As Oil Slips Away, So Do Chances for Obama

By PETER BAKER
NYT

WASHINGTON — President Obama is supposed to leave Washington in 10 days for Indonesia, Australia and Guam, but with oil still gushing into the Gulf of Mexico, some in the White House are wondering whether the weeklong trip should be scrubbed.

For now, the trip remains on the schedule. But as the White House tallies up the spiraling price tag of the largest oil spill in American history, the bottom line extends beyond dollars and cents. Also on the line are the opportunity costs for a president who already had a packed agenda before a rig exploded in the waters off Louisiana.

Now that engineers have given up trying to plug the leak and have turned their efforts to containing it until a relief well can be finished in August, Mr. Obama faces at least two more months of crisis management that will complicate his hopes of advancing his agenda in other areas. Every day he devotes to a spill that seems beyond his control, and every day it consumes attention in Washington, is another day that he cannot focus as much energy and resources on his own initiatives.

Mr. Obama had hoped to spend his summer creating jobs, passing financial reform, promoting his health care program, getting a Supreme Court justice confirmed and an arms control treaty with Russia ratified, pressing for international sanctions against Iran and jump-starting the troubled Middle East peace process. While not abandoning any of those goals, Mr. Obama now must find ways to continue pushing them while demonstrating to the nation that he is concentrating on a spill he has called “our highest priority.”

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