Obama’s Katrina?

Some are suggesting that the BP spill in the Gulf could end up being Obama’s Katrina. That’s possible, but I doubt it. My reasoning has to do with the differences between right and left, not with how Obama responds to the disaster. Here’s why. . .

There is little doubt that the BP oil spill in the Gulf is a total disaster. The spill was avoidable, its timing couldn’t have been worse for Obama -- having just proposed expanding drilling, and it is already the biggest environmental disaster the country has ever faced. Indeed, this spill, which now apparently can’t be stopped until at least August, is likely to put at least 2.3 million barrels of oil into the Gulf and will wipe out whole industries and ruin beaches all along the Gulf coast for years. The environmental and economic damage is staggering and, frankly, I am starting to suspect that BP will need to seek bankruptcy protection before this is over.

And Obama’s handling of this matter has been incompetent. He was slow to react, and has been more interested in pointing fingers than finding solutions. He has made repeated assertions that he’s in charge and keeps assuring us of quick fixes, but he’s done nothing to make things better. He’s also made huge public relations mistakes, like going golfing or going on vacation rather than visiting the Gulf. And he’s failed to get a point man on this, leaving his underlings to issue contradictory statements.

In fact, Obama’s handling has been so disastrous that the Democrats are getting nervous. The Democrats have tried hauling BP’s management (and others) into Congress as a diversion, but that didn’t work because people just wanted the thing fixed and they saw these hearings as little more than political theater.

Nancy Pelosi tried taking the preemptive step of blaming Bush, but that didn’t work either. Even if we all believed that Bush was evil, as the Democrats state reflexively, Obama has had two years to deliver us from Bush’s sins. So a failure at this point is on Obama, not Bush, especially since Obama has been unwilling to reform the problems that have now been exposed.

And now other things are coming out, like BP giving a ton of money to Obama’s campaign. And like evidence of the far-too-cozy relationship between Rahm Emanuel and BP's PR firm Greenberg Quinlan Rosne. Apparently, Stanley Greenberg is married to Democratic Representative Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn), and Greenberg/DeLauro let Rahm live in the couple’s Capitol Hill townhouse in violation of congressional ethical guidelines. “Coincidentally,” the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee paid Greenberg’s firm $500,000 in 2006 and 2007 while Rahm lived in their townhouse and while Rahm “coincidentally” ran the DCCC. Whether there is a connection to BP is not known yet, but the mere fact that the MSM is looking at this is bad news for Obama.

Thus, we now have an unprecedented disaster, utter incompetence, and influence peddling. We even have Democratic newspapers like the Washington Post getting nervous with headlines like: “Obama Struggling To Show He’s In Control” and Congressional Quarterly describing Obama as “defensive, un-authoritative and equivocal, he came across as a beleaguered bureaucrat in damage control.” Bill Maher has even made jokes about Obama on this. And some have even used the words “Obama’s Katrina.”

But I don’t think this will ever become “Obama’s Katrina” because of the hypocrisy of the left. The left will attack people it doesn’t like for any reason. It will even make up reasons when it can’t find any real reasons. No fact is too significant to ignore, no lie is too obvious not to believe, and no amount of hate and anger is too much. But when leftists make the same mistakes, the left gets amazingly quiet. No error is too large to overlook, no justification is too fake to accept, no injury is too horrific to ignore, and no third party is too blameless to demonize.

If BP had happened under a Republican administration, there would be ten thousand journalists in the Gulf at the moment. We would have round-the-clock coverage of every single drop of oil, every closed business, and every protestor that the left could bus in. But it didn’t happen under a Republican, so the media is silent. Rather than rushing to the Gulf to show us "the human cost," we get stories about BP’s corporate management. Rather than attacking the President for his failures, we get Obama’s justifications and excuses fed to us without any critical examination.

Where is Greenpeace? Where is the Sierra Club? Where are any environmentalists? Where are the celebrities who flew to Alaska to wash off birds after Exxon Valdez? And where are the pictures of animals covered in oil? They don’t exist because the left and their fellow travelers who populate these groups don’t want them to exist. Dying animals is an inconvenient truth that must be avoided until a Republican fall guy can be arranged.

Before this spill can take on the political significance of a Katrina, there must be a concerted effort to make it into a huge political issue. And that is the forte of the left, not the right. For unlike the left, the right actually looks at issues on the merits. The right accepts the existence of accidents and it doesn’t automatically try to exploit these events. The left suffers no such limitations.

So unless this disaster gets big enough that the left itself turns on Obama, don’t expect this bigger-than-Katrina disaster to become anything like the politicized Katrina that Bush faced.

Of course, there is one caveat to this. While the Gulf spill may not become as politically poisonous as Katrina, it may be just one more nail in the coffin to those in the middle who thought that Obama at least offered a level of competence that Bush lacked. And if Obama spends his time trying to point fingers, the mushy middle will turn on him.

I guess we’ll see what happens.