Obama Tries to Boost Tourism to Gulf Coast After Spill With Weekend Trip

President Barack Obama and his family encouraged tourists to visit the Gulf Coast region with a weekend trip to Florida that included a porpoise sighting and a swim in coastal waters as the administration tried to boost the area’s economy in the aftermath of the BP Plc oil spill.

As BP moves closer to completing a relief well to permanently kill the damaged Macondo well, which had gushed an estimated 4.9 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico before it was sealed last month, the Obama administration is shifting to the next phase of its response to the disaster: cleaning up the remaining oil, restoring parts of the coastline and bolstering an economy that largely relies on tourism.

The president, first lady and their youngest daughter Sasha spotted a porpoise in St. Andrews Bay during a boat ride yesterday in rainy weather, and the commander-in-chief even took his turn at the helm of the converted 50-foot Navy Launch. To signal the waters are safe for tourists, he and Sasha went for a swim Aug. 14 in the bay, which leads into the Gulf.

Yet BP and government officials faced another setback in their efforts to plug the gusher. Underscoring the difficulties that they’ve encountered since the April 20 explosion aboard the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig 40 miles (64 kilometers) off the Louisiana coast that killed 11 people, the London-based company said yesterday it is analyzing possible risks to the bottom-kill procedure aimed at permanently plugging the gusher before it can resume operations.

Full Recovery

After meeting Aug. 14 with local officials and small business owners in Panama City, Obama promised Gulf Coast residents that even though oil has stopped flowing, he’d make sure the region is “fully recovered.”

“The well is capped, oil is no longer flowing into the Gulf,” Obama said. “It has not been flowing for a month. And I’m here to tell you that our job is not finished, and we are not going anywhere until it is.”

Encouraging Americans to visit the area, the president also said the “beaches all along the Gulf Coast are clean, safe, and open for business.” He pledged to make sure the region’s seafood was safe to eat and he promised to expedite the claims process.

The spill may cost the region 17,000 jobs and about $1.2 billion in lost economic growth by the end of the year, Moody’s Analytics said last month. A separate analysis by Oxford Economics released by the U.S. Travel Association said the impact on tourism may cost the coastal economy $22.7 billion over three years.

Encouraging Tourism

President Obama and first lady Michelle Obama, in speeches and on separate trips to the Gulf Coast, have tried to encourage tourism there, noting that many of the beaches are without oil and the restaurants and hotels are all functioning. Gulf seafood was served at the White House at a recent barbecue.

Local officials and businesses say they hope the first family’s trip to Panama City Beach this weekend will convince people to visit the region.

“Even the president is coming to the sunshine state this weekend,” Florida’s Republican governor Charlie Crist, who was with Obama, said in an Aug. 11 interview on CNN. “We’re glad he’s coming and it’ll be a great advertisement for the sunshine state.”

The economic losses estimated by the U.S. Travel Association exceed the $20 billion BP has agreed to put into an escrow account to pay spill victims. Tourism generated $94 billion in revenue in 2008 for Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida, the group’s president Roger Dow said in testimony before Congress last month.

Environmental Disaster

The nation’s worst environmental disaster at one point wiped out more than half of BP’s stock value, forced the company to suspend its dividend, halted deep-water drilling in the U.S. and closed as much as 37 percent of the Gulf of Mexico to fishing as the oil spread. BP said Aug. 9 the cost of stopping and cleaning up the spill had risen to $6.1 billion.

After the president’s meeting Aug. 14 at the Coast Guard Station, it was family time with even the first dog, Bo, joining them on the trip. Last night the first family partook in a game of mini-golf, where Sasha scored a hole-in-one at the first hole, much to the delight of her parents.

“That’s how you do it right there,” the president said, smiling. “That was unbelievable.”

The Obamas returned to Washington yesterday and are scheduled to leave this week for a longer vacation in Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts. Republicans have called the first family out of touch for taking vacation at a time when the nation’s unemployment rate is 9.5 percent, and criticism increased earlier this month when Michelle Obama vacationed in Spain with family friends.

Republican Comment

“It’s nice to see the president take the time out of his busy schedule of golf games and campaign fundraisers to clear his conscience and visit Florida for only the second time since the oil spill crisis began,” Republican National Committee spokeswoman Amanda Henneberg said in an e-mailed statement.

By taking the family to Florida, where the unemployment rate in June was 11.4 percent, and in Panama City, where the rate as 9.3 percent, Obama shows he’s still connected to average Americans, said Stuart Rothenberg, publisher of the nonpartisan Rothenberg Political Report in Washington.

“One of the reasons that he was elected was the public concluded that the Bush administration and Republicans had failed after Hurricane Katrina and that government wasn’t helping people,” Rothenberg said. Obama needs to show that “the administration is committed to a full and complete clean- up and that he’s going to get the job done.”