Yeh, but it won't keep him from taking the blame if they fail, or the credit if they succeed. In the real world, "fair" doesn't have anything to do with it. In politics, war, business, and even life itself; personal competence plays an equal role to pure luck, and moral principle plays little part at all. Men do not often agree, and the universe doesn't give a shit, who's right or wrong. Just hitting the green may require practice and talent; but a hole in one is always an act of God.

If you are really interested in knowing who is responsible for the oil spill, there is no shortage of those who can be made ready to take the fall.

The onsite engineers for allowing the accident to occur...
BP for failing to anticipate and prepare for its consequences...
The government for not regulating the industry properly...
The industry itself for its technical arrogance and hubris...
The nation for putting itself in the position to need to take these risks...
The civilization for becoming overly dependent on petroleum....

I could go on, but I think you see the point I'm trying to make.

People compare Obama to Bush/Katrina in this incident, but his role is probably more like Carter's in the Iranian Hostage crisis: he had nothing to do with it happening, and there's little he can do about stopping it. But depending on his luck alone, he will either emerge as a hero or a failure. Just think of what would have happened if Carter's hostage rescue mission had succeeded, or those SEAL snipers had missed their pirate targets. The true skill of a leader depends a lot less on how he handles a crisis than how he manages to avoid it, but there's a price to be paid for excess caution, too.

Or to put it another way, it's good to be King, but it can be a bitch, too, if things don't work out the way you expect. In my opinion, there's only been one American President in my lifetime I can think of who through no fault of his own allowed a situation to spiral out of control, but then immediately did the wrong thing, thereby guaranteeing it would only happen again and again and continue to plague us to this day, and still somehow managed to escape the verdict of history for that error. Like I said, luck plays a huge role, not only in events, but in how people perceive them.