Maybe we should call him President BP Obama?

The incomparable Michael Barone writes,

Looking back on all the presidential contests held since Obama as a Columbia undergraduate was parroting leftist criticisms of Ronald Reagan, it can be argued that Republicans have won the elections that turned on ideology, and that Democrats have won the elections that turned on competence.

Republican victories in 1984, 1988 and 2004 were clearly endorsements of Ronald Reagan’s and George W. Bush’s policies. Democratic victories in 1992 and 2008 were indictments of the two George Bushes for incompetence and in 1996 an endorsement of the competence of Bill Clinton.

The one election in this period that is hard to classify was in 2000 and had a split verdict, with the Democrat winning the popular vote and the Republican the Electoral College.

That makes sense, if you think about it; polls have pretty consistently shown the US to be a center-right country, closer ideologically to the Republicans (though not by a lot), but the Democrats have pretty consistently shown themselves more capable at actually running government, and particularly at doing so in a way that’s consistent with their ideology. Given that the ideological content of the President’s policies is not all that popular right now, anything that makes him and his party look less than competent is bad news—and it’s starting to look like this disaster in the Gulf could be very bad news indeed. Dick Morris wrote in The Hill,

Conservatives are so enraged at Obama’s socialism and radicalism that they are increasingly surprised to learn that he is incompetent as well. The sight of his blithering and blustering while the most massive oil spill in history moves closer to America’s beaches not only reminds one of Bush’s terrible performance during Katrina, but calls to mind Jimmy Carter’s incompetence in the face of the hostage crisis.

America is watching the president alternate between wringing his hands in helplessness and pointing his finger in blame when he should be solving the most pressing environmental problem America has faced in the past 50 years. We are watching generations of environmental protection swept away as marshes, fisheries, vacation spots, recreational beaches, wetlands, hatcheries and sanctuaries fall prey to the oil spill invasion. And, all the while, the president acts like a spectator, interrupting his basketball games only to excoriate BP for its failure to contain the spill.

Of course, Morris has been anti-Obama all the way along, so it’s not as if there was any support here for the President to lose; but how about Peggy Noonan, a certified Obamacan? From her, we got the anguished cry, “He was supposed to be competent!”

The original sin in my view is that as soon as the oil rig accident happened the president tried to maintain distance between the gusher and his presidency. He wanted people to associate the disaster with BP and not him. When your most creative thoughts in the middle of a disaster revolve around protecting your position, you are summoning trouble. When you try to dodge ownership of a problem, when you try to hide from responsibility, life will give you ownership and responsibility the hard way. . . .

I wonder if the president knows what a disaster this is not only for him but for his political assumptions. His philosophy is that it is appropriate for the federal government to occupy a more burly, significant and powerful place in America—confronting its problems of need, injustice, inequality. But in a way, and inevitably, this is always boiled down to a promise: “Trust us here in Washington, we will prove worthy of your trust.” Then the oil spill came and government could not do the job, could not meet the need, in fact seemed faraway and incapable: “We pay so much for the government and it can’t cap an undersea oil well!”

This is what happened with Katrina, and Katrina did at least two big things politically. The first was draw together everything people didn’t like about the Bush administration, everything it didn’t like about two wars and high spending and illegal immigration, and brought those strands into a heavy knot that just sat there, soggily, and came to symbolize Bushism. The second was illustrate that even though the federal government in our time has continually taken on new missions and responsibilities, the more it took on, the less it seemed capable of performing even its most essential jobs. Conservatives got this point—they know it without being told—but liberals and progressives did not. They thought Katrina was the result only of George W. Bush’s incompetence and conservatives’ failure to “believe in government.” But Mr. Obama was supposed to be competent.

Remarkable too is the way both BP and the government, 40 days in, continue to act shocked, shocked that an accident like this could have happened. If you’re drilling for oil in the deep sea, of course something terrible can happen, so you have a plan on what to do when it does.

How could there not have been a plan? How could it all be so ad hoc, so inadequate, so embarrassing? We’re plugging it now with tires, mud and golf balls? . . .

Republicans should beware, and even mute their mischief. We’re in the middle of an actual disaster. When they win back the presidency, they’ll probably get the big California earthquake. And they’ll probably blow it. Because, ironically enough, of a hard core of truth within their own philosophy: When you ask a government far away in Washington to handle everything, it will handle nothing well.

Of course, the President and other Democrats are trying to blame this one, too, on George W. Bush; but it just won’t wash. President Bush could have blamed 9/11 on Bill Clinton—if President Clinton had done his job better, al’Qaeda would never have been able to launch the attack (and Osama bin Laden might not even have been around to try). President Clinton could have spent all kinds of time at the beginning of his term blaming George H. W. Bush for the state of the economy. Ronald Reagan could have done the same with Jimmy Carter, since he inherited an economic mess that might have been worse than the one we’re in. Gerald Ford certainly would have had a great deal to blame on Richard Nixon. The list goes on. None of them did it; they took responsibility, rolled up their sleeves, and went to work solving the problems they’d been given to solve. That’s what Presidents do.

At the rate he’s going, we could expect to find Barack Obama in 2012 still campaigning against President Bush, still blaming everything bad on President Bush, as if he’d never been elected; this incessant blame game is indeed change, but not the kind of change people wanted—it’s unseemly. He needs to accept, as Noonan wrote months ago, that it’s his rubble now. That’s part of being the president, just as it’s part of being the captain of a ship: whatever happens, fair or not, it’s