Obama’s Katrina

On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina triggered in the city of New Orleans the catastrophe that would come to be one of the symbols of George W. Bush’s second presidential term in office. In those images the supposed ineffectiveness of the Bush administration, his slovenliness before the public and his lack of compassion — in contrast to the “compassionate conservatism” slogan with which the president had attempted to renew the Republican message — suddenly became known, as if the final piece of a puzzle.

Because of what has occurred more than one year after his arrival in the White House, Barack Obama faces a problem that has become his own Katrina. It has taken some time for this to set in because the nature of this catastrophe is distinct, without the instantaneity or the plasticity of that of New Orleans, and moreover because the Democrat rejoices in the shamelessness with which certain resources were massacred by a Republican president in the same circumstances.

Even so, relishing in his predecessor’s mistakes cannot last forever and come what may from this moment on, Obama has his Katrina. To begin, he has underscored the incapacity of the most powerful government in the world to fix a very specific problem. In New Orleans, it was the images of the busted levee. With the spill, it is the pipeline full of holes. As the Obama presidency began by promoting the idea that all is possible, that is to say that governments can do All, the denial demonstrated in the 50 days that the leak has remained open is lethal.

As if it were not enough, Obama has always boasted of his independence with respect to big enterprises. In the case of British Petroleum, the one responsible for the disaster, he has treated the company with a disdainful detachment to make it very clear that he (it is tempting to write He) does not have any relation with a business sector so characteristically depredatory, like the ties that the Bush family had (He never does things without propagandist intentions).

In regards to the recalcitrant leak, the imagined strategy went amiss; whereas Bush remained a merciless man, Obama has turned out to be an ill-bred young gentleman that fulminates useless orders and takes a walk with his perplexity on the Louisiana beaches, disguised as an explorer of the “Lost” series.

This image brings to mind two other failures of his presidency. One is the arrogance with which he is confronting problems mostly caused by illegal immigration, an unfavorable approach in the opinion polls no matter how much the Hispanic community is driven away from the Republican Party. The other is health care reform, which could have been conceived as a consensual, bipartisan change — as they say there — but was designed and promoted as an anti-Republican weapon of mass destruction. It is the famous “talent” that we know too well here.

The ecological disaster of the Gulf sums up the failure of Obama’s poor strategy of straining the electorate. They are giving their adversaries, Republicans who have accepted the challenge, the advantage. The next elections in November are promising, without a doubt.