Thanks to Ken at Dirty Water for noting a different take on the Delahunt-Chavez oil deal. Steve Bailey, one of the Globe’s business columnists, writes that he’s no Bush fan, but he still doesn’t like Hugo Chavez "grandstanding" by selling cut-rate oil to Massachusetts residents as a way of "pok[ing] a stick in George Bush’s eye." Bailey goes on to note that a lot of Venezuela’s residents are a lot poorer than the poorest Massachusetts residents, and that Chavez’s own country maybe could use the money more. Ken agrees, saying that the whole thing seems to be "largely a political stunt by Chavez."
You’ll get no claim from me that Chavez isn’t grandstanding, or that he isn’t delighting in embarrassing George Bush by doing more to help low-income Americans pay their heating bills than their own government is doing. I wouldn’t even say that this isn’t a "stunt" by Chavez. But I don’t think any of that proves that Delahunt shouldn’t have cut the deal he did. Regardless of whether poor Venezuelans are poorer than poor Americans, or whether (as Bailey somewhat irrelevantly notes) Venezuela’s infrastructure is in bad shape, the fact remains that there are a lot of people who live in this state who are looking at a very, very cold winter without help. And there’s nothing Bill Delahunt or, really, any other American can do to make Chavez run his own country better. Delahunt is right: his job is to serve his constituents, and it seems to me that that’s what he did by, essentially, taking advantage of bad blood between a President with no interest in helping poor Americans and an ambitious Bush-hating foreign leader who is, as Bailey says, "trying to establish himself as a player in Latin America." Good for Delahunt for being clever enough to leverage that bad blood into a good deal for his constituents who can’t afford to heat their homes. Besides, as I said before, Chavez may not be the most admirable head of a major oil-producing country, but he surely isn’t the least..
