In case you missed it, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney on Friday blamed “career professionals” at the Department of Energy for giving $535 million of taxpayer money to Solyndra, the now-bankrupt solar energy company.
Carney did not come out attacking the Department of Energy, but his comments tended to insulate President Obama, and even Obama’s appointed Energy Secretary Steven Chu, from criticism over the loan debacle.
“Secretary Chu does have the President’s full confidence [as head of the Energy Department],” Carney responded to a questioner. “Ultimately, the head of that department is responible for [the loan],” Carney continued, “but let’s be clear, there were numerous people involved who were career professionals and work on those kinds of issues every day.”
Carney’s benign attitude towards “career professionals” – implicitly well-meaning, capable people who made an unfortunate mistake – at the Energy Department makes a sharp contrast with the party line regarding last year’s energy sector embarrassment, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
As oil poured into the Gulf, Obama directed attention to a “cozy relationship” between the oil industry and federal regulators. Then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., blamed that regulatory failure on President Bush’s “burrowed-in” political appointees, which proved baseless in the Deepwater case. But President Obama has extended that basic argument throughout this year, as when he charges Republicans with wanting to “let corporations to write their own rules.”
Obama advocates expanded bureaucracy and increased regulation through avenues such as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Dodd-Frank regulatory reform bill – measures which may be necessary in some cases, but tend to put “too much discretionary power in the hands of unelected bureacrats,” to quote Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis.
Though different from Deepwater insofar as Energy Department loan officers did not have regulatory obligations, the bureacurats’ failure in giving out the Solyndra loan guarantee underscores the inherent problem of government through bureacracy. Obama offers the bureaucratic state as a palliative to social ills and a guard against corporations who would serve themselves at the expense of the public good. But when the bureacurats cost the public half a billion dollars, Obama does not accept responsibility. Instead, he expresses full confidence in the “career professionals” whom he uses to avoid responsibility for the Solyndra failure.
And thus Obama reveals the one constant in his attitude toward the oil and solar industries: when something goes wrong, he wants you to know that he’s not responsible.
