Daniel Larison, one of the most incisive bloggers I’ve come across, drew blood in a post on my recent column in The Daily Beast on BP. I encourage you to read his post. My column was uncharacteristically intemperate, and I fear my argument has been misunderstood. Rather than single out the Obama administration for blame, I was speaking to a human tendency to vilify outsiders. I get the impression that BP has been doing an impressively bad job of managing environmental as well as health and safety risks for a long time. But now, when this view is universally shared, I’m suspicious of get-tough tactics that short-circuit a deliberative process. This is all very abstract — more abstract than I’d like to be or than I ought to be.
In Daniel’s persuasive view, BP was acting in its own interests:
Dave Weigel reported earlier this week that some Republican members of Congress, including Louisiana’s Joseph Cao, had been pushing for BP to establish the fund weeks ago. BP voluntarily decided to establish the fund, and then after the fact Obama took some credit for the establishment of the fund. I don’t quite see how this is comparable to the disparity and abuse of power in the Opium Wars, the forced relocations of whole nations or communal riots in Ahmedabad. For that matter, I missed the part in all of this where “a stronger party, ignoring the conventions of a good-faith negotiation, all but forces a weaker party to bend to its will.”
It appears that the corporation responsible for the spill is attempting to take responsibility for the consequences of its negligence, and it doesn’t appear that much coercion was involved. I can understand that Reihan does not want to encourage a spirit of vindictiveness, and he probably doesn’t want to encourage anti-corporate populism that this spill has been fueling (if you’ll pardon the expression), but anything less than some gesture from BP like this one would have ensured that both would have become much stronger.
This may well be true. My error was in assuming that the Obama administration was sincere in its characterization of how the negotiation proceeded. On ABC’s This Week, Rahm Emanuel said the following:
EMANUEL: And by — wait a second, and also, Jake, is they originally weren’t thinking about $20 billion. And they originally weren’t thinking about an escrow account and forcing them to do that. There are certain things that they had to be pushed — not certain things, like a lot of things that they had to be pushed to do. And pushed to do faster, more of.
So did the White House force BP to establish an escrow account or not? There are a couple of views we can consistently hold: the president forced BP to knuckle under and that is a good thing, because BP behaved unconscionably and there was no guarantee that the legal system would compel them to do the right thing even in the fullness of time; or BP acted in its own best interests and the Administration is misrepresenting its role. There might be something I’m missing here.
Elsewhere in the interview, Emanuel made a number of arguments regarding the auto bailouts that raise questions about his sincerity, as Keith Hennessey observes.