So just how clever is Barack Obama, eh?

There we were, puzzling over the waves of factitious “kick ass” outrage pouring from the Oval Office, when suddenly everything became clear: it was all a cunning ruse to trick redneck America into backing green energy.

“Our continued dependence on fossil fuels will jeopardise our national security”, intoned the President. “It will smother our planet… put our economy and our environment at risk. We cannot delay any longer, and that is why I am asking for your help…”.

Slick (pun intended) or what?

At a stroke, a whole slew of liberal initiatives on energy and climate which had been widely derided by an increasingly confident Republican right were repackaged as pure patriotism: all wrapped up in the Stars and Stripes.

It’s been tried before, of course: George Bush famously urged America to overcome its oil addiction in the name of energy security. But that was somehow less impressive, coming after he’d tried and largely failed to secure abundant easy oil by force majeure in Iraq. Besides, you never quite believed a Texan steeped in gasoline really had his heart in all that greenery in the first place. Especially not with Dick ‘Halliburton’ Cheney just that heartbeat away…

With Barack, though, it’s a bit more polished. First comes the fury at the easy target – and let’s face it, they don’t come much easier than that pantomine Hollywood villain, the ‘toffee-nosed’ Brit. It’s sustained just long enough for the slick to hit the sand: a direct assault on homeland security, on primetime Fox News.

Only then, with the country crying out for action and the Brits duly whipped, does Operator Obama slide the green stuff into the mix...

OK, so the banality of day to day politics, especially when lurching from crisis to crisis, is rarely as Machiavellian as I’ve just described. But those of us fearing that the once super-cool President was losing it, big time, might take some comfort from the latest developments.

And at the very least, you’d have to agree that the sheen of oil on the Louisiana beaches could yet turn out to have one hell of a silver lining.