The influential and nonpartisan website pollster.com shows that President Barack Obama’s job approval rating has dipped since the oil spill.
Pollster http://www.pollster.com/polls/us/jobapproval-obama.php now shows that 48.9% disapprove while 47.2% approve.  That’s pretty much a reversal of the situation one month or so ago.  Note that Pollster’s numbers are an aggregate of many top polls and that it is nonprofit, nonpartisan and run by professional political scientists, many affiliated with the highly regarded University of Wisconsin, Madison.

This follows other recent polls showing a majority of Americans disapprove of Obama’s handling of the BP oil spill mess.  I don’t have the results of those polls at my fingertips but I seem to recall something like 52% disapproval and 46% approval.

Of course, each day this mess continues the presidential approval rating numbers will go down.  

The President must deal with this catastrophe more forcefully.  Here are some steps he could take immediately:

  1.  revisit the scene and spend some time (not just a few hours there) talking with people about what happened and what can be done. This environmental disaster is more important than spending time with Republican legislators or flying to California to help Barbara Boxer get reelected; show some fight!;
  2.  fire Ken Salazar as Interior Secretary and overseer of the cleanup process.  Put in someone who has a known, tough reputation for being an environmental steward. Note that while Obama promised no more waivers of environmental impact statements, the New York Times reported two days ago that this practice is still occurring under Salazar’s “leadership”. Like Bush did with Brownie, Obama must show Salazar the door.
  3.  clean out just about all the staff at MMS.  The New York Times has a new report up showing that many of these hapless regulators actually let the oil companies fill out their regulatory forms in pencil, and then they just used pens to cover up the pencil remarks of the oil companies.  Prosecute those people within the government who broke the law (as in those who took bribes as reported by the Times).  This is NOT a time for “look forward not backwards.”
  4.  get tough with BP and other oil companies.  Have the Justice Department investigate to see if any laws were broken, and if they were, prosecute to the fullest extent of the law.
  5.  permanently REINSTATE the offshore drilling ban. President Barack Obama has as of now just put a 30 day moratorium on it.  There should be no more offshore drilling period.
  6.  it is especially necessary to ban offshore drilling in the Arctic. Shell is sending drilling equipment up there right now.  This should be stopped with a complete ban on offshore drilling.
  7.  Obama should return the money that BP gave him in 2008 and refuse to take any more.  Otherwise, all of those waivers look like “pay to play”.  
  8.  Maybe we should take Andy Borowitz’s humorous suggestion up and plug the oil leak up with BP excecutives!

    From Borowitz writing at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andy-borowitz/experts-propose-plugging_b_589709.html :

    “We’ve tried containment domes, rubber tires, and even golf balls,” said William Cathermeyer of the National Oil Leakage Institute, a leading consultancy in the field of oil leaks. “Now it’s time to shove some BP executives down there and hope for the best.”

    Submerging the oil company executives thousands of feet below the ocean’s surface could be a “win-win” situation, Mr. Cathermeyer said.

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