“There’s no one who wants this over more than I do,” the beleaguered oilman told the “Today Show” on Sunday. “You know, I’d like my life back.”

Watch here:

Just like that, anyone who — after weeks of watching BP dissemble, block photographers from the spill and launch an endless succession of failed remedies with dopey names — didn’t already want to aim a junk shot at Hayward must have lost whatever sympathy they had for him. Eleven oil workers were killed in the explosion that sank BP’s rig; the Gulf of Mexico may be permanently ruined; thousands of fishers and shrimpers have lost their livelihood; birds, fish and turtles are dying by the score; some people are starting to wonder if nuking the Deepwater Horizon might be the best way to stop it. And poor Hayward wants his life back.

Then again, can you blame him? That life he wants back is pretty cushy. BP paid Hayward $6 million last year — a 41 percent raise over the year before, even though the company’s profits fell 45 percent.

Every penny of which he must feel he earned. After all, despite a safety record far worse than any of its major competitors, BP somehow pulled off a cynical greenwashing ad campaign, marketing itself as environmentally friendly and declaring itself “beyond petroleum.” So what if it turned out the only thing green about BP was its flowery logo? Hayward, CEO since 2007, had steered the company into a new, Orwellian branding strategy, where merely saying it was taking precautions against accidents and spills was enough.

That magical thinking apparently carried over into the way he processed the spill. Well after scientists had started saying the Deepwater Horizon explosion was already the worst environmental disaster in the nation’s history, Hayward tried to minimize the whole thing. The spill wouldn’t be so bad, he declared, because the Gulf is a “very big ocean.” In fact, it would likely turn out to be a “very, very modest” disaster. (Besides, haven’t you seen our logo? Of course we’re not responsible for the biggest oil spill the U.S. has ever seen!)

Still, it’s one thing to lie about how much oil your company is dumping, and it’s another thing altogether to make yourself seem like the pitiful protagonist of the whole story. And sure enough, by the end of the week, BP’s new PR armada had realized Hayward was making things worse.

So a lengthy apology of sorts was placed (in the sympathetic nest of the Wall Street Journal’s Op-Ed page), and the CEO presumably learned to stop whining.

Maybe now, instead of worrying about what Hayward is going to say next, BP can get back to worrying about how to stop the spill and clean up its mess. Which is what really matters — not poor Hayward’s disrupted routine. After all, Tony, we’d all like our lives back. Unfortunately, thanks to BP, this disaster shows no sign of going away anytime soon.

A new poll out Friday by Research 2000 for the Daily Kos showed Halter leading, 49-45 — slightly up from last week’s result. Among people who voted for Morrison who plan to turn out again, Halter led by 10 points.

Lincoln’s campaign has been pushing harder and harder on the idea that Halter is the candidate of outside interests, not Arkansans, playing up his support from MoveOn.org and big labor unions (which, though they have members in Arkansas, aren’t wildly popular there).

Take a look at her new ad Friday, featuring Bill Clinton bashing labor:

Lincoln aides sent out a memo late Thursday, reminding reporters that MoveOn had helped raise nearly 60 percent of the money Halter has taken in since jumping into the race. “Bill Halter has shown that he is in the pocket of liberal groups outside Arkansas who are trying to make an example out of Sen. Lincoln,” Lincoln spokeswoman Katie Laning Niebaum wrote.

Meanwhile, the Halter campaign — sounding increasingly confident lately — plans to send him out most of this weekend on an RV tour of the state, repeating a similar tour he did just before the May 18 vote. “This poll shows that Arkansans want change,” Halter campaign manager Carol Butler said in an e-mail responding to the Kos survey. Early voting started earlier in the week, and Halter aides said they were targeting their supporters to get them to the polls ahead of time if possible. “This race is very close, and I urge all of our supporters to take their friends and family to go vote. They have three days left to vote, two candidates but only one choice for change.”

The only reason anyone’s talking about this stuff now, in fact, is because Sestak managed to knock off the Obama administration’s preferred candidate, party-switching incumbent Arlen Specter. Had Sestak lost, the fact that Bill Clinton floated the possibility of a job last summer in a failed attempt to clear the field for Specter would — maybe — merit a line in Sestak’s Wikipedia page. But as soon as he won, Republicans seized on the offer as a chance to embarrass the White House, which had campaigned on promises of transparency and ethics. (Of course, Obama never promised that “ending business as usual” would mean an end to the very basic concept of giving politicians something they want in order to sweeten a deal to make them do something they don’t want to do, but never mind that.)

When previous administrations used the same tactic, no one ever got upset. Take Karl Rove, for example. Eight years ago, Rove and then-Vice President Dick Cheney convinced Tim Pawlenty (at the time serving as Minnesota House majority leader) not to run in a GOP primary for the Senate against Norm Coleman. Why didn’t anyone accuse Rove of shady deals then? At least in part because it actually worked — Pawlenty stayed out. But it would be fairly naïve to assume Cheney and Rove made no promises at all in exchange. Rove, though, didn’t let that stop him from blustering recently that Sestak is either a liar or protecting a felon.

