Morning Must Reads — Unable to share in anger, Obama tries to be comforter

After trying everything else, President Obama wants to be presidential and reassuring about the effort to stanch the flow of oil and eventually clean up the spill.

We also expect to hear an update on the negotiations with BP on creating a fund (up to $20 billion) that will be administered by a government designee and may or may not come with lawsuit indemnification for the oil company.

We will also hear more about the resident’s argument that this is proof that Congress needs to move swiftly to enact global warming legislation. (Examiner colleague Susan Ferrechio has a good piece on the state of play on cap and trade these days)

We will also hear more about the president’s deep, personal frustration with the spill and its damage to the gulf.

The 15-minute speech, which will be carried live on all four networks, is going to have to carry a lot of weight. The president is losing ground in the polls and is battling against the perception that he is passive.

Having tried unsuccessfully to foster perceptions first of serene competence and then righteous anger in the president, the White House is apparently going to try for avuncular reassurance. It makes sense that the administration would eventually get there, because so often the Obama team sees Americans as fearful and confused and just need to have things explained to them by a patient instructor.

Welcome back, Professor Obama.

Calmes gives us a preview of tonight’s address:

“At a staging site for cleanup efforts in Theodore, Ala., Mr. Obama referred to the fishermen, shrimpers, oystermen and others he had met in four visits to the Gulf Coast and described their fear that the spill ‘can have a long-term impact on a way of life that has been passed on for generations.’

‘And I understand that fear,’ he said.”

New York Times — Documents Detail Risky Decisions Before BP Well Blowout

The bosses of all of the big American oil companies will be before the House today for a ritualistic flogging by Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass. It’s the start of an election-year bonanza of oil hearings that will reach a crescendo with the scourging of BP boss Tony Hayward on Thursday.

But today, its generalized contempt for big oil as Markey barks at the heads of Exxon, Chevron, Conoco and the American branches of BP and Shell.

Lawmakers have no end of grandstanding ideas about what to do to the domestic oil industry (forgetting, as Examiner colleague Julie Mason points out, that today’s tough talk can result in tomorrow’s high gas prices).

Bad news for BP this week as emails surface that show the company knew the well being drilled by the Deepwater Horizon was a “nightmare,” that had run 43 days late and that the company knowingly took cheaper, faster alternatives in order to speed up the process.

We can also expect to see the other oil executives turn their fire on BP. Since BP caused a problem that will cost the industry billions in new regulation there’s lots of incentive to dig a firebreak around the company.

Writer Henry Fountain tells us what’s in the memo members of Congress sent BP so the company knows can have a few days to prepare for their whippings.

“The congressmen described three flawed decisions relating to the cement, and said the company also decided not to use a device called a “lockdown sleeve” to ensure that the top seal would hold.

Among the decisions relating to the cement, the congressmen said, BP opted to use far fewer “centralizers,” devices to keep the final string of casing centered in the well hole and help assure that cement flows evenly around the outside of the casing. BP used six instead of the 21 recommended by the cement contractor, Halliburton, which warned of a potential for a “severe gas flow problem.” A BP official complained in an April 16 e-mail message that it would take 10 hours to install the recommended number. “I do not like this,” he wrote.”

Washington Post — Concern on Capitol Hill about Afghanistan war grows

With big pieces in the Post and Times on big problems in Afghanistan, the press drumbeat about the stagnating Obama surge is getting louder.

Timesmen Peter Baker and Mark Landler got outside advisors who helped craft the current 100,000-troop exercise in armed community organizing to say that things are not working out as expected.

To wit:

“‘Things are not looking good,’ said Bruce O. Riedel, a regional specialist at the Brookings Institution who helped formulate the administration’s first Afghan strategy in early 2009. ‘There’s not much sign of the turnaround that people were hoping for.’”

But Post writers Karen DeYoung and Greg Jaffe put that gathering sense of dread into more tangible terms by reminding us that supplemental funding for the next phase of the surge is still stalled in Congress as Democrats fight over unrelated spending, mostly for government employee unions.

