Tony Hayward Is My New Hero

I only caught a little bit of Tony Hayward's testimony before Congress today, but I was overfed the "highlights" while listening to the news on the way home tonight.  At first Rep. Joe Barton was my hero for apologizing to Tony Hayward, but then after getting pressured by House Republican Leadership he retracted his apology and went from hero to supreme loser in 0.5 seconds flat.  Way to have some integrity dude, seriously.

While I'm fully aware that it goes against every concept of "open government," I believe that Congressional Committee Hearings should be closed to the press.  At least as far as live video and audio are concerned.  They should still be open to the public and members of the media who wish to take notes.  But broadcasting Committee Hearings live on national TV has done nothing but completely annihilate the purpose of the hearings in the first place.  These hearings took place, and presumably accomplished things, long before the era of radio then TV.  I was completely dumbfounded when I visited the House Chamber for the first time.  There was a Congressman making a speech on the floor, with charts and visual aids.  To an empty room.  The only other people present were about ten tourists and the CSPAN camera.  When you watch CSPAN you assume the Congresspeople are making their speech to a room full of other Congresspeople, but that is almost never the case.  They stand there and talk to an empty room with all the fire and passion and drama you see on TV.  Anywhere else that scene took place people would call the individual certifiably insane.

But so much of what takes place now is playacting and grandstanding.  It clearly isn't to get to the bottom of things, to investigate and render findings.  The Representatives spend more time sharing their own feelings and thoughts than they do questioning the individual before them that its usually not even clear why that person has to be there at all.  Congressional Hearings are now the modern representation of the gallows of yesteryear, where a prominent individual related to the political scandal du jour is paraded before the public and lectured like an insolent child.

A surprising number of Representatives list "business" as their occupation outside of Congress, however that can cover a range of activities, not many being equivalent to CEO of a large, multi-billion dollar, international company.  Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm not sure any members of the House of Representatives have equivalent experience.  That was painfully apparent in today's hearing.  It was not clear at times whether the Representatives asking questions were honestly that clueless, or were just acting for the cameras.

But did they truly expect the CEO of a company with thousands of employees and operations on every continent of the globe to be privy to e-mails between engineers working on one specific project?  When Hayward attempted to explain by telling a Congressman that BP drills over 100 wells a year he was interrupted for a smart-ass remark by the Congressman stating that was exactly what was bothering him rather than acknowledging that the CEO is not involved in the engineering details of each and every project his company undertakes, particularly when he is not an engineer and they manage over 100 such projects annually.

Hayward was all but called a liar when he declined to answer technical questions about the well's engineering.  His reasoning was that he was not qualified to comment on those matters and he needed to see the conclusions of the ongoing investigations before he could comment.  He kept his composure when he was chastised for not having those investigations completed yet, after two months, even though the vast majority of HIS time has been in damage control and trying to figure out how to mitigate the current crisis--the leak itself.  This from a body that sometimes takes YEARS to complete investigations and studies on the most mundane and ridiculous of matters.  Rather than recognize the need for thoroughness in the investigations, they scoffed at the speed of their work and implied Hayward should be current on all the details and data before the work is completed, despite his lack of qualifications in independently interpreting such data.

Finally, they called Hayward a coward, in so many words, for failing to answer many questions posed to him.  They each tried to ask the same questions over and over, in different words, with varying degrees of anger and frustration.  Because Lord knows when a Congressman is confronted with a scandal they just come right on out and answer straight up and honest, giving the public 100% of the information they deserve.  Why should he answer questions for which he does not know the answer?  And why should he answer questions which could come back to bite him in the ass if criminal charges are filed, which the Administration has already said they are planning to file?  Get real people.  How many times did Reagan or Clinton "not recall" certain things when they were compelled to testify?

Still, Hayward kept his composure and stayed perfectly clam--something I would have never been able to do.  Not while being lectured like a child by that bunch of hypocrites.  He deserved the apology Rep. Barton gave him and he deserves another after the treatment he received today.  As I said in the previous post on this subject, BP is 100% at fault for this disaster, but Tony Hayward is NOT BP.  He is the CEO, which means he manages the company as a whole, from 10,000 feet.  He is not involved in the day-to-day operations, he is not involved in engineering decisions or planning, or rig testing, or disaster planning--none of that.  Nor should he be!  That is not the CEO's job.  But as the CEO he is the public face of the company, so today he had to endure the public shaming by Congress that is now required by our culture whenever something goes wrong, no matter what it is.  And he endured it with grace and class and with complete professionalism.  So, now he's my hero.  Let's stop dissecting his every word, facial expression and breath and let the man go back to work.  He paid his dues.  Do they not realize that no matter what he's done up to this point, or will ever do in the future, his name will forever be associated with this spill and his lasting legacy in the history books one of complete and utter failure.  All for something that is not his fault.

Nothing new was learned today.  Nothing in that hearing got us any closer to having the leak capped, the mess cleaned up or to preventing a future disaster like this one.  To me, Congress made one big ass of itself and Hayward came out looking like the sympathetic character, the victim.  Everyone has jumped in the pit to maul Hayward, and this debacle will certainly kill him professionally, but if they aren't careful they will all come out bloody and no one will escape unscathed.