I keep reading these articles and listening to podcasts about how the public has lost or is losing or may yet well lose confidence in Barack Obama's leadership because of the Gulf Oil Spill. Even though polling shows that 70% of the country blames BP for the oil spill.
I just don't really understand this narrative. It seems like its being pushed by journalists as opposed to actually reflecting the public attitude. I know I live in New York City (where real Americans only lived on one day in 2001), but I just am not hearing this sentiment. The spill is clearly the result of massive failings by a whole lot of people not named Barack Obama, and he seems deeply engaged with trying to solve this seemingly insurmountable problem. A failure to solve the problem so far just seems to magnify how bad the issue is: it doesn't seem to show how incompetent the players are. His approval numbers aren't taking some massive hit anywhere, not as far as I've seen.
I honestly think it has something to do with this...
ReplyDeletehttp://voices.washingtonpost.com/postpartisan/2010/06/during_oil_spill_crisis_do_we.html
"It seems like its being pushed by journalists as opposed to actually reflecting the public attitude"
ReplyDeleteIt's probably our own unrealistic expectations about what one man can do, even if he is the President of the United States. What's disturbing is that Sarah Palin & James Carville seem to have the same expectations, but, of course, for different reasons.
See "BP Oil Spill: Who's Your Daddy?"
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=11859