A few days ago, the president managed to get BP to set aside $20 billion for victims of the oil spill. This is something our media is not equipped to properly contextualize. It's the fact that this is completely outside the power of the Presidency that makes it such an amazing accomplishment. Guys like Joe Barton call it a shakedown. I orignally thought of it as more of a Jedi mind trick, but TPM reader DB described it best as an act of leadership.He wrote:
It reminds me a little of something that happened during the Hurrican Rita evacuation. It was going to slowly and endangering the evacuees. Houston Mayor Bill White got on the phone to the Texas Department of Highways. He said, "make all the lanes of I.H. 45 one way north for the first hundred miles from the coast--the southbound traffic can find another route." He had no power to order that. But the officials just complied. He acted like a man in charge.Unless the fund is handled poorly, and it looks like the administration has farmed this out to a competent, experienced individual, this has to go down as one of the great presidential accomplishments of this relatively major presidential accomplishment-free century.
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