I just finished reading an awful OpenLeft piece that I can’t recommend about how Obama is “extending the hegemonic continuity of Nixon-Reagan Era”. I got sucked into because it seemed to suggest that the Democratic wave in 2006 (and on in to 2008) was caused largely by the change in political narrative caused by Hurricane Katrina: “Katrina disaster finally punctured the bubble of Versailles ass-covering for conservative failures”. I agree with this description of the change insofar as it describes the media.
Right after that, I read this, from Dan Balz:
In politics today, the narrative is king.
Presumably, he means that political results are driven by narratives.
Do you think that this is true? Do these crazy media narratives have big impacts on actual elections? Or are they just ways Politico and Mark Halperin to attract readers? In particular, did Katrina really have a huge impact on the 2006 and 2008 elections by changing media coverage? I’m not so sure it did — Bush’s approval rating was already pretty low, mostly because of Iraq. But it certainly had some effect.
mrsmarks
I think for the non-bloggy voter – the person who was still willing to cut Bush some slack – Katrina was simply the last staw. The incompetence all the rest of us had already sussed out was made manifest.
Kryptik
I’d argue that it may not have as big a pull in elections, but it damn sure well effects policy in an infuriating way. Sure, we passed the health care reform stuff, but look at what got stripped out, and what memeage was seeded and the ridiculous rise of the tea parties that came out of it, simply because some folks with hatchets and megaphones drove the narrative.
Maude
When people vote, they are alone with their vote.
The media makes things up and just repeats them as if these things were god’s own truth.
Katrina only showed what the damn media should have seen on 9/11. Bush has always run away when confronted with anything difficult.
He did that on 9/11, at the time of Katrina and he did that when he was in the Guard.
Someone tell me if they ever find Bush’s military records.
I bet he went AWOL and Daddy made sure that wasn’t anywhere in writing to be found.
Obama is an active president and he does git er done. He keeps moving along and the press can’t quite catch up with him. It explains why some of the media resents him so much.
Shalimar
Iraq and Katrina certainly played a part, but I think Bush’s approval rating mostly went into the toilet right after his 2nd term started because he tried to gut social security and lost everyone other than his base because of it.
Mnemosyne
I don’t think the media narrative about Katrina had much to do with the change, but having talked to conservatives at the time, the government’s (lack of) response to Katrina was absolutely a game-changer. The people I talked to were absolutely LIVID that American citizens had been abandoned by their government.
Republicans gambled that most Americans wouldn’t care since most of the people affected were black. They gambled wrong, and disastrously so, because it turned the last few reasonable conservatives away from them.
Marc
If you read a Paul Rosenberg piece, you get what you deserve.
JR
I don’t agree with that. In political media, the narrative is king, to be sure. But not in politics.
The thing is, though, in the political media, the narrative is incredibly fungible, to the extent that any on-the-ground occurrence outside of the most extreme deviation from expectations will be weaved into the narrative, so that the same inanity will survive in a barely modified form, tailored just enough to encompass the new reality (a race becomes less important than once thought, a candidate becomes less savvy, a movement becomes more fringe, etc.).
CT Voter
Perhaps 2006. Not 2008. The media response to the Administration’s flailing just made it crystal clear to everyone that Republicans appeared to be inept.
But I would say that the wave in 2006 had more to do with Republican scandals in the summer of 2006, AND, Ned Lamont’s primary victory over Lieberman. People became disgusted with Republicans, and Democrats were energized that an anti-war candidate could actually upend the apple cart.
Linda Featheringill
I think that the narrative does not have as much influence as some folks would like for it to have.
Most of the narrative does not even reach most people, except for political junkies. Maybe the junkies are influenced by a well phrased argument for or against something.
Considering the country’s recent history of Congress that can’t get anything done, I think the best course for Democrats would be to get as much done as possible. Most folks would rather have an able person they disagree with in office than have to put up with an incompetent boob they agree with.
[Is that last sentence clear?]
Tim Cooper
And my take on Katrina was that it wasn’t so much the issue in and of itself, but the straw that broke the camel’s back. Combined with obvious failure that Iraq was by August 2005, The media could no longer pretend that Bush II was the magical warrior king who would protect them from the bad bad world.
SectarianSofa
Didn’t ‘politics today’ have to fold? I think Politico hired some of their writers, some went south into Mexico, through El Paso, to fight against Pancho Villa.
In honesty, I don’t know if the quote above is intelligible in any meaningful sense. But I am kind of a quitter.
JGabriel
Like everyone else here, I’ve scoffed at the Obama’s Katrina meme that the media has been pusing re: the BP oil spill.
But now that oil has reached the shore, and people are getting sick from chemical dispersants, over a month after the spill began, people are beginning to ask, with some cause I’m afraid, questions like “Why hasn’t this been stopped yet?” and “Why is it taking so long?”
Those questions, and the ineptness they imply, really do mirror Americans frustrations with the Bush administration after Katrina. That’s beginning to worry me.
.
gbear
I’m going down to Pundit pool to do nothing for the rest of my life.
