Blowout puts Salazar on hot seat, in spotlight

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, a son of rural Colorado's San Luis Valley, is very much on the hot seat and in the spotlight as he deals with the Gulf of Mexico oil blowout (which is a rural disaster, Dee Davis reminds us in the Daily Yonder) and the Minerals Management Service that probably helped cause it. Today he is the main subject of major stories in two national newspapers, the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times.

John Broder and Gardiner Harris note in the NYT that President Obama recently gave Salazar "a powerful new deputy, Michael R. Bromwich, a veteran investigator and former prosecutor, to supervise the remaking of the minerals service" even though "Salazar had appointed two aides to do the same job just a month before, and that Mr. Bromwich’s new assignment essentially reversed not only that move but also perhaps Mr. Salazar’s entire overhaul plan for the minerals service," which was tarred by corruption in the Bush administration.

The story notes that on May 27, Obama "scolded Mr. Salazar for his cowboy rhetoric," about keeping the federal boot on BP's neck, "and acknowledged his impatience with the pace of change at the minerals service." Since then, Salazar "has become noticeably less visible" than other memnbers of the administration's "Green team," Energy Secretary Steven Chu, Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lisa Jackson and Obama environmental adviser Carol Browner, who headed EPA under Bill Clinton. Salazar's former colleagues in the Senate defended him. (Read more)

Jim Tankersley of the Tribune Co. Washington Bureau writes in the LAT that Salazar and others in the team "must find ways to stop the leak, clean up millions of gallons of crude and take steps to reassure the public it won't happen again. But the means it has chosen, a six-month moratorium on deep-water drilling, risks the fiscal health of the offshore oil industry that sustains much of the Gulf Coast economy. It is in some ways typical territory for Salazar. As Colorado's attorney general, a U.S. senator and now Interior secretary, Salazar has sought out the sort of compromises that rarely leave anyone completely happy." (Read more)