Mrs. McMahon on Offshore Drilling for Oil.

The Gulf of Mexico oil spill lends itself to much fist-shaking and tub-thumping. This prompted me to ask the Linda McMahon campaign for the endorsed Republican Senate candidate’s notion of the way forward on exploration of oil.  In this era of boilerplate, disputatious exchanges, I was surprised to receive this nuanced reply from the McMahon campaign’s spokesman, Ed Patru:

Linda does not agree that the way forward is a moratorium on offshore drilling. That reaction would cost thousands of jobs, and it further devastate economies in the Gulf states that are already struggling. And obviously it would necessitate increased dependence on foreign oil.

She believes implementation of the stronger safety requirements issued by Dept of Interior would be a good place to start – immediate and more frequent safety inspections, and recertification of the equipment on these rigs. Obviously those new regs address specifically the blowout prevention devices.

The clean-up right now needs to be the top-priority, and she thinks we ought to be using all available resources – foreign and domestic – in tacking this issue. Clearly there is some expertise that exists on this issue in countries like Holland, for example, and she’s not sure why we didn’t avail ourselves of those offers earlier. Either the administration didn’t grasp the scale of the problem, or it didn’t want to deal with the political implications of accepting help.

We didn’t pull the plug on the space program after the shuttle disasters. She thinks it’s important that we move forward cautiously and ensure that what happened with BP never happens again.