I do think that Katrina hung large over the 2006 & 2008 elections because it put such a bright shining spotlight on what happens when the drown-government-in-a-bathtub gang gets their way. They couldn’t hide the horrific results with the standard rhetoric.
beltane
The media has consistently underplayed the importance of the Terri Schiavo business in turning people off of the Republican party. My father-in-law was terminally ill in Florida at the time and we lived in fear that mobs of religious nuts were going to descend on his hospital bed and harass us.
Aside from Iraq, the economy was stinking for a lot of people years before the media took notice.
SectarianSofa
@mrsmarks:
Yeah, it is hard, even for F’x News, to spin clusterfuck into something rosy.
MattF
I think it’s more like pieces of a puzzle that could, at least for a while, have fit together in various ways. E.g., was Bush a misunderstood genius? Well, no… but there were, for a while, actual adults who made that claim. In the puzzle metaphor, Katrina was a big piece that made it impossible to put the Bush pieces together into the ‘genius’ pattern. But that was because you also had the Schaivo piece, the Social Security piece, the Iraq piece, the Cheney piece, the ‘Mission Accomplished’ piece, et cetera and so forth.
Chuck Butcher
People love to have a “turning point” they can talk about. People were not happy with GWB in 04 but Kerry didn’t offer them enough to break the incumbent advantage. There was a steady flow of policy and actions from 04 on each adding more discontent. As the discontent progressed you got the 06 election and the 08.
I didn’t get Balz saying that the narrative drives political results, I got that he was saying it drives analysis. I don’t care much for him so I didn’t sit and analyse everthing but notably he pointed out that the narrative missed PA12 pretty badly and that the GOP better pay attention.
Resident Firebagger
This is kind of an old (but still intriguing) question. Didn’t Cole himself finally bail on the Republicans after Schiavo? That, I think, started the turn against Bush Republicans. The Katrina aftermath sealed it.
Cat Lady
Katrina explained the cock-up in Iraq, but unlike Iraq, we couldn’t look away from New Orleans – the press wasn’t imbedded. The dead bodies floating in the street of a great American city (with W playing the guitar superimposed over the image) was shocking. The Bushies were put on the defensive the whole time and when they couldn’t play the with us or against us treason card, their cards were played out. They showed everyone, especially the press, that they were who we all thought they were – incompetent sycophants and hacks oblivious to reality.
beltane
@Marc: It’s good to know OpenLeft is still around. Do they still yammer on endlessly about the superiority of the Creative Class?
Mr Furious
I think narrative has more of a hold on coverage and politics/policy than it does on voters. As someone above said, in the booth, the voter is by themselves, without anyone whispering in their ear or knowing what they did.
I think the narrative has a crippling impact on Democratic politicians however. It seems to be foremost in their minds at all times and impacts the direction their policy heads, and the way they vote on it.
I think in many ways Republicans are less affected. Often the narrative is either in their favor or originates with them, and even if the tide is against them, they have a massive echo chamber to turn to, and that gets them through the day and past whatever vote might give a Dem pause. The ideological orthodoxy doesn’t reward analysis or thought either. A GOP pol who stops to think about their vote as opposed to following directions get hammered quickly.
Tom Q
I think JR has it right: the narrative is king only because the media are allowed constant rewrite privileges — thus, the “devastating” Reverend Wright story was magically transformed into the “Obama makes lemonade of lemons with race speech” when it failed to slow the campaign. How many narratives during ’08 were proven false (the “celebrity” accusation; the Palin bandwagon)? Go back further in history: the press will always claim some minor event — “There you go again” in ’80; the Weinberger indictment of ’92; the Bush DWI of 2000 — had some cataclysmic effect…when, in all those cases, the election turned out the way the historic models had predicted all year long. (The result in 2000, of course, was that Gore would narrowly win, which, in truth-world, he did)
2006 was affected by Katrina, but also by Iraq, and by the fact that Bush was operating from an extremely narrow base, having achieved the weakest re-election in American history. Even then, the “narrative” included Mark Halperin saying if he were a Democrat he’d be scared to death…and Karl Rove saying if Dems ran against Iraq they’d be sorry. Inconvenient predictions are instantly scrubbed from memory, which helps keep the myth of the predictive narrative alive.
cleek
@JGabriel:
ditto
the GOP jumped the gun with trying to label the spill “Obama’s Katrina” so soon. but after this long, reality has caught up to the GOP.
not that i think Obama isn’t trying to fix it – i’m sure he knows as well as anyone that people are looking to him for a fix – but this is a Hard Problem. and i don’t know that i believe he sat on his hands for too long, but i think his characteristic lack of visible leadership is going to really hurt him this time. sometimes people want to know someone’s in charge and is working, even if the results are slow in coming. it’s called “leadership”. he should try it.
and, he should get the fuck out of Iraq.
