How Obama blew his critical offshore drilling decision

WASHINGTON — Weeks before the world had ever heard of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, President Barack Obama stood in the Roosevelt Room of the White House poring over maps of oil drilling sites in the Gulf of Mexico, Alaska and elsewhere.

Satisfied that he knew all he needed to know and confident that it was safe, he decided to propose expanded offshore drilling.

"This is not a decision that I've made lightly," he said when he unveiled his proposal on March 31...

Obama did roll back some of the offshore drilling that the George W. Bush administration had approved on Bush's last day in office. However, Obama never challenged the Bush era's fundamental faith in the oil industry or its ability to clean up a massive spill. Instead, he embraced expanded offshore drilling in part to win Republican support for broader legislation to curb climate change.

"He deserved to be more skeptical," said Stephen Hess, a veteran of four White Houses back to the Eisenhower administration and an expert on how presidents do their job....

Ultimately, it's up to Obama to decide if he's satisfied with how he reached his decision to propose more offshore drilling.

A president's decisions are only as good as the information that drives them. That point was driven home in early 1961 when an inexperienced President John F. Kennedy blindly signed off on what would become the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.

Kennedy learned. Afterwards he personally questioned experts skeptically, including his own generals. Eighteen months later, facing the Cuban Missile Crisis, he developed an advisory system that remains a model of executive decision-making, one that helped the world escape its closest brush with nuclear war.

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