WASHINGTON — It wasn’t quite making lemonade out of lemons, but President Obama did the best he could yesterday while surveying the ongoing oil-spill disaster in the Gulf.
Seeking to put the sunniest face on the nightmare, Obama enjoyed a lemon-lime snowball on a nearly deserted beach and urged Americans to visit the area.
“That’s another thing we can agree on,” Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, a staunch Republican, said of Obama’s choice of ice flavoring.
They also agreed that Barbour’s Gulf state and others remain open for tourism.
“We just want to make sure that people who have travel plans down to the Gulf area remain mindful of that,” Obama said, “because if people want to know what can they do to help folks down here, one of the best ways to help is to come down here and enjoy the outstanding hospitality.”
“There’s still a lot of opportunity for visitors to come down here,” added the president, who will address the nation on the crisis at 8 p.m. tonight from the Oval Office.
Dining with local officials and business owners at the end of a pier in Gulfport, the president also insisted that the seafood from the Gulf was safe to eat.
“But we need to make sure it stays that way,” he said.
To prove the point, the group ate miniature crab cakes and fried shrimp from a local restaurant.
In his fourth trip to the region in the nearly two months since a damaged oil well began spewing millions of gallons of crude oil into the Gulf, Obama met with Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, who is in charge of cleanup efforts, as well as local officials.
Obama used his two-day trip to Mississippi, Alabama and Florida to assure residents and workers whose livelihoods depend on the Gulf, and said he intends to get BP to reimburse them for credible claims of lost business and income.
He told reporters that his administration had begun preliminary discussions about a framework for getting those payments sorted and distributed in a timely fashion.
The White House wants BP to set up an independently run escrow account to be paid out to those affected. Senate Democrats yesterday called for BP to put $20 billion into the fund.
BP yesterday announced it would boost the amount of leaking oil it could vacuum up, aiming to begin collecting 28,000 barrels a day by the end of the week.
The company hopes to begin collecting 50,000 barrels a day by the end of the month.
“All in all, we are confronting the largest environmental disaster in our history with the largest environmental response and recovery effort in our history,” Obama said, defending what critics have called a slow response to the disaster.