The Gulf of BP Chronicles Thread #1 For 5/25/10: Obama To Return To The Gulf

It really needed to happen:

A White House source said today that President Barack Obama will travel to Louisiana and the Gulf Coast on Friday to to assess efforts to halt the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

No details on the visit were immediately available.

Sargent makes another terrific point:

But it seems to me there's another solution to this perception problem. 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.

Reasonably people can disagree as to whether there's more the White House could be doing to stem the current crisis. For the sake of argument, let's say the White House is right: There's nothing more in the way of decisive action Obama can take in response to the disaster.

If that's so, Obama may as well take another course of decisive action that is open to him: Seize this opportunity to shift the energy reform debate once and for all. 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.

Either that or say what Duncan Black said so appropriately, even though that won't be coming out from Obama's mouth ever.

Update: And it will happen on Friday:

On Friday morning, May 28, President Barack Obama will travel from Chicago to the Louisiana Gulf Coast to assess the latest efforts to counter the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The Administration has mobilized one of the largest responses to a catastrophic event in history, with more than 1,200 vessels in the region and more than 22,000 people, including many of the brightest scientific minds from both the public and private sector, working around the clock to mitigate the oil's impact.