Obama's wrong, the oil spill is not like 9/11

There is an old adage in British politics that whoever mentions the Nazis first in a debate automatically loses. The thinking goes that the comparison rarely, if ever, stacks up and as a result anyone attempting to draw parallels between their opponent's position and that of the Nazis invariably weakens their own argument. Of course, this does not apply if you are debating with the BNP, but you get the idea.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, something similar has happened in the US with regards to 9/11. Drawing similarities between any event and the attacks on Manhattan and the Pentagon will look insensitive at best and outright offensive at worst.

President Obama's attempts over the weekend to link the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and 9/11 were very much in the former category, but they are still threatening to backfire on him.

As usual, those in the media attempting to whip up a storm over his comments appear not to have actually read what the president said. He did not liken the impact of the oil spill with that of the 9/11 attacks themselves, nor did he equate the number of deaths inflicted by the two tragedies or the historic global repercussions of the events.

What he quite deliberately said is that there were similarities in terms of the impact of the two events on policy and US public opinion. "In the same way that our view of our vulnerabilities and our foreign policy was shaped profoundly by 9/11," Obama told the Politico web site, "I think this disaster is going to shape how we think about the environment and energy for many years to come."

The problem is that the comparison is still off. Obama hopes that the oil spill will have a similar effect on domestic energy policy to that which 9/11 had on US foreign policy. But as long as the Republicans continue to oppose even the most modest attempts to clip the wings of Big Oil, Obama will never be able to engineer a similarly dramatic policy shift.

In the wake of 9/11 Congress gave the Bush administration carte blanche to rewrite US foreign policy. The Patriot Act was passed and wars were waged with barely a whimper of protest from opposition Democrats (there were one or two exceptions, Obama among them). Liberal commentators and campaigners may have protested over Neo-Con policies on rendition and torture and prisoner detention, but Bush faced virtually no political, legislative or public opinion barriers as he pursued his doctrine of pre-emptive aggression.

The scenario is quite different for Obama as he attempts to harness the public anger over the oil spill and instigate a tipping point in US environmental and energy policy.

The simple fact is that the Republicans and indeed some rogue Democrats do not see it as a matter of patriotic duty to support the president's agenda as he battles with a national crisis – quite the opposite, in fact.

For example, last week 47 senators, including three Democrats, voted to strip the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) of the right to regulate carbon emissions. They may have lost the vote, but as oil began to wash up on the shores of the Gulf, 47 elected representatives felt it was in their constituents' interests to oppose an agency trying to limit US reliance on oil. Moreover, assuming the most recent polls are accurate, there is a real chance that by November the Republicans will have the Congressional majority needed to win such a vote should it be repeated.

Many senators said they opposed the EPA's regulation of carbon emissions because it was the job of Congress to deliver greenhouse gas regulations. But a year after the House of Representatives passed a climate change bill that would have done just that, we are still a long way from seeing such legislation adopted.