Will the Gulf oil leak webcam engulf President Barack Obama?
It’s nearly impossible to avoid the live video of the coal-gray oil gushing from BP’s well a mile below the Gulf of Mexico’s surface. According to an Associated Press-GfK Poll this week, 88 percent of the public has viewed it — a picture so sharp that it’s tantalizingly easy to wonder why someone doesn’t just stuff a rag into the ruptured pipe.
The video is a daily reminder that two months after the oil rig explosion that killed 11 and caused the massive leak and resulting environmental and economic damage, BP still hasn’t plugged the well. The AP-GfK Poll shows that so far people are more upset with BP than Obama: 83 percent disapprove of how the British-based oil company is handling the disaster, compared with 52 percent unhappy with the president.
The White House Asked For It
It was the White House and Democratic lawmakers who originally pressed BP to make the videos available. Yet if the crude continues to flow, the images could morph into a vivid symbol of the intractable problems Obama has yet to solve to the satisfaction of a demanding public — not just the Gulf’s environmental disaster, but the limp economy and feeble job market, too.
“Certainly what they want is for us to focus on what they’ve done right,” Paul Freedman, who teaches about public opinion, media and politics at the University of Virginia, said of the White House. “And to the extent that that’s still a problem, I’m not sure it (the videos) helps them.”
Democrats and environmental advocates say the relentless pictures are helpful politically because they highlight a problem that people know was caused by an oil company, not the president. They also hope the images, plus pictures of oil-covered birds and beaches, will win greater public acceptance of cleaner energy sources. Obama called for such a transition in an Oval Office speech Tuesday.