WASHINGTON — The oil-soaked feathers were flying between the White House and Sarah Palin yesterday after the former Alaska governor suggested President Obama’s response to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill was influenced by campaign donations from BP and other big oil interests.
Palin chided the media for not doing enough to examine “if there’s any connection there to President Obama taking so doggone long to get in there, to dive in there, and grasp the complexity and the potential tragedy that we are seeing here in the Gulf of Mexico.”
“I don’t know why the question isn’t asked by the mainstream media and by others if there is any connection with the contributions made to President Obama,” she told “Fox News Sunday.”
White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said, “Sarah Palin was involved in that [2008] election, but I don’t think apparently was paying a whole lot of attention.
“My suggestion to Sarah Palin would be to get slightly more informed as to what’s going on in and around oil drilling in this country,” he told CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
Obama was the top recipient of campaign cash from BP in the 2008 cycle, getting $71,000.
“I’m almost sure that the oil companies don’t consider the Obama administration a huge ally,” Gibbs said. “We proposed a windfall-profits tax when they jacked their oil prices up to charge more for gasoline.”
Palin said she remained a “big supporter of offshore drilling.”