US PRESIDENT Barack Obama returned to Louisiana yesterday for the third time in five weeks, in the hope of demonstrating strong feelings about the BP oil spill that started on April 20th.
Mr Obama’s emotions – or lack thereof – have become one of the biggest issues connected with the spill. “Are you angry at BP?” Larry King, the CNN talkshow host, asked the president in an interview broadcast on Thursday night.
“I am furious at this entire situation . . . Somebody didn’t think through the consequences of their actions,” Mr Obama replied, careful not to name BP specifically.
Television commentators yesterday mimicked Mr Obama’s flat, calm delivery of the words “I am furious”.
Mr Obama almost had to apologise for not showing the feelings that US commentators are demanding: “I would love to just spend a lot of my time just venting and yelling at people,” he said. “But that’s not the job I was hired to do. My job is to solve this problem. And, ultimately, this isn’t about me and how angry I am.”
In his previous two trips to the Gulf coast, Mr Obama stayed just two hours and only met officials.
As Ruth Marcus wrote in the Washington Post: “The White House was foolish enough to play along” with media demands for proof of presidential emotion.
Yesterday’s visit to Louisiana was scheduled to last longer and to include photo opportunities with distressed animals and people.
Mr Obama was reproached for hosting a party for Paul McCartney to celebrate McCartney receiving the Gershwin Prize from the Library of Congress on Wednesday night.
The White House cancelled a visit to Australia and Indonesia, which had already been postponed so that Mr Obama could see through the final stages of healthcare reform.
In what seemed to be the first good news from the site of the leak, Adm Thad Allen of the US coast guard, who is leading the government’s response to the spill, said yesterday afternoon that the cap installed by BP on the broken pipe was siphoning off about 1,000 of the up to 19,000 barrels of crude oil that are leaking daily.
Adm Allen said the amount would increase as BP closed vents in the pipe.
Using underwater robots overnight on Thursday, BP cut the pipe with a pair of giant sheers and smoothed the cut with saws before lowering the cap, which resembles an inverted funnel.
BP chief operating officer Doug Suttles told the CBS Early Show yesterday that he believed the cap could siphon off “at least 90 per cent of the flow of oil into the ocean”.
Even as BP completed the “cut and cap” operation, oil reached the pristine beaches of the Florida panhandle, threatening to destroy the state’s $60 billion-a-year (€50 billion) tourist industry.
BP has attempted to counter negative publicity by appointing a former aide to Dick Cheney to head its US public relations operation, taking out full-page newspaper advertisements and airing a new television advertisement in which BP chief executive Tony Hayward promises: “We will get it done. We will make this right.”
But Charlie Melancon, a Louisiana congressman, has started a petition demanding that BP’s board fire Mr Hayward, a British geologist who was paid $4.6 million last year.
“How is it possible that BP chief executive Tony Hayward hasn’t been fired?” Eugene Robinson wrote on the opinion page of the Washington Post. “How can anyone believe a word the man says?”
Mr Hayward had to apologise to the families of 11 men who died in the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig after he told an interviewer from NBC: “There’s no one who wants this over more than I do. You know, I’d like my life back.”