Dee Loralei
Shalimar is right. Bush’s poll numbers started tanking immediately upon re-election, first the I have a mandate to gut social security, then trying to sell the ports to Dubai, and the Terri Schiavo overreach. By the time Katrina hit he had lost everyone except for his base and the John Rogers crazy 28% which is also his base. He lost a bunch of his base over Dubai and some over the SS, but he had gotten many of them back. And each of those things individually and collectively peeled off more and more independants and regular republicans. Katrina was the final straw where those people walked away and never went back and actively started hating him and the Rep Congress, and it was then that they lost the 2006 elections. Their subsequent scandals and sex stuff just made them lose more seats. And Harriet Myers was somewhere in this time frame he almost irretrievably lost the base over her.
And fucking Obama and the Congress better start doing some serious lifting on jobs and on this oil spill or they are gonna find themselves in Bush level approvals.
HRA
I voted for Bush both times. Although, I was a Republican then, it does not in any way make me a party line voter.
I can put the blame on Bush for Katerina. No problem there at all. I began to get the anti-war for Iraq almost right after it began. I kept thinking why are we there and there were no answers available.
I cannot blame Bush for 9/11. I cannot get excited or driven to vote for someone based on whether they were or weren’t in the military. That’s their past. I want to know about their ideas for the future.
I supported Obama from the beginning of the primary and I still support him now.
Mr Furious
@JGabriel: Agreed. It’s not only worrying me from a narrative sense, it’s actually genuinely pissing me off as a citizen. I’m not finding much fault with Carville’s position on this.
It’s been clear to me that BP’s solutions have all put a priority on salvaging the well or harvesting the leak rather than sealing it, and I believe Obama has given them too much leash.
It may very well hurt him politically, and I might end up thinking somewhat deservedly.
SectarianSofa
@JGabriel:
The sad thing is that people have freaked out more abut the LHC (apocalypse via black hole) than have apparently ever questioned the absolute worse case scenario of undersea drilling operations.
Or at least, according to all media reports.
(Full circle on topic, then?)
I certainly had no idea what kind of volume of oil was in play. It’ll be interesting to see how complicity in ignorance, and placing blame on parties who should be responsible for oversight will play out in for the public. Does the gov’t protect us, the scientists, the elites, the corporations?
In this case, I think that media framing will have an effect, but I can’t really predict to what extent.
Mike in NC
In journalism today, Dan Balz is a hack.
They disappeared forever once Bush became governor, i.e. commander-in-chief of the Texas Air National Guard. Shredded, burned, and dumped down a mineshaft.
baldheadeddork
Katrina definitely changed the media narrative, and I think that had a clear effect on the 2006 election. But the “narrative change” was to finally start doing their jobs and treating administration and Republican claims with a dose of skepticism. It was the moment when they began to report on the emperor’s real wardrobe, instead of what everyone in the beltway agreed it looked like.
About the Republican wave in November, I’ve never bought into it. I’ve thought the R’s are more vulnerable to losing seats in the Senate because they have a lot up in this round, and because they’ve doubled down again on the same fatal mistakes they made in 2006 and 2008. There is no reason the Democrats can’t start 2011 with 62-64 seats in the US Senate.
JGabriel
@Cat Lady:
“Bush strummed while New Orleans drowned” really should become the American equivalent of “Nero fiddled while Rome burned”.
.
SectarianSofa
@SectarianSofa:
LHC being http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider , in case that wasn’t clear.
PeakVT
Presumably, he means that political results are driven by narratives.
When hasn’t politics been driven by narratives? I don’t know why Balz seems to think politics is different these days. It’s not as if at some point the voting population consisted of technocrats impartially analyzing policy. (I’ll add that I think the line was a throwaway that should have been edited out.)
I think the stupid mini-narratives that the press invents do affect things, both by influencing low-info voters and by crowding out real news. Katrina, however, created its own narrative. My impression is that the press did a lousy job of presenting it because it wasn’t a simple one. But the narrative was so powerful it affected a lot of people anyway.
cleek
@PeakVT:
where’s the zing in cynically sighing “same as it ever was” ? that’s no way to attract page views.
JGabriel
@cleek:
I don’t know either, but letting BP remain essentially in charge of repairs and clean-up efforts for so long looks like a massive mistake.
.
JGabriel
@Mr Furious:
Me too. I should have made that clearer.
.
Nick
AN awful OpenLeft piece? As if there’s just one?
Nick
@JGabriel:
That’s the law…law states the company who owns the rig/tanker that caused the spill must take the lead and pay the cost of the cleanup.
Have a problem wth it? Change the law. The only reason the law exists is so we wouldn’t have to bailout oil companies.
MikeJ
Yeah, narrative is important. “Tax and spend liberal.” That’s what we’ve been running against for 40 years. The story on the GOP is that the just don’t care about people at all. Katrina was just another chapter in that book.
gbear
Who’s Obama going to send in? The national guard? We’re kind of stuck in that there aren’t a lot of available contractors with the equipment needed to deal with the problem, and the regulation part of this is the horse long gone from the barn.
Mr Furious
@MikeJ: Whether that’s true or not, or that law is the final word won’t matter for Obama. If this takes off, that will be an oft-ignored footnote to the story.