Unlike the early days of the George W. Bush administration, though, when President Obama’s aides give orders to Democrats around the country, they don’t necessarily seem to listen. In Pennsylvania, they couldn’t keep Sestak out (though it wasn’t entirely clear that, in June 2009, anyone in the White House thought Sestak posed a serious threat). In Arkansas, Lieutenant Gov. Bill Halter ignored the establishment’s preference to let Sen. Blanche Lincoln slide without a challenge. In Colorado, Romanoff wouldn’t even take a job he’d already applied for instead of challenging Sen. Michael Bennet. The administration also failed to lure their preferred candidates into races in Illinois, North Carolina and Florida — not to mention Delaware, where Vice President Biden’s own son decided not to run for the Senate — and had no luck trying to muscle New York Gov. David Paterson out. (The New York Times took care of that for them, it turned out.)

So the disclosures this week have Democrats grumbling (though still only under condition of anonymity) about a political operation that seems to have fallen asleep since the 2008 campaign. “What became news was that they let [the job offers] become news,” says one Democratic strategist who has worked with a campaign the White House tried — and failed — to quash. “This is not new, this is not news, there is nothing untoward or unusual. Reading about it on the front pages is the mistake that happened.” Another strategist admits there’s a “competence argument” that’s more compelling than any of the legalistic ones the GOP is pushing. (The White House didn’t immediately respond to a question about the administration’s political operation.)

Which is why the Republican protests might, in the end, be smarter than they look. It’s a tough sell to convince anyone except overeager cable bookers that there’s any real criminal controversy here. It’s far easier to turn the whole mess into yet another embarrassing problem for the administration — especially with Rod Blagojevich about to go on trial for corruption charges stemming from his own efforts to sell Obama’s old Senate seat. This isn’t about sending anyone to jail. It’s more about scoring political points. Unfortunately for the White House, their bumbling attempts last summer to go about the day-to-day business of politics made it easy for the GOP to turn things around on them now.

But Crist had been a patron of Greer’s, taking advantage of his post as governor to install him as chairman of the state party. Crist pushed hard for Greer in 2007, after Greer had raised money for Crist’s gubernatorial campaign the year before.

Worse, the documents filed in the case by authorities make clear that Crist’s campaign was aware that Greer had the state party bill them $30,000 for polling by Victory Strategies — which the campaign never ordered, and never paid. The party had already paid Greer’s firm for the poll. So the state party’s chief financial officer, Richard Swarttz, “sought repayment on several occasions from the Crist campaign for the [Victory Strategies] poll,” an affidavit filed by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement says. The Crist campaign “recall this bill being forwarded to them, but they denied payment for it because they did not know anything about a poll done by the [state party] for the campaign.”

Which means, potentially, Crist’s aides could have stumbled onto evidence of the scheme before authorities did. And that could mean the arrest becomes an issue in the Senate race this fall. Crist’s campaign did not immediately return a call for comment on the affidavit Wednesday.

Crist himself, speaking to reporters in Florida, said the whole thing caught him off guard. “It’s surprising,” he said. “Sometimes you’re disappointed by people.” He also said he didn’t feel complicit.

Democrats, though, were already trying to stick the whole mess on Crist. “Governor Crist is trying to walk away from his Republican past, but that past will forever haunt him, especially on days like today,” Rep. Kendrick Meek, who’s running against Crist in a three-way Senate race with Republican Marco Rubio, said in a statement. “The governor expects a free pass and will claim ignorance and innocence, but those statements will not stand.”

The fate Griffith met Tuesday night — defeated handily, with main rival Mo Brooks winning more than 50 percent even with a third candidate on the ballot — mirrored what had already happened to Sen. Arlen Specter among Pennsylvania Democrats. Specter switched parties last April, at a moment that seemed as good for Democrats as Griffith’s leap seemed bad. Both candidates admitted part of the reason they jumped was to help themselves win reelection, but Specter was more nakedly calculating; he wasn’t ready, he said, to let Pennsylvania’s conservative GOP primary voters have the final say on whether he would continue to represent the state in the Senate. The conventional wisdom then was that Republican Pat Toomey would have rolled right over Specter in a GOP primary, but that Specter would probably be able to beat him in the general election.

Democrats in the state, though, weren’t as easily persuaded. Rep. Joe Sestak resisted establishment efforts to muscle him out of the race (including, yes, by dangling the prospect of some kind of job) and perservered even though longtime donors were advised by power players in the state that they shouldn’t give his campaign any money. And lo and behold, on a rainy primary day, Specter lost.

Of course, northern Alabama Republicans don’t have that much in common with union activists, liberals and the other die-hard Pennsylvania Democrats who turned out there last month. But what they both do seem to share is an unwillingness to go along with establishment marching orders without question. So far this year, that’s been the overwhelming trend — just ask Charlie Crist or Trey Grayson, chased out or defeated by their party base despite backing from national Republicans, or Sen. Bob Bennett, beaten soundly in Utah’s GOP convention before the primary even came along.

So Griffith’s loss Tuesday might be troubling for both parties. For Republicans, of course, it’s just the latest sign that the Tea Party folks the GOP has been depending on for energy in 2010 might spin farther and farther out of the party establishment’s sphere of influence. (And at some point, if your ground troops refuse to take any orders at all, are you really better off having them on your side?)

But for Democrats, who have been cheering Brooks on in hopes of avenging Griffith’s betrayal, there’s a hidden downside, too. Optimistic strategists in Washington keep saying that the mood in the country isn’t anti-Democratic, it’s anti-incumbent. Griffith’s defeat might prove them right — and they could still wind up having a brutal Nov. 2. After all, there are far more Democratic incumbents trying to hold onto their jobs this year than Republicans. If voters are really in a “throw the bums out” mood, which Tuesday’s result seems to add more evidence is the case, that math adds up to bad news for Democrats down the line.