Long time, no blog! Obama answers questions about the Deep Water Horizon spill

President Obama held a news conference today after several weeks of mounting criticism from both democrats and republicans regarding the federal government's response to the BP oil spill.

While Obama's critics have mostly lacked specific suggestions on what the federal government should be doing to mitigate this environmental disaster (also known as Obama's Katrina and/or Obama's Exxon Valdez, take your pick), the general consensus is that the government was slow to act and that red tape is keeping local clean-up efforts from moving forward.

In his news conference today, Obama lashed out at the GOP for politicizing the oil spill and seemed to make a deliberate effort to come across as angry and frustrated with BP. He defended the federal government's response effort while at the same time acknowledging that the size of the oil spill has now exceeded the level of the Exxon Valdez (making it the largest oil spill in US history).

So what is next for Obama? The oil spill is still continuing to spread, but could this spill really have the same political impact on him as Katrina did on Bush? The disaster has gone uncontained for a month now, is it possible that public interest in the issue could wane if it goes on long enough? Even though Obama was open to offshore drilling only 2 months ago and since scaled back his stance, the GOP is still heavily tied to the oil industry, and it seems unlikely that a future challenger would be pro-oil in a campaign.

It is also unclear what exactly the federal government can do other than work with BP as it has been to stop the spill. The nature of this event is in completely uncharted territory, but perhaps the public announcement that the head of the Minerals Management Service (MMS) had been fired and the president's moratorium on offshore drilling will begin to have an effect on the public's perception of the disaster response.



On a side note, while some had speculated that a question regarding the job offer supposedly made to Joe Sestak might pop up during the conference, it apparently did not come up.