Gulf Disaster

What Obama Should Be Doing

Use occasion to shift energy-reform debate.

People are increasingly frustrated with the Obama administration’s response to the Gulf spill, but the question remains: What should it be doing? It lacks the technical prowess to actually stop the leak, but Greg Sargent has another suggestion: “Maybe Obama should take an additional path of decisive action that clearly is an option right now, which is to use the crisis to rally the public towards real energy reform,” he writes. “If there's little more that can be done to address the current problem, as massive as it is, time to go big and tackle the even larger, underlying one.” Sargent points out that “if Obama seized the moment to rally the public more broadly behind energy reform, it would add to the sense of an aggressive response to this crisis in particular.”