Barton's Blunder
Democrats hope to make Joe Barton really sorry.
Also in Slate, Michael Newman describes BP chief Tony Hayward's dodgy testimony.
By the end of the day David Plouffe, Obama's campaign manager in 2008, had sent an e-mail to millions of Obama's supporters asking them to sign an "open letter" that would send a message to Barton to show "him and other Republicans that they weren't elected to defend big oil." Even if people sign on to the effort, it's not a letter that Plouffe will ever send. The reality is there's not a single thing about Joe Barton's behavior they'd like to change.
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Correction, June 18, 2010: This article originally misquoted Carl-Henric Svanberg as calling residents of the Gulf "little people." (Return to the corrected sentence.)
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John Dickerson is Slate's chief political correspondent and author of On Her Trail. He can be reached at slatepolitics@gmail.com. Read his series on the presidency and his series on risk. Follow him on Twitter.
Photograph of Rep. Joe Barton by Win McNamee/Getty Images.