And if he tried to change that law, what do you suppose might happen? Starts with “F” ends in “buster.”
Something needs to go right with this mess in a hurry or the narrative will be to take Obama down a notch.
Or more.
Mr Furious
@gbear: Doesn’t matter. The appearance here is all that matters.
Nick
@Mr Furious: So should we just send the national guard in for a photo op and then listen to endless bitching about how much taxpayer money was spent to send the feds in to do nothing because they can do nothing?
licensed to kill time
__
from Frustration mounts as oil seeps into wetlands
Tazistan Jen
The media narrative took Al Gore out. The media just made shit up and repeated it over and over until people believed it. Even I believed some of the bullshit memes until I read “What Liberal Media?”
Zuzu's Petals
This made me think about that most interesting open-mic exchange between Peggy Nooners, Chuck Todd, and Michael Murphy re the Sarah Palin pick:
“PN. … I think they went for this — excuse me– political bullshit about narratives —
CT: Yeah they went to a narrative.
MM: I totally agree.
PN: Every time the Republicans do that, because that’s not where they live and it’s not what they’re good at, they blow it. ”
————-
Edited for blockquote fail.
Mr Furious
@Nick: No. What I mean is it appears that Obama is too hands off.
Also, the longer this goes on the more of BP’s blame starts to rub off on Obama. It’s one thing to get everyone on board with this being an unprecedented industrial fuck-up that he had nothing to do with when it first happens. Pulling that defense off 6 weeks later when oil is still gushing into the Gulf and now showing up on shore? He won’t remain clean.
If the final solution from BP ends up being scuttling the well or blowing it up, people are going to RIGHTLY ask why the fuck he didn’t have the Navy do it the first week.
We’ve been hearing about the “junk shot” approach for weeks, and it sounds to me like BP is getting yet another chance to try a different approach before resorting to that. Why? Is the junk shot final, yet riskier? OR just final, and BP is reluctant to let the well go.
Obama may very well be answering for that—fairly or not.
(Edited for clarity. I hope)
Zuzu's Petals
@Nick:
Actually, the law states that it’s the holder of the lease – not the owner of the rig – that is responsible for cleanup and damages (See Secs. 2701 and2702). Same result, though.
gbear
@Mr Furious: I’m not quite capable of cynicism on that level.
I realize that keeps me out of the cool kids club, but so be it.
Alex S.
I thought that Katrina showed that there was a real need for government that extended beyond national security. And it was the nadir of that horrible year 2005, the year of the failed reform of social security, the failed nomination of Harriet Miers, the resignation of Tom Delay and the deteorating situation in Iraq.
Zuzu's Petals
@Mr Furious:
The most effective (and “final”) method – drilling alternate boreholes to kill the well – takes months. The drilling began just over a week after the discovery of the leaks.
The junk shot is untried at that depth, with no guarantee of success:
PS, just wondering what your reasoning is that the Navy could have done any of this?
Toni
I think the oil spill is a growing disaster and there is a lot of growing frustration that the leak has not been stopped. The problem is that there is no easy/short-term solution. Two long-term solutions to cap the well is to drill a new pipe (being done but takes 90 days) or to set off a bomb (possibly small nuclear) to seal the whole thing. The consequences and risks of the latter are high given how much existing drilling as well as fishing and cargo transport goes on in the gulf.
All the other measures to seal the well have to be done by robotics controlled from the surface that the government has neither any similar technologies nor the expertise. There are also submersibles with robotic arms which can be used but also are not possessed by the government. Most of these measures are untried and untested at 5000ft because neither the government nor BP planned for such a problem.
I do see the potential for this to become a political nightmare for the President especially if a lot of oil starts coming onshore. I’m not sure how he avoids that though.
JGabriel
Toni:
“Leak” is becoming a horribly inappropriate word for the situation. This is to a leak as a geyser is to a drizzle.
.
Zuzu's Petals
@JGabriel:
On the other hand, it’s not really a “spill” either.
Hmm…spew?
cleek
geyser
volcano
explosive petrolarrhea
JGabriel
@cleek:
oilrhea
crud-cano
.
licensed to kill time
It really is a gusher, and not in the ‘good’ way.
Ruckus
@JGabriel:
Don’t know any side of this but have to ask the questions
What it the legal status of the government taking over?
Does the government have any resources to handle this?
As bad as BP has handled this, is there any alternative?
That's *Master* of Accountancy to You, Pal (JMN)
@Mr Furious:
I’m going with “not.” Your posts seem to be very vague on whether or not you think it’s fair. Mostly, what I see is that the administration is obeying the law. Your position seems to be that they should have violated it and taken over. I have to disagree with that.
It may be a disaster in this instance, but, overall, I think that it is a fabulous thing that Obama seems to put a high priority in not doing anything illegal. I don’t like some of the arguments they’ve made in court on civil liberties issues, but I very much like the fact that I have a good deal of confidence that, if the judicial branch ends up rejecting the government’s arguments, that this administration is going to obey. At this point in the American republic, I can’t overstate how important I think that is.
