Today in the Wall Street Journal, Karl Rove pens an op-ed titled: “Yes, the Gulf Spill is Obama’s Katrina.” He predictably places blame on Obama for a supposedly inadequate response to the BP oil spill. But the real significance of the op-ed is not what conservative-strategist Rove has to say about Obama; rather, it’s that Rove is implicitly acknowledging that Bush screwed up the response to Katrina. Rove is essentially trying to make the case that Obama mismanaged a disaster almost as terribly as he and Bush did. TP explains why this op-ed is news, but not the way Rove thinks.
This is breaking news because, for years, despite all the evidence to the contrary, Rove has defended his administration’s disastrous response to Hurricane Katrina. As recently as March, Rove told ABC News:
The federal government’s responsibilities were met under Katrina which were to provide the immediate assistance, to pluck people off of the roofs.
And in his recently released memoir, Rove “staunchly defends” Bush’s handling of the disaster, and praises former FEMA administrator Michael “Heck of a job, Brownie” Brown.
It’s refreshing to see Rove finally concede his own failures, albeit in a roundabout way. After all, it was he who “was in charge” of the botched reconstruction effort. In his book, Rove touted, “I’m one of the people responsible” for the administration’s response to Katrina.
Rove’s analysis would be sharper if he noted that “Obama’s Katrina” actually highlights some very real Bush and Cheney failures. By filling the Minerals Management Service “” the government agency responsible for regulating off shore oil drilling “” with industry shills who took drugs and had sex with the officials they were supposed to be policing, the Bush administration dangerously eroded the regulatory regime, and missed warnings that could have helped prevent the BP disaster.
– Reposted from Think Progress.
JR: I would add that in the case of Katrina, the Bush administration ignored its own administration’s weather forecasts for days. In the case of the spill, the reverse is true. BP basically misled everybody about the size of the spill “” by a factor of 5 “” and hence their ability to control it. It was NOAA “” which is to say the Obama administration “” that realized BP was lowballing the leak, that the problem was beyond the company’s resources, and that much broader action was needed (see “Looks like BP stands for Burning Petroleum; worst spill since ExxonValdez heads for LA coast“).
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The comparison to Katrina has been a media/political creation and has zero substance to it. A hurricane is not a huge private company with large financial, human, intellectual, and technical resources at its disposal. The disaster overwhelmed local resources. The disaster required an immediate federal response and that was absent due to cronyism and general incompetence, not to mention funding cuts.
Claiming that somehow the federal government should have taken over from BP at the beginning of the oil spill is silly. BP “should” have the resources and knowledge needed. It’s their own stupid rig and specialized deep-sea equipment. The reason why the political spin works is that people seem to assume that the problem should be easily fixable by someone – that the federal government would certainly be able to do a better job in a highly-specialized task than a huge oil company, the latter of which obviously failed for at least the last month.
What I find interesting is that when doing a remotely valid comparison, Exxon Valdez, I find that there’s barely a mention of Reagan or Bush Sr.. The fault is almost entirely Exxon’s. The focus was rightfully mainly on Exxon. I’m not saying the Reagan/Bush Sr. years were great by any stretch, but it seemed like discourse was much more rational not too long ago. Democrats and media weren’t uniformly up in arms at the first Bush Administration to fix the Exxon disaster. There once was a time when politicians and media didn’t live off of pure mud-slinging and partisanship. I find the current situation quite sad.
Your link is broken. It should be ” http://thinkprogress.org/2010/05/27/rove-admits-katrina/ ” , not ” http://thinkprogress.org/2010/05/27/rove-admits-katrina/http://thinkprogress.org/2010/05/27/rove-admits-katrina/ ” .
This ones a bit more grey than black and white. Harry Shearer, a native of New Orleans and certainly no fan of Bush’s response to Katrina is making a film on the Bush administration response and aftermath of Katrina and faults Obama not for lack of early response but appropriate follow up. You can see it on Keith Olbermann’s website.
Is Obama handling the oil crisis correctly?
May 26: Harry Shearer explains why the Gulf Coast oil spill is not President Barack Obama’s equivalent of Hurricane Katrina.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036677/vp/37367780#37367780
By focusing on either a single politician or administration, or a single oil company, we allow the larger picture to elude those who prefer not to think about it, and we allow the situation to continue essentially unchanged.
It was Exxon’s fault, yes; it was BP’s fault; it was Reagan and Bush the Incoherent and Bush the Lesser; it is Obama. We can find any number of individuals and companies to blame, but if the system as a whole is not changed the next time it will as likely be some other company as the same ones again. It will be some other administration holding to the same neconservative deregulation principles, excusing everything for the pursuit of profit and re-election for a few. Whether you believe the problem is capitalism or as I do that capitalism is just a symptom of our collective psychological problems, something more fundamental needs to change or this will just continue to happen in one guise or another.
Lakes of coal sludge flooding towns, coal mine disasters, tritium leaking from nuclear reactors, oil gushing into fisheries and wetlands and reefs… how much is enough? When we will realize it’s all the same, that it’s all symptomatic, that both major parties are completely corrupt? What has to happen for us to rise up and actually do something to stop it?