Rep. Joe Barton Likes BP -- and the Company Likes Him Back with Cash
After BP Chief Executive Officer Tony Hayward had expressed his contrition to members of Congress for the ongoing oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, a long-time friend of the oil industry, Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas), today issued an apology to Hayward for his harsh treatment at the hands of the White House.FLASHBACK: During Exxon Valdez disaster, President Bush got a free pass from the press
Barton, speaking at a congressional hearing, called the $20 billion escrow account set up by BP to pay for claims related to the spill, a "shakedown" on the part of the Obama administration.
Individuals and political action committees associated with BP have donated $27,350 to Barton's political campaigns since the 1990 election cycle -- eighth among members of Congress, the Center for Responsive Politics' research indicates. (Barton might find it ironic that the man he said so mistreated BP, President Barack Obama, received more than $77,000 from BP employees during his political career.) Contributions from PACs made up 94 percent of Barton's donations.
Individuals or PACs associated with the oil and gas industry as a whole have been Barton's biggest patron since he entered Congress, donating more than $1,448,380 since the 1990 election cycle. The figure puts him at No. 1 among all House members for donations from the industry, fifth among members of Congress and fourth among active members of Congress.
Barton's comments today came after Hayward had just taken his licks from several members of the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, including Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.). Barton, the ranking Republican on the energy and commerce committee, must have been a welcome sight.
Barton has been a consistent skeptic of global warming and opponent of legislation to address climate change. In his Oval Office speech Tuesday night, President Obama sought to use the disaster from the spill in the Gulf to argue for action on significant climate legislation.
Barton was also among a group of Republican congressmen from Texas who earlier this week put forth a bill to end the moratorium on deepwater drilling. When announcing the bill, he questioned whether the temporary moratorium imposed by the Obama administration would become permanent.
(Update 4:08 p.m.:) Barton's biggest single corporate contributor, Anadarko Petroleum, is a 25 percent stakeholder in the Macondo Prospect, site of the Deepwater Horizon explosion in the Gulf of Mexico. Individuals and PACs associated with Anadarko have given Barton's campaigns $146,500 since the 1990 election cycle. Political blog FiveThirtyEight highlights this fact in this report.
On the night of June 10, NBC’s Nightly News aired one of its many reports about the BP oil spill disaster. In this segment, Lisa Myers examined “what the government knew about how bad the leak could be and how much they told the public,” as Brian Williams put it. The report leaned heavily on the question of whether the Obama administration “leveled with the public” about the severity of the spill.That's the so-called liberal media. One impossibly high standard for Democrats and a free pass for Republicans.
The rather breathless Nightly News segment, with lots of what-did-he-know-and-when-did-he-know-it implications, perfectly captured the news media’s somewhat odd obsession, virtually from Day One of the oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, with making Obama a central figure, if not the responsible player, in the drama about an oil-industry catastrophe.
No, the government didn’t operate or own the rig. And oil giant BP was obviously the responsible party. Yet the press immediately focused in on Obama.
The knee-jerk interest in the Oval Office was especially odd when compared with how the same Beltway press corps went out of its way in 1989 to completely remove President George H. W. Bush’s role as a player in the Exxon Valdez environmental crisis. If you go back and look at the coverage, in the days following the first reports that the Exxon supertanker’s hull had ruptured on Bligh Reef, spilling more than 10 million gallons of oil into the pristine Prince William Sound, a gusher that ended up covering 11,000 square miles of ocean, you’ll see that Bush was mostly a non-player in that unfolding drama, which quickly became the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history. Bush barely even warranted mention during the blanket news coverage.
In terms of reporting on the Exxon Valdez disaster, which was punctuated by constant claims from locals that the oil industry, with its nonexistent contingency plan, as well as the federal government, with its decidedly hands-off approach, had woefully botched the cleanup (sound familiar?), Bush remained, in the eyes of the press, a non-entity, a spectator. And not the kind of bystander who got tagged with blame, which was why there was virtually no Beltway media chatter about how the Exxon spill would play out politically for the new White House inhabitant. It wasn’t even discussed.
Well, not by most. A St. Petersburg Times editorial did condemn the federal government’s “ineffectual” and “almost blithe” reaction to the monster spill. And there were a couple of other media darts thrown Bush’s way. But they were the exceptions. For instance, I can’t find any examples of mainstream outlets suggesting Bush “owned” the Exxon spill. And I didn’t see these kinds of very unsubtle headlines and images, courtesy of the New York Times, used during the Valdez coverage:
During the 1989 man-made disaster, corporate media journalists didn’t obsess over whether or not Bush was showing enough emotion. They didn’t conduct poll after poll to figure out Bush’s “grade” for handling the spill. They didn’t fixate on stagecraft. And they certainly didn’t include the president on lists of people who were “to blame for the oil spill,” the way Time recently included Obama on such a list, blaming him for the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion. (Why was Obama to “blame”? Because “shortly before” the disaster, he proposed allowing for more offshore drilling. And no, that doesn’t make any sense.)
With Bush and the Exxon Valdez, the press didn’t really seem to care what the president thought of the disaster or what he planned to do to fix the mess. Yet three presidents later, with the country once again under attack by oil-industry malfeasance, the press has been focusing most of its attention on the White House and demanding to know what the president is going to do to clear up the confusion. The press has also been spending countless hours calculating the supposedly immense political fallout. (Although, according to polling firms, there has not been any yet.)
In other words, the press gave Bush a free pass following the Exxon Valdez spill, while today, the same press corps seems determined to hang the oil spill around Obama’s neck. Why the glaringly different approaches when covering epic oil spills?
By the way, I'm certainly not suggesting that Obama and the federal government are above reproach, or that tough questions shouldn't be posed about the cleanup effort. And obviously, the BP crisis has extended weeks longer than the Alaska spill did under Bush, giving the press more time to dwell on Obama. But I am suggesting the press corps has undeniably imposed a double standard in its treatment of a Republican president during an environmental crisis and its treatment of the current Democratic president.
And trust me, it wasn’t like Bush was proactive in the wake of the Exxon Valdez calamity.
Consider:
-He didn’t travel to Alaska to monitor the cleanup or meet with locals.
-He didn’t display much public emotion about the disaster.
-He didn’t publicly flash anger about the spill.
-He didn’t want the federal government to take over the cleanup.
-He didn’t go on primetime TV to address the nation about the spill.
-He didn’t meet with the CEO of Exxon at the White House to discuss the cleanup.
-He didn’t send top administration officials to Alaska until five days after the spill.
