's (British) Financial Times by Clive Crook - normally not a great Obama admirer. I suggest the daily Beast get permission to republish it, or otherwise your readers go online to read it. It deals with all of the relevant issues perfectly
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