Is Obama getting a pass on the oil spill?
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
Do you recall the days following Katrina and how inept the Bush administration was portrayed?
I well remember the president’s comments, “Brownie’s doing a great job” referring to the inexorably out-of-his-league FEMA director, Michael Brown.
Fast forward five years, we have another disaster (man-made this time) and another lackluster response from our president.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTFor all his change-we-can-believe-in rhetoric the Obama administration’s response to this crisis mirrors our beleaguered former president in many ways.
Just like Katrina, the severity of the problem wasn’t immediately recognized by the administration. On April 23rd, three days after the incident, the Coast Guard stated:
Although the oil appears to have stopped flowing from the well head, Coast Guard, BP, Transocean, and MMS remain focused on mitigating the impact of the product currently in the water and preparing for a worst-case scenario in the event the seal does not hold.
However by April 28th, the Associated Press was reporting that the oil was flowing and that original spill estimates were far lower than what was actually happening. Perhaps the Obama administration believed BP could handle the problem just like Bush believed “Brownie” had everything under control. In a world where there are dozens of crises occurring every moment, you can’t expect Obama or his team to be on top of all of them all the time can you? To use another Obama tagline, YES WE CAN!
To bring to our level locally, when did Obama visit the streets of Providence, Warwick, or Cranston during the unprecedented flooding a few months ago? A disaster unlike this region has ever seen, and where was our President? He actually attended a Democratic fundraiser in Massachussetts but couldn’t take the hour drive down to Rhode Island to see the devastation here first hand.
If former President Bush attended a fundraiser in Boston while all this was going on, we’d still be talking about it today.
Where were the mainstream media outlets holding this president accountable in the same way they held Bush accountable for his mishandling of the Katrina situation?
And just so you don’t think I’m a conservative guy looking to poke holes into Obama where there are none, ABC News/Washington Post polled Americans regarding the response to the oil spill finding that 69 percent held a negative view towards the administration. Compare that to 62 percent feeling similarly of the Bush administration’s handling of Katrina and you see where I’m going with this. Five years later we can easily reference ghastly images of New Orleans and the lackadaisical response of Bush’s team, but what administration images come to mind in this disaster? Americans are just as if not more disappointed with this administration this time around and yet we don’t hear it from the media.
Folks, when we don’t hold all officials accountable irrespective of party affiliation it only hurts us because they become emboldened to do what they want, when they like, and even expect us to pat them on the back as they do it. Yet, Obama promised us many changes, but in this instance he responded like his processor. The only difference this time was that main stream media gave him a pass while thousands and thousands and thousands of barrels of oil spilled into gulf on a scale we’ll likely never see again.
Donald Roach is a GoLocalProv.com MINDSETTER™
He can be emailed at [email protected]
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