by Javier Manjarres

Wednesday’s decision by President Obama to drop the initiative he put forth last April that supposedly would have expanded oil exploration and drilling off our coasts should not be surprising to anyone.  Obama’s latest example of duplicity takes his opportunistic and deceptive brand of politics to another level.  He has now reneged on perhaps the only bone that he has thrown at conservatives during his Presidency, but in all likelihood, the President never intended to follow through on this promise in a concrete manner.  Obama’s much publicized initiative was simply yet another rhetorical head fake from the beginning, the kind of which has become his administration’s trademark.

For what it’s worth, Obama issued an Executive Order that allowed for the limited expansion of offshore drilling back in April, but the BP oil disaster gave Obama the opportunity to “never let a crisis go to waste” and completely renege on this initiative.  Obama’s completely arbitrary call for a seven year moratorium means that oil drilling and exploration activities will be strictly limited as long as he is President.

At the time of the spill, now Senator-Elect Marco Rubio was quick to acknowledge the gravity of the spill.  Rubio has always been a proponent of energy independence and maintained his position that oil drilling is, and will continue to be vital to the country’s overall energy strategy.

Senator-elect Rubio issued this response in the wake of  President Obama’s flip-flop:

“I do not support the administration’s decision. I believe offshore oil exploration should continue to be part of America’s energy mix, so long as it can be done safely. I believe the administration’s new policy is an obstacle to job creation and imperils our national security by making us more dependent on foreign oil from hostile regimes. On this issue, the White House should have left politics out of the equation and based its decision on sound energy policy that advances our economic development and national security goals.” Senator-Elect Marco Rubio

Rubio is one of many elected officials that have been critical of President Obama’s off-and-on again oil drilling positions. Earlier this year, Former Governor of Alaska and potential Presidential candidate Sarah Palin ripped into President Obama by insinuating that his sudden pro-drilling position was a sham, and she rightfully warned people to be distrustful of his actions-

“I’ve got to call it like I see it.  The administration’s sudden interest in offshore drilling is little more than political posturing designed to gain support for job-killing energy legislation soon to come down the pike. I’m confident that GOP senators will not take the bait.”- Sarah Palin

President Obama is not nor does he care to be an honest broker in his dealings with his political opposition, and his lofty public statements as they pertain to policy matters are completely detached from the hard consequences that result from the pursuit of his misguided ideology.   The President does not engage the principled objections to policy positions because to countenance them would be to give them exposure and credibility.


This may not be newsworthy to those of us who understand who Barack Obama is, but do enough elected Republicans realize yet that Obama will not be channeling his inner Clinton to either triangulate or offer much hyped “Third Way” policies?  We are dealing with a whole different type of political animal, and Republican politicos who do not understand this yet had better get the message fast and strategize accordingly.

As much as Obama wants to inaugurate the “post-carbon” era, none of us alive will ever see it, so ample supply of oil, gas, and coal will be essential to our future prosperity.  It should be commonsensical that we need to control our own destiny as it pertains to energy exploration and production.  The President is willfully blind to our country’s energy needs as well as our aspirations for prosperity.  We shall see soon enough just how much Americans are willing to pay at the pump before the outrage about our inaction on oil exploration and drilling reaches a critical mass.