The leak may hurt him image-wise, but I’m hard pressed to find an objection to how he’s actually handled it.
DougJ
@Zuzu’s Petals:
Even with blockquote fail, win. Very interesting point.
Mr Furious
What I’m saying is the longer this goes on the more the perception will grow that he didn’t do enough. I don’t know enough about the situation to assess that. But neither do the morons in the GOP or media, but that won’t stop them from pointing the finger.
If his hands were truly tied by the law as explained above, or by the technology, than that criticism from me or anyone else would indeed be unfair, but the perception that he let BP stall in an attempt to salvage their investment might persist.
And THAT may very well take on Katrina-like proportions.
Sasha
Narratives have the potential to be deeply influential in that, should they exist unchallenged long enough, they become conventional wisdom, which is much harder to shake.
Take for instance, the statements “Republicans are fiscally responsible”, or “The media is liberal-biased.” Although they may have once been accurate observations, they have not reflected reality for some time. Yet despite this evident fact, everyone “knows” that liberals can’t be trusted with the nation’s pocketbook, and all mainstream media stories are reported with a liberal agenda (except of course the outlets that are conservative — they get to claim to be unbiased.)
This received wisdom may very well be the only analytical framework a low-information voter uses, and it requires a great investment of energy and effort (and money) to convince such a voter to vote against what he already, unthinkingly, accepts to be true.
Mr Furious
As for my opinion personally, I am reserving judgement for now, but I have to admit the optics look bad.
Reactions seem slow…be it the initial reaction from Obama personally, the EPA and the dispersants…what have you. A sense of urgency is harder to sell when the period moves from days to weeks and now months.
Mike Kay
Paul Rosenberg is prototypical butthurt edwards supporter.
He’s the kind of person I have in mind when I mock edwards’s hippie lemmings.
After edwards lost lowa, OL and MYDD walked around like dazed zombies for months.
Obama signs a trillion dollar health care bill, a 800 billion stimulus bill, FinReg reform (that Krugman creamed over), and he’s on his way to overturn DADT, but no, obama is just like fellow stem-cell research advocates, bush and reagan.
EFroh
Nick
@Mr Furious:
because legally, we’re not allowed to. The end.
Hal
Reminds of a comment I read on Daily Kos accusing Obama of trying to continue Bush’s “Imperial Pax Presidency.”
This is what happens when you read the dictionary.
kay
@Zuzu’s Petals:
I don’t get that either. I don’t know why there’s an assumption that feds alone could have done better, when it’s now feds and BP.
Is it because no one trusts BP? That’s rational, but are there any indications, solid or otherwise, they aren’t trying every possible solution, in conjunction with the feds?
Apart from “optics” or political considerations, would a fed takeover at the outset have led to a better result?
Mike Kay
@Hal: that’s all they do over at kos. They’re only happy when they’re miserable, which means they have to create a boogieman if one doesn’t exist.
kay
I don’t know the first thing about this subject, but this person might:
Sylvia Alice Earle is an American oceanographer. She was chief scientist for the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration from 1990-1992. She is a National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence, sometimes called “Her Deepness” or “The Sturgeon General”.
MATTHEWS: Do you have any confidence that this government is going to stop what we‘re looking at, this horror of this oil going up the East Coast?
EARLE: Well, we can all hope that we can use the technologies that are out there. But we need better methods for actually working underwater. Actually, the industry, the oil industry, has the best technology presently in the world, except maybe certain navies, for actually observing and working in the sea.
The scientific community, NOAA, the – the Coast Guard, we‘re ill-prepared to deal with something of this sort or even to evaluate the consequences to life in the sea. We don‘t have submersibles. We don‘t have fleets of remotely-operated systems of the sort that the oil industry does have at our disposal.
I mean, we can hire from the industry such devices. A few institutions, such as Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, have undersea vehicles, the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California, of course, Scripps, and others. But where‘s—where‘s the capability for fast response on part of the Coast Guard or NOAA or any of the other federal agencies to be there on the spot.”
I don’t see how they would have done better without BP, unless BP are deliberately operating in bad faith. Which is certainly a possibility, but I haven’t seen anything that would show it.
Nick
@kay:
It’s funny she said this because there are a lot of grumblings going on now that BP is intentionally fucking this up to force the government to come in and take over and thus pay for it themselves so BP doesn’t lose any more money.
Mike Kay
@kay: I know. I know. The media has seen “The Hunt for Red October” too many times. Even Rachel had on head of the National Institute of Standards and Technology and asked if there was a better way to measure the volume of crude flowing, and he was shocked by the question, and said it’s really hard to make any measurements 5,000 feet below the sea.
kay
@Nick:
Right, okay, but frustration and distrust and “grumblings” of possible bad faith aren’t going to fix anything.
Look, I share the frustration, and a certain measure of distrust, and disgust, actually, but I can’t just stamp my feet and demand someone do something. There are a lot of people working on this, from the Coast Guard to the EPA to BP. Are they all in on it?
I always thought the Katrina example was lazy and too easy.
We know how to deliver bottled water, and temporary housing, and emergency federal cash assistance. We did that poorly in Katrina. That scared people.
