White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Washington’s New Dance Craze — the Perplexity Quickstep

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After more than six months of vilifying, ridiculing and laughing out loud at President Trump, Washington is getting down to realizing that he is the president — and he will not be gone, by some miracle, in the morning.

Ergo it is time for companies, lobbyists and Congress to find a mechanism to work with Trump or around him. It might be described as a dance: the perplexity quickstep. Fleet feet are essential.

Business is treading with increasing alarm and tentativeness. Lobbyists are seeking White House sources for steps guidance. And Congress is tripping over new choreography.

A lot of business leaders thought that Trump, himself a businessman, would see government from the Oval Office as though he were still sitting in the corner office. They believed he would seek the best path forward, going for the main chance and strategizing how to get there. Instead, the business community — from the chairmen of some of the largest companies, with whom I have spoken, to those of small- and medium-size companies — is flummoxed, reviling Trump in private and seeking advice from a variety of Washington gurus on what to do going forward.

Business people, who think they understand cause and effect, cannot find a pattern that suggests the president has any understanding of that relationship. Business hankers for certainty, Trump for adulation. Business worries about the bottom line, Trump about the television commentariat. Business people who want to get a point of view across to the president are trying to get on television — particularly on the morning shows on Fox.

The trade associations, among the most effective lobbies in Washington, are working under the old rules while trying to learn the new dance steps. So they continue to “applaud” Trump appointments and to “congratulate” administration policy. Business and its lobbyists truly hope for lower corporate taxes and for loosening of regulations but they worry about the future of trade and trade agreements — and the concept that America can pull back all its overseas commitments. “America First” is a harbinger of bad things to come for global companies.

Many CEOs, including Elon Musk of Tesla, Tim Cook of Apple and some other bold Silicon Valley C-suiters, have criticized Trump and quit his advisory committees. This has earned them public plaudits, but in doing so they have reduced their ability to affect things. Many others ask, “With Trump, isn’t it better to be on the inside, as close to the president as possible?” Trump is said to believe the last person with whom he spoke.

In Washington’s new dance, the hope is that when the music stops, you are the one standing next to him. You cannot do this if you have taken off to California in high dudgeon.

Many corporations are in the awkward position of needing good relationships with the White House because they are involved in government contracting — and most large corporations are, even as they like to denounce government. Less government, more contracts is the dichotomy of the business-government relationship.

So many corporations with interests in Washington are learning the perplexity quickstep: two quick steps to the right, two quick steps to the left, and circle to the rear. Dance near Trump and he might heap praise on you. Dance far from him and he might come after you for manufacturing overseas. Like his own party and the press, business waits for the new choreography which often arrives by Twitter in the early morning.

This was a week to marvel at the perplexity quickstep: Trump decided on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Program, or DACA, putting the fate of nearly 800,000 young undocumented immigrants in lawmakers’ hands before undermining the whole effort by tweeting that if Congress did not act in six months, he would insert himself back into the process. Then he danced the GOP right off the floor and cut a deal with the House and Senate Democratic leaders, Nancy Pelosi of California and Chuck Schumer of New York. Dizzying.

 

Photo: President Donald J. Trump, First Lady Melania Trump, Vice President Michael R. Pence, and Second Lady Karen Pence, dance with service members at the Salute to Our Armed Services Ball at the National Building Museum, Washington, D.C., Jan. 20, 2017. The event, one of three official balls held in celebration of the 58th Presidential Inauguration, paid tribute to members of all branches of the armed forces of the United States, as well as first responders and emergency personnel. (DoD photo by U.S. Army Sgt. Kalie Jones)

Obama on Oil’s Slippery Slope

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Way back in the 1970s, the old Mobil Oil Company paid $212 million for an oil shale lease in Colorado. The company did not produce a single barrel of oil from that lease. After leasing the land, Mobil shied away from developing the resource because of substantial environmental problems, involving water and degradation of the high desert.

Traditionally, oil companies have taken leases that they have had to abandon either because the resource was not as substantial as they had hoped, or because the economics had changed or as in Colorado, other impediments appear.

Also, there are physical limitations on where the oil companies can look for oil. And sometimes the judgment of their geologists is just wrong. Even in this age of seismic sophistication, there are dry holes.

A modern deep-sea oil rig is nearly as complex and sophisticated as a refinery. Every off shore rig (there are a little over 400 of them around the world) is working flat out; sometimes in the service of international oil companies, and sometimes in the service of state-owned oil companies, which control a majority of the world’s resources.

When it comes to offshore drilling, the oil industry feels that there would be a better chance of finding reserves in new leases rather than old leases, which they acquired defensively at a different time.

To the Democrats, this is evidence of oil company ineptitude and greed. To the oil companies, it is a situation reminiscent of the David Mamet play “Glengarry, Glen Ross,” where the real estate salesmen are denied the best prospects in order to shift lousy inventory.

The best oil-drilling prospects are in the eastern Gulf of Mexico and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). Not only do these areas have the best expectation of good reserves, but there is already a sophisticated infrastructure in place in the Gulf and Alaska. No such infrastructure exists on the Atlantic Coast or the West Coast north of Santa Barbara. Infrastructure is important because it reduces cost, and especially because it speeds the time it would take to bring new oil to market.

The drilling controversy has been a gift to the Republican Party because it enables John McCain to go after Barack Obama on an issue that people understand: the price of gasoline. Seventy percent of Americans, according to the polls, favor drilling offshore now. Yet Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the House, refuses to allow an up or down vote on this simple issue. She wants a vote to be part of a larger energy and environment bill.

Pelosi is handing the best issue yet to John McCain. The public cannot understand many of the complex problems confronting the country, but it can understand the price of gasoline, even if new drilling will not lower that. It does not matter to the public that it was a Republican president, George H.W. Bush, who originally blocked drilling in the Outer Continental Shelf, or that John McCain was a supporter of not drilling there and still opposes drilling in ANWR.

The Democrats have boxed in their presumptive presidential nominee. Unless Pelosi softens her position, the issue is going to dog Obama through to the election. Even if he comes out in favor of drilling, he is vulnerable to McCain’s attacks if he is at odds with the speaker of the House.

Democratic antipathy to Big Oil goes back many decades. To many Democrats, the dislike of Big Oil is visceral. They have convinced themselves that somehow the oil companies represent a malign international conspiracy to block alternative energy sources and to run up prices. The left wing of the party has never been able to separate the oil industry from John D. Rockefeller and his kerosene cartel.

For their part, supporters of more drilling onshore and offshore are overselling what can be expected in the way of new supplies. The United States has about 2.5 percent of the world’s oil reserves and consumes about 25 percent of the world’s oil. Nothing can be done about the former, so something will have to be done about the latter. Right in the front of doing something about the latter are–surprise, surprise–the oil companies. British Petroleum has enormous investments in alternative energy, including hydrogen. And Chevron, as it likes to remind us, is the largest geothermal producer in the United States.

The oil companies are not perfect, but they are quite good at what they do: getting oil out of the ground and to your local gas station.