I recently wrote in my Des Moines Register blog that the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in April is an environmental, economic, but it is also a very political accident. I argued that when then explosion ripped apart the Deepwater Horizon oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico it also ripped apart the Republican mantra “Drill, baby, drill.”

One thousand barrels a day are spilling from a broken pipeline. There is a frantic move to stem the hemorrhaging of oil and in a worst-case scenario it could take one or two months to drill a side well into this disaster.

Remember that John McCain, Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich screamed “Drill, Baby, Drill” to counter candidate Barak Obama’s more cautious and traditional approach to offshore oil drilling in U.S. waters.

That produced a lot of pressure on Obama and he finally caved to the call for urgent oil production increases that seemed to match public opinion.

Depending on how bad the coastal impact of the Deepwater Horizon spill is offshore drilling may have suffered a setback. If we see fouled and closed beaches, pleasure craft coated in goo, threatened marine life including fishing, shrimp, shellfish, and those tragic images of birds coated in oil being helped coastal states will certainly push back hard against more offshore drilling.

Regardless of how this accident turns out between 2001 and 2007 there were 1,400 accidents on offshore drilling platforms, according to a report by the U.S. Minerals and Management Service. That’s a statistic we had not heard until this event.

Moreover, this accident may cost insurers and reinsurers $1.6 billion dollars according to latest estimates.

Once a powerful message, offshore drilling will be off the political table fro years. That’s a blow to the Republican message of energy independence through more drilling. Of course it is also going to put a dent in Obama’s offshore drilling plan, which will now undergo an even more thorough scrutiny. It continuously amazes me how powerless presidents really are in, the face of the unexpected. There is nothing like a huge hurricane (Katrina) to derail the image of a leaders, Bush. Or how about a couple of powerful earthquakes in Haiti and Chile to redirect the U.S. government’s attention. Let’s not even mention what an unpronounceable volcano in Iceland can do.

This oil platform disaster will also derail the soft and reassuring ad run by the petroleum and energy industry where an actress tells us how wonderful the new technology for deep water drilling is for oil production, jobs creation and tax revenue. That ad campaign will need to go out the window. It’s airy optimism and claims that new oil technologies are safe and clean have just been brilliantly disproven and discredited. What has been missing from our policy conversation has been the importance of predicting what could happen in the future.

Actually, with offshore oil that was done and California decided after it’s major offshore spill that they would not authorize more because the risk and damage was too high. Large parts of the offshore east coast of the United States were also put off limits because, again, the risk management projections and predictions made the long-term risks to beaches and the ecosystem much too high. Parts of Florida were also set aside for no drilling for the same reasons even by a Republican governor who’s brother was president (Jeb Bush).

Now, we have compelling and truly staggering evidence that using good science and engineering to project forward and enact policy based on that science is wise. The Deepwater Horizon spill is projected to cause untold damage to wetlands, marshes, ocean marine life, endangered whales, tourism, beaches and other valuable assets.

My urgent message to our political and policy leaders is this – never ignore a well-designed cautionary prediction when enacting public policies.

Steffen Schmidt is a professor of political science and chief political correspondent for www.insideriowa.com