Is it scary that no one seems to know how to fix this? Hell, yes. But that doesn’t mean there’s a plot afoot.
I get the political problem. What I’m asking is if a better political response would have remedied the actual problem. Bush couldn’t get bottled water to New Orleans. That we know how to do. His political response sucked, but so did the actual response.
kay
@Mike Kay:
I read two dueling oceanographers yesterday, in the NYTimes. One works for the federal government, and she was defensive and offended (justifiably) at the suggestion she wasn’t trying (she’s probably dog-tired, which wouldn’t help) and the other doesn’t work for the federal government, and she was angry and frustrated ( also justifiably).
But they both want to fix this. They agree on that, and I believe both of them. They just don’t know how.
Elie
@kay:
kay —
This is such a deep hurt… we are at the margins of what we KNOW and that aint much as it turns out…
We are in an era of gotcha politics when the reality is plain, we are just at the edge …
Please Lord, forgive us (and it is US and not just BP). We are about to destroy one of your unbelievable gifts to us, and we are having a hard time facing that fact — and ourselves
I have been just sad and crying for days…
SectarianSofa
@kay:
I agree.
It seems like (among the political narrative people, everywhere in the press) the bar is set higher for Presidents who appear to be competent, and appear to care. For Bush, Jesus was just going to take care of shit after a certain point.
SectarianSofa
@Elie:
Hrm. Understandable, but maybe try to focus on doing the doable that is good. It’s people who are depressed by stuff like this that are most needed, by larger society, to keep their own sanity. Smile at the saint and the sinner, and keep on going. Of course, I’m not too much into the saints and sinners scene, but we are always in some community, helping or hindering.
skippy
just wanted to say that you still write the funniest headlines, doug!
walking on sunshine!
Mr Furious
@Nick: Either you’re missing, or I’m not effectively making my point …
I’m not saying that the Navy could have done anything that BP didn’t or couldn’t. Or that Obama should have grabbed a bullhorn and jumped onto a sub and personally fired a torpedo at the wellhead.
What I am saying (and cleek hit on this also) is that Obama is looking ineffective, and I don’t think it’s going to get any better for him if this keeps going.
And if in the end, the solution ends up being destroying the wellhead in some fashion that appears to have been available in the early days—whether it was the best course at the time or not, or deemed too risky back then—the narrative is going to get much worse for him, fast.
Mr Furious
@Zuzu’s Petals:
I’m not sure they could have. But I’m sure the question will be asked, and the answer won’t matter, the narrative that he blew it might result anyway.
Nick
@Mr Furious: You know why he looks ineffective, BECAUSE HE CAN’T LEGALLY DO MUCH OF ANYTHING.
Karen
You know what Katrina did? It showed that it wasn’t just government incompetence that caused the damage and the deaths. It was willful negligence. They purposely let people die because they figured no one would care about poor black people. No one did. Until they were on the news 24-7 and in your face.
Now the country is learning what happens with no government oversight. You end up with a crappy economy. Wall Street and The Banks raped the country and John McCain and his buddy Phil Gramm, along with nearly most of the Republican Party and a lot of the Democratic provided the lube.
Which brings us to BP. Up until now, because of high oil and gas prices, the “drill baby drill” sentiment encouraged oil drilling off coastlines and Alaska. Conservatives in both parties were pressured to push for this. What wasn’t talked about was the gutting of government regulations. And the BP oil disaster happens and suddenly the country sees what can happen to their beaches. Their coastlines. What the “loony left” and green environmentalists had warned about was no longer an abstract idea, it could be seen.
And that is what Katrina and BP’s disasters have in common.
Corner Stone
@Nick: Dim Bulb – thou name Arte Nick.
Zuzu's Petals
@kay:
I see little that would lead me to believe that the unified command, which includes govt agencies and BP, isn’t doing everything possible. But then I tend to follow the more technical boards, like <a href="http://www.theoildrum.com" >The Oildrum.
Zuzu's Petals
@kay:
Nice research.
I see that Adm. Landry recently teleconferenced with various bloggers, including the guy from Think Progress. Seemed very straightforward and responsive about what was being done, what was possible, etc. Transcript and video links here.
Zuzu's Petals
@Nick:
In which case BP would have to repay the government.
Zuzu's Petals
@kay:
Good point. I hadn’t thought of the distinction that way, but yeah, excellent point.
Zuzu's Petals
@Mr Furious:
Well no, it wasn’t. The only permanent way to kill the well is by drilling alternate boreholes, which takes months.
The planned top kill is an extremely difficult manuever, which takes a lot of detailed planning, and is extremely risky. If it backfires it could, among other things, blow the casing and make the whole thing much worse. It is more of a last resort than an “early” choice.
Zuzu's Petals
@Mr Furious:
To tell you the truth, I haven’t seen that question asked by any credible source.
Zuzu's Petals
@Nick:
Not sure what you mean by that. If you’re thinking about the Oil Pollution Act, that mainly addresses liability issues, but I can’t imagine it would impede the federal government’s ability to respond to an emergency.
