"In early April, fresh from announcing his decision to allow drilling in previously protected waters, an upbeat President Obama traveled to a battery factory in North Carolina. The day's topic was the economy, but a concerned questioner rose after the speech to ask about the thinking behind his new drilling decree.

Obama's expansive answer included a revealing aside about his confidence in the safety of offshore operations. "It turns out, by the way, the oil rigs today generally don't cause spills,' the president told the questioner, a man from Charlotte. 'They are technologically very advanced. Even during Katrina, the spills didn't come from the rigs.'"

Michael Leahy and Juliet Eilperin report for the Washington Post October 12, 2010. [2]