Katrina vs. The Deepwater Horizon

The oil spill in the Gulf isn't Obama's Hurricane Katrina, it's his Iraq.

Within days of the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon, conservative pundits were talking up the crisis as “President Obama’s Katrina.” It was a predictable but ultimately unsuccessful attempt to set the narrative for this story early. Why not? The location was the same and it was obvious that there would be precious little that the federal government could do to halt the environmental devastation that was going to unfold.

The media picked up the Katrina narrative and ran with it for a while, but it never really felt right. Missing were the scenes of mass human suffering at the Louisiana Superdome. There, Americans wondered how it was that CNN’s Sanjay Gupta and Anderson Cooper were helping these folks instead of the government.

Not only is there no epicentre of captive human misery in this story, but it also just so happens that Team Obama is just as good – if not better – than their predecessors at dictating the dominant political narrative.

Team Bush was ultimately felled by a catastrophe that few saw coming (although the evidence was apparently there if anybody cared to look). The same appears to be true about the latest Louisiana catastrophe. A highly centralized political federation is probably the worst form of government during a crisis, because it foists all hope and responsibility upon a distant capital, while providing megaphones to state and local politicians – who blame distant overlords for all that “went wrong” – both to protect themselves and to self-aggrandize.

“Hurricane Katrina” emasculated Bush, whose presidency had been successfully built upon powerful symbols of military might and competence. While the “warrior president” narrative got him re-elected to a second term, it just didn’t lend itself well to the sorrowful situation that developed in the wake of Katrina.

In part, this was because the country’s over-extended military was unable to prevent the disaster from unfolding before the cameras. At the same time vast sums were being spent on those “ungrateful” Iraqis, Americans were suffering and dying at home. At the Superdome, the powerful images of easy victory in Iraq turned against Bush. Iraq wasn’t going well and Afghanistan was going worse, and now it looked as if America couldn’t even take care of its own people in its heartland.

Obama is now a war president too, but he has a different party base and a different story to tell. His story is one that would make the earth shake at Ronald Reagan’s gravesite: “We are the government, and we are here to help.”

It is a longstanding and powerful storyline. It sells particularly well when economic times are tough. In the wake of the 2008-2009 financial collapse, there were many corporate characters to blame. Democrats have seized upon this narrative for the lifeline it represents, effortlessly bestowing a big, black hat upon hapless BP CEO Tony Hayward. “It’s all their fault, and it’s the Republicans who gave them the regulatory keys. It happened on Wall Street and now it’s happening in the Gulf. Only we, the Democrats, can set things right.”

Thus a disaster whose optics could have rendered any president impotent has become an opportunity for Obama to take on a role that comes naturally to him: the anti-corporate warrior.

Unfortunately, Obama’s response to the Deepwater Horizon disaster could become like Bush’s response to 9-11. Bush marshalled his country’s mighty resources to fight a convenient foe when he should have kept his eye on Afghanistan where the real trouble was. Obama must be careful not to do the same thing economically. While he probably can parlay this anti-corporate warrior narrative into a second term, he would do better to keep his eye on the real problem: an ailing economy. Instead of looking for butts to kick, Obama should be looking for investors to attract – with sensible fiscal, regulatory, and monetary policies, and a renewed commitment to free trade and investment. The trade-off: fewer votes but more prosperity.