I’d guess it’s more of a capability problem…as pointed out in other comments and links, it is private industry that may have the best resources to deal with parts of the problem.
mclaren
DougJ, you’re probably reversing cause & effect. The new narrative of the drunk-driving C student’s maladministration emerged between late 2004 and 2006 as Iraq broke down into chaos and Katrina revealed the gross incompetence of the people in the White House.
Katrina served to crystallize that general narrative.
If you want a peek at the previous narrative confected by Rove’s propaganda, peruse Peggy Noonan’s classic 19 February 2004 piece of butt-snorkeling, “Broken Glass Democrats.”
A series of events shattered Rove’s narrative from 2005-2006.
USA Today’s 2005 front page feature “Piecing Together the Weapons That Weren’t” hit pretty hard at the “competence” myth. The daily headlines “Chaos in Iraq,” and “New round of violence erupts in Baghdad” (you know ’em, you’ve read ’em) destroyed the fantasy of “Mission Accomplished.” A good timeline for Iraq in 2005 appeared in The Guardian, here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/page/0,12438,1394573,00.html
Esquire magazine’s 31 October 2005 piece “Greetings From Idiot America” struck a nerve with a lot of folks. The hard-hitting book The Republican War On Science came out in 2005, and Mike Judge’s film Idiocracy followed up in a one-two punch.
When you put all those converging threads together, you get an overall narrative that tells us the drunk driving C student’s White House was animal house on crack. Prior to that, you had a narrative that claimed the drunk driving C student and his torturer sidekick were “Lincolnian” (George Will) and distinguished by “normality” (Peggy Noonan) and competence:
[Peggy Noonan, op.cit.]
Katrina was just the crystal dropped into a supersaturated solution of ignorance and stupidity and incompetence and criminality that precipitated the truth out of all those Rovian lies.
goatchowder
This is a private-sector failure.
It is BP’s KATRINA!! It is the OIL INDUSTRY’S KATRINA!
Take that, narrative whores of the beltway!
The failure in 2005 was of the ARMY Corps of Engineers and of PUBLIC flood-control systems that had been neglected and underfunded by government-hating, incompetent Republicans. It wa s failure of government, of which Bush was the head. The response was the reponsibility of “heckuva job Brownie” and his horse-riding rich buddies, and of Bush, and they botched it.
Let’s look at 2010. This was a CORPORATE-OWNED, CORPORATE-BUILT, CORPORATE-OPERATED drilling rig, and the response has been to date has been the responsibility of, completely dominated by, and tightly controlled by… corporations. They won’t even release fucking videotapes or data on time! This is not a government failure. It’s a corporate failure.
It’s a Katrina alright. Just as 2005 showed the horrifying reality of what happens when you shrink government down until you can drown it in a bathtub, the 2010 disaster shows… the horrifying reality of what happens when you shrink government down until you can drown it in a bathtub.
Shell Goddamnit
I have no idea where this “BP trying to save the well” thing came from – that is not why we’re in trouble. We’re in trouble because we let them drill the damned thing in the first place, without failsafes or careful oversight, but once drilled, at that depth everything is dicey. I mean, they’re talking NUKE to stop it, for fuck’s sake. Maybe I’m too close to it, I work with oil spill info every day, but I have never had the impression that delay was caused by BP being allowed to focus on saving the well.
Where Obama’s administration fell down post-explosion is not forcing BP to make ongoing information available. BP was in charge of the information flow and was even allowed to keep their dispersant recipe secret until enviros screamed loud enough (and BP was then forced to use a less-toxic formulation). They were allowed to keep their geyser video to themselves and to make their low low lowball estimate of the magnitude the standard. Gov’t oversight needs to be real oversight, with all available information – and the enviros etc are then providing oversight of the oversight, so all that information needs to be public.
Shell Goddamnit
And also, it is true, industry has the equipment, government does not. BP has to do the work because they have the ability – but they need to be directed by gov’t, and held accountable by gov’t. This is totally aside from any legal issues, which I can’t imagine would actually prevent the administration from doing something if it could.
Mr Furious
Gibbs was on with Sheiffer this morning talking that up—that Admiral Coast Guard was directing BP’s operation. And he just repeated over and over that everything possible is being done 24/7.
It wasn’t very convincing or reassuring.
At all.
—
Look, I’m an Obama fan, and I fought back on this stuff early on after the spill. But they are really taking it in the teeth on this now, and I’m not sure any of the defenses are going to salvage this. I was waiting for Gibbs to make the legal argument Nick mentioned above, but he didn’t.
Gibbs might as well have been Ari Fleischer with the crap he was spouting—it just comes across as spin. He didn’t do Obama any favors, and I was looking for a positive.
Mr Furious
@Shell Goddamnit:
I’ll tell you where it comes from…
It comes from a news report like the one I heard last week on NPR. One that explains any of the processes BP is trying (insert tube, top hat, whatever) culminating in “pumping the leak to a tanker on the surface.”
