President Obama is visiting the Gulf States for the fourth time today and tomorrow, and will be delivering his first Oval Office address tomorrow night on the Oil Spill crisis. Then on Wednesday, he will have an Oval Office meeting with the top leadership of the British Petroleum Corporation, the topic being what is now easily the greatest environmental disaster in US history finishing eight weeks without resolution!
Obama has a reputation of being unemotional and wanting to remain a “nice guy” and always rational. But in this crisis, now to be considered the greatest crisis he has faced, bar none, he needs to show a tough side and to be demanding and condemning of BP, in order to get quicker resolution of the crisis, while holding the corporation completely responsible financially and legally for the loss of jobs and the killing of wildlife and the destruction of the tourism of the Gulf States!
Obama needs to be like Harry Truman at the time of labor strikes when he threatened to draft strikers into the US Army! He needs to be like John F. Kennedy when he confronted an inflationary price increase in the steel industry by throwing down the gauntlet to the steel companies and having concessions made by them under public condemnation!
There is no room for doubt or hesitancy for Barack Obama. His entire legacy may be based on the way he handles this crisis, and he must not worry what the critics say! This is one time when the federal government must assert its supremacy, no matter what states rights fanatics might declare to be unacceptable!
America must be run by its national government, not the corporations which have been running amuck in the past thirty years, and need tight discipline and regulation for the benefit of the American people!