Posted on 06/07/2010 6:24:17 PM PDT by Kaslin
The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has created a double bind for the Obama administration. How it deals with a challenge even more complicated than it looks will determine the kind of summer the president has and the kind of election the Democrats will face this fall.
The obvious problem is how the administration can get ahead of a disaster that promises to be a running story for much of the year. White House aides admit that they mishandled the public side of the event even as they insist that from the moment the oil rig exploded, President Obama was deploying resources on a large scale and preparing for the worst possibilities. They say they got the statecraft right but the stagecraft wrong.
"Nobody can look at the response and say we were slow in doing what we were doing," senior adviser David Axelrod said in an interview. He pointed to a "whole range of steps" Obama "took right from the beginning." But he added: "We didn't communicate it well."
Axelrod offers a long list of facts and figures to back up his portrait of an administration on top of things. What's not in doubt is that the Obama team's failure to explain what it was doing, to have someone speaking authoritatively about its plans and to engage the president more visibly early on, all helped feed a media narrative no leader wants to face — a public argument over whether his predicament more closely resembles Hurricane Katrina or the Iran hostage crisis.
(Excerpt) Read more at investors.com ...
hey, let’s get more popcorn.
This will be a fun debate. Is this more like the Hurricane Katrina situation, or the Iran hostage crisis? Take your pick, Democrats.
It’s especially fun because Democrats and their useful idiots in the MSM whipped everyone into a frenzy about Katrina and New Orleans only because Bush was an “evil” Republican president. By setting a standard that a president should be foreful and on top of all details of a disaster in progress, they set an impossible standard for a future Democrat president to follow.
Both Dionne and Richard Cohen were briefly shocked when BJ Clinton finally admitted that he lied about not having had sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky, but quickly returned to the plantation when it was clear the libs could lose their champion-of-the-moment as a result. I doubt this will be any different.
That could very well be, and it would not surprise me
[It’s especially fun because Democrats and their useful idiots in the MSM whipped everyone into a frenzy about Katrina and New Orleans only because Bush was an “evil” Republican president. By setting a standard that a president should be foreful and on top of all details of a disaster in progress, they set an impossible standard for a future Democrat president to follow.]
Well said. But the truly delicious irony is that the BP oil spill is similar to Katrina in the public’s mind, both geographically and by intensity, so people get to see Obama’s claims of uber-competance for so much methane.
Don’t worry E.J. he is still a Marxist like you and won’t let a little thing like this spill interfere with his desire for complete government control of your life.
Yes, don’t let that little disaster in the gulf divert you from your headlong stumble toward the bigger disaster you had origninally planned for this nation.
I'm confident Obama can cause multiple disasters at one time.
I think you’re right . . . the man personifies disaster.
He's too far behind to ever get ahead.
You don't even catch up when you're so busy playing golf, having vacations, BBQing, playing basketball, zipping around the country for fund raisers, entertaining pop stars, etc.,
Too late, bambam.
The only thing he does well is dither, when it comes to things that are crucial for the country.
If he had shown half the concern and time on this that he did on obamaCare, things would not have gotten so out of hand.
Right from the get go, 17 countries offered their help, expertise and equipment. He blew them off - only accepted from TWO! Mexico and Norway.
He should have said, HELL YES!
And just maybe the oil wouldn't now be creeping up on the Florida shores = where it will run down the west coast, around and half way up the east coast, then veer off for Europe.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE64420A20100505
Why no headlines on that story?
. . . . . ", "crickets & bad vibes boys & girls".........
Being the pro that he is, he quickly sensed the vibe and donned his official wal-mart John Kerry flip-flops and said maybe that's not a good thing.
The more I see the more I smell fish, . . fish covered in oil.
It almost makes one wonder if the oil spill is God’s way of slowing up the Obama agenda in answer to prayer for America.
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