Recognizing the interest in Barack Obama’s speech in Germany today, the McCain campaign came up with a photo-op that would have captured at least some attention — John McCain would hop on a helicopter and give a speech from an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, off the Louisiana coast. The campaign knows how important oil prices are to voters, so McCain assumed he could fool a few of them into thinking coastal drilling would give them relief at the pump.
But just an hour after the photo-op was finalized and the media was alerted, the event was off. The campaign said the weather just wasn’t cooperating. Jonathan Martin noted, “The campaign declined to comment any further about the quick decision to spike the trip other than to cite the weather.”
Truth be told, I hadn’t thought too much about this, other than to notice McCain’s streak of bad luck lately. But it turns out, there are two salient angles to this story.
First, as ThinkProgress noted, the cancellation of the photo-op doesn’t exactly reinforce the talking points about oil rig “safety.”
Ironically, the “weather” of concern is the strengthening Hurricane Dolly, which has been bumped up to a category 2 hurricane (Katrina was rated a category 5) with winds up to 100 miles per hour. Today, Dolly made landfall in Texas.
As the Wonk Room’s Brad Johnson has noted multiple times, McCain and his surrogates have for weeks been peddling the false claim that Hurricane Katrina caused no major oil spills to push for expanded drilling. […]
As McCain makes his push for increased oil production, Louisiana officials are also dealing with a barge collision that caused a spill of an estimated 9,000 barrels of fuel into the Mississippi River, resulting in a 12-mile long oil slick. “Television stations reported the stench of diesel fuel wafting across the French Quarter.”
Which leads to the second point: the weather is actually fine off the Louisiana coast today, and it’s the oil spill that probably prompted the cancellation.
Ben Smith mentioned this morning, “Partly cloudy and calm in New Orleans, where it might have been a nice day to visit a rig.”
But the McCain gang didn’t want to visit the rig if the reporters on hand were going to notice the smell of diesel wafting through the French Quarter.
The Coast Guard closed 29 miles of the Mississippi River at New Orleans after a 600-foot tanker and a barge loaded with fuel oil collided Wednesday, breaking the barge in half.
Nobody was injured, but more than 419,000 gallons of heavy, almost tar-like fuel oil spilled from the barge, forming a slick 12 miles long, said Lt. Cdr. Cheri Ben-Iesau, a Coast Guard spokeswoman. […]
The double-hulled tanker Tintomara was loaded with about 4.2 million gallons of biodiesel and nearly 1.3 million gallons of styrene, but was not leaking, said Michael Wilson, president of ship management company Laurin Maritime (America) Inc. in Houston.
The collision occurred about 1:30 a.m. CDT just upriver from the Crescent City Connection, a pair of bridges between New Orleans’ east and west banks. A smell which many people thought was diesel was noticeable in the French Quarter and parts of New Orleans’ central business district.
Nothing says “drill safely now” like an oil spill that closes 29 miles of the Mississippi River near New Orleans.
Maybe this prompted the McCain campaign’s cancellation more than cloudy weather? Call it a hunch.