Anyone who hears that and doesn’t think, “Well, isn’t that convenient for BP…” is insufficiently cynical.
One specific report mentioned a concern about sucking up too much water with the oil. So. Fucking. What. Suck it all up and filter it out later. That sounded immediately to me like a concern that the product was being compromised.
I don’t think any of those reactions make me a conspiracy nut.
It also doesn’t mean I’m not wrong, but I think it makes perfectly clear where people are getting the idea that BP is worried about oil first, leak second.
The next (somewhat) logical step for many people is “what does Obama know and what is he doing about it?”
Again, not necessarily fair or accurate, but an understandable reaction.
Zuzu's Petals
@Mr Furious:
Which also happens to be the most practical, immediately effective way to divert the leak.
Remember that ALL original efforts were aimed at shutting off the well.
The only discussion I’ve heard is the concern that dilution of the oil/gas by seawater may make it a bit more difficult to determine the actual volume of the leak. After all, drilled oil is typically separated from water and other matter during the collection and refining process, so “compromising the product” wouldn’t seem to be a major concern.
Perhaps you can link to the report you’re thinking of?
Corner Stone
I don’t know the truth of it all but ISTM if BP had the capability to cap that damn well off they would have done so immediately then come back around for a second dip later.
IMO, it’s just not reality to think BP weighed several hundred million dollars of oil against several billion dollars of damages.
But…who the hell knows with these damn psychopaths anymore?
Shell Goddamnit
As far as I can tell, and IMO, of course: The administration has plenty to answer for – allowing the drilling at all, allowing the drilling to go forward without a complete EIS, allowing BP to control information, to spin and do damage control, and to keep proprietary information secret, etc. Not stepping in and doing the work is not one of them; and neither is letting BP say “fuck the Atlantic, save the well!” If it keeps pouring forth at the current rate for three months and the loop current picks it up & sends it north, we could actually have the entire Atlantic contaminated.
The siphon is of course inadequate, and indeed, about all it’s done is tell us that the magnitude of the geyser is severe. The amount they’re siphoning is about we were given as worst-case-scenario for the entire spill.
It’s horribly frustrating, and it’s tempting to think that something must be preventing them from Fixing It, but I’m afraid that Something is the goddamn depth, not BP’s intransigence. A pity, because BP intransigence we could fix, maybe – but the depth is a hard boundary.
Mr Furious
@Zuzu’s Petals: Sigh. I’m not trying to go round and round with any of you. I think in the big picture we actually agree. It is entirely likely that Obama and BP are in fact doing everything possible. This is certainly an unprecedented situation in scale and in the insurmountable hurdle that is the depth this is occuring, and I would absolutely believe that there’s nothing more than can happen.
But I am quite pissed off about the whole thing. Have been from day one. It is fair to say that at this point, some of that anger is turning towards Obama—but check my name—that’s typical, and not always correct or fair… :-)
I’m not disputing any of the assertions from you, Nick or anyone else. You may all be correct, and anyone who says other wise, wrong. That’s not the point I’m making. This thread started out talking about narratives, and that’s where I’m trying to have this discussion.
My original point about the Navy is that this will be a nightmare for Obama if what ultimately ends up happening is something such as blowing up the well that WILL APPEAR to have been something that could have been done far sooner—whether that is realistic, or not.
It certainly makes sense that the only way to collect the oil until the leak is stopped is aboard tankers. That’s obvious. What follows is that BP now has a tanker filled with oil. You seeing my point?
It’s already starting. Palin was on television this morning rolling out the Obama is a slave to Big Oil Theory. Actually claiming that he received more campaign cash from oil companies than Bush ever did, and openly aasserting that that might be the reason for his slow, ineffective reaction.
Is she full of shit? Certainly. A fucking idiot? Yep. She actually used the word “doggone” in her accusation. But, the fact remains that the media is content to treat her Twitter account like an AP feed, so this may rapidly become fully one half of the he-said/she-said narrative.
And as much as I like not having a “gut” President, there is something to be said for someone flying off the handle about something that is an outrage to much of the country. Calm and cool has a shelf life in this type of situation.
Will it change anything but perception for Obama to rip someone’s head off? No. But he might need to.
Zuzu's Petals
@Mr Furious:
Okay, I see your point about narratives and perception.
But I also see plenty of theories floated (pardon the pun) here and in other threads, that just aren’t always based on fact or logic.
I’m just a stickler for getting good information and letting the discussion go from there. We’re supposed to be the rational ones.
Zuzu's Petals
@Mr Furious:
Oh, and you are correct that Palin is full of crap. Even the WSJ says so:
Glad to see the administration didn’t waste any time in pushing back:
kwAwk
;”
Shell Goddamnit
Unfortunately I went away and read a DKos diary that made me think that the administration might deserve the “Obama’s Katrina” tag, goddamnit: http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2010/5/11/865387/-Fishgrease:-DKos-Booming-School
10 days old, no update, but christ almighty does it piss me off
Mr Furious
@Shell Goddamnit: Damn. Those are some good diaries. At this point I believe that guy over anything or anyone else I’ve heard.