Getting Out Obama's Oil Stains

Nate Silver crunches the poll numbers for Obama and the Democrats and finds out that the President is starting to pay a price for the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

Although the trend is not very robust -- it may just be statistical noise -- the notion of some modest downward pressure on Obama's numbers rings true to me. On the one hand, this is a real event, a really horrible event, that real people are noticing -- and not the sort of ginned-up faux scandal that can dominate Washington's coverage during slow periods in the political cycle. Although it's dangerous to relate from personal experience, a lot of people in my social circle have certainly been thinking about the disaster in the Gulf, including what they perceive to be a lackluster response from the White House.

On the other hand, it's not exactly clear what the critique is. The most widespread criticism of Obama is simply that he's expanding government too much, too fast (in other words, that he's too liberal). In the case of the oil spill, however, the prevailing sentiment seems to be that Obama was not quick enough to get the government involved, and was too deferential to BP. I don't mean to oversimplify this -- I recognize that there's a perfectly coherent intellectual position which holds, for instance, that deficits are a huge problem, but also that the White House needed to intervene more forcefully in the Gulf. Nevertheless, the criticisms have been somewhat orthogonal to the usual ones that the Administration receives.

There are, of course, other strands of criticism too -- like Maureen Dowd's refrain that Obama is too aloof and dispassionate, and the argument (mostly from liberals) that contrary to perceptions, the White House is in fact too slack with major corporations. Those adhere into a more coherent anti-Obama narrative when it comes to the Gulf disaster. On the other hand, they are probably not things that people on Main Street are talking or thinking much about.

Mostly I simply think that the disaster is reinforcing people's frustration -- an emotion that has become very widespread within the country, and which crosses most demographic and political boundaries. If that remains the prevailing mood of the country in November, the risks to the incumbent President and his incumbent party are mostly to the downside.

Quite frankly, the longer this goes on, the more damage Obama takes.  Should the absolute worst case scenario go into effect, that is the relief wells fail and oil is still gushing out on Election Day and wrecking the coast from Brownsville, Texas to Bar Harbor, Maine, the Democrats are pretty much through.  Fair or unfair, the public will throw them out on their asses this fall and hand the country right back over to the GOP.


Better hope one of these Wile E. Coyote plans works and damn fast.