If Bush Did It

The Washington Post 's Joel Achenbach has just completed a book on the gulf oil spill, BP, and the Obama administration's response to the disaster: A Hole at the Bottom of the Sea: The Race to Kill the BP Oil Gusher. The excerpt in today's Post suggests that the country is, indeed, in the very best of hands : On May 10, President Obama ordered his Nobel Prize-winning secretary of energy, Steven Chu, to dive into the response. Two days later, Chu showed up at BP headquarters with a hand-picked team of advisers, most of whom had limited experience with petroleum engineering. (Chu, a physicist, had won his Nobel for figuring out how to freeze atoms with lasers.) BP executives were not thrilled to see the scientists march through the door. It looked to the company as though the administration had said, “Where are our experts?” and then rounded up anyone who did not flinch at the sight of a differential equation. Science, engineering, it was all the same. The Obama folks were obviously in love with the idea of Chu — this notion of having an in-house Nobel Prize winner who could be dispatched, superhero-like, to solve intractable problems with the power of his giant brain. Jim Geraghty

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‘The Obama folks were obviously in love with the idea of Chu.’