To mollify members who have concerns about spending tens of billions more on a war that seems increasingly unlikely to achieve the grandiose but vague goals laid out by the president for building a civil society in the second worst country in the world, Democratic leaders are bringing in Gen. David Petraeus to jolly up conservatives and Defense undersecretary Michele Flournoy to placate liberals. Petraeus will assure that a war is still being fought, while Flournoy will assure that the administration is doing everything possible to prevent actual fighting.

This latest round of complaint on the Hill will likely fade away. The cynical, and probably erroneous, assumption that bad results now may actually make Obama’s 2011 withdrawal timetable more likely should keep liberals on the rope-a-dope. And most conservatives still aren’t ready to override Petraeus, whom they deified in the late Bush years.

But this brings us one step closer to the eventual end of Obama’s Afghan political coalition.

The White House, meanwhile, is having a hard time not sounding like LBJ.

“Benjamin J. Rhodes, head of strategic communications for the National Security Council, said that rough patches are inevitable and that ‘at different times, different aspects of the strategy will be performing better than others.’ Early this year, he said, Obama was concerned about recruitment and training issues with the Afghan security forces and ‘he leaned into that, just as he leaned into alignment with the Karzai government’ before Karzai visited Washington last month.”

The Hill — House vote tests job push

The president is looking for $50 billion in deficit spending that he is describing as “state aid” or “small business relief” but is a mélange of stimulusy spending designed to prevent public employees from being fired. The keystone to the plan is $23 billion for teachers unions.

Writer Walter Alarkon explains that Democrats, despite some very loud grumbling from the rank and file, will start pushing parts of the plan forward this week. It will provide test votes to show where the caucus stands on what would be the fourth stimulus package since the start of the recession.

It’s made more complicated because the Senate is still gagging on a huge deficit spending bill that Democrats need to prevent an end to unemployment benefits, to postpone decreases in Medicare reimbursement for doctors, which also includes some of the Obama mini-stimulus.

“In the Senate, Democrats plan to hold a vote on a $115 billion bill extending jobless aid, Medicare doctor payments, aid to prevent public-worker layoffs, Medicaid money for states and tax provisions that have either expired or are set to expire soon. Because most of that bill isn’t offset and thus would add to the $13 trillion federal debt, Republicans have attacked the measure.”

Raleigh News and Observer — Video shames Etheridge, galvanizes Republicans

You’ve seen the video of Rep. Bob Etheridge going berzerk on some young conservative filmmakers who tried to get the congressman to say something stupid on camera. They succeeded beyond their wildest aspirations when Etheridge grabbed his questioner, cuffed his neck and even put him in some sort of quarter-nelson.

There’s reason to wonder why the student filmmakers won’t share their identities or why Internet impresario Andrew Breitbart didn’t insist on them divulging as a condition of release, but it’s certainly a moment that shows the rage inside the Democratic majority these days. These folks are angry about having to govern a nation that despises them.

Etheridge’s district, west of Raleigh, is usually safe Democratic territory: 40-percent black and mostly blue collar. But he has an archetypal Tea Party opponent this fall – a nurse who runs a clinic in the district and filed for office when Etheridge voted for Obamacare.

The scuffle was big news in the district. The Raleigh paper rolled three reporters on the story and provides video, transcripts and a photo gallery on what happens when Congressmen attack.

Writers Barbara Barrett, Benjamin Niolet and Rob Christensen explain where the White House press secretary may have gotten his smooth moves when dealing with media inquiries.

“Many bloggers encouraged readers to support Ellmers, Etheridge’s Republican opponent.

By Monday afternoon, she had a fresh injection of cash from hundreds of supporters in California, Wisconsin, Georgia and other far-flung states. She did not say how much.

‘I think this does put a whole different spectrum to who he is,’ said Ellmers, a nurse. ‘I’m not going to try to take advantage of it. It’s a terrible situation. I feel badly for him.’

After Etheridge’s apology, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, who worked for Etheridge in Congress, called him ‘one of the most honorable people I know.’”

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