Obama: Did he mishandle the oil spill?

He was at least “supposed to be competent,” said Peggy Noonan in The Wall Street Journal. Barack Obama was elected 18 months ago largely because he promised to usher in an era of effective, focused, and capable governance, after George W. Bush botched Iraq, failed to respond to Hurricane Katrina, and ran up huge deficits. But this week, as countless millions of gallons of oil continued to spew from BP’s ruptured Deepwater Horizon rig, Obama was chest-deep in his own Katrina—a political disaster that may permanently damage his standing with the American people. For weeks, Obama “tried to maintain some distance between the gusher and his presidency,” so that BP would be blamed, not Obama. By the time he finally roused himself to rush down to the Gulf of Mexico for photo-ops on the beach, it was too late. He seemed distant and disconnected from the misery around him. The most apt analogy is not Katrina, said David Brooks in The New York Times, but the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis. Day after day, that crisis slowly eroded President Jimmy Carter’s credibility, until it became “a symbol of America’s inability to take decisive action in the face of pervasive problems.”

“The idea of the oil spill as ‘Obama’s Katrina’ breaks down under the slightest scrutiny,” said Margaret Carlson in Bloomberg.com. After the hurricane flooded New Orleans, Bush didn’t realize how bad it was for days, and then kept insisting that food and water was being delivered and people were being rescued, when they plainly were not. During this oil spill, the government has been on BP’s back from the beginning. What was Obama supposed to do? Only BP has the technology to cap a broken well one mile under the sea. Indeed, if this is anyone’s Katrina, said Andrew Sullivan in TheAtlantic.com, it’s President Bush’s second. Had oil-industry regulation not been so “poor and corrupt” under Bush and Cheney, this spill would likely not have happened in the first place.

But “life isn’t fair,” said Frank Rich in The New York Times, and Obama will pay a steep political price for the environmental catastrophe. Obama’s entire presidency is premised on the principle that government is “a potential force for good” in people’s lives, not the tax-hiking, freedom-curtailing boogeyman of Tea Party rhetoric and Republican ideology. It won’t help his sinking poll numbers for people to watch “a pipe gushing poison into an ocean” while the government stands by helplessly.

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It’s silly to blame Obama, said Yuval Levin in National Review Online, but Americans have “completely unreasonable expectations of government.” In theory, the state could prevent all oil spills, bank meltdowns, and other man-made disasters by regulating private industry to the point that no risks are ever taken. But reducing risks to zero would come “at enormous cost to a lot of things we care about,” such as personal freedom and a vibrant economy. So now we know: Obama is no Superman, said Charles Krauthammer in The Washington Post. We all should have known that, but then again, our grandiose president did once say that future generations would remember his inauguration as the moment that “our planet began to heal” and “the rise of the oceans began to slow.” No wonder people are disappointed in him. “When you anoint yourself King Canute, you mustn’t be surprised when your subjects expect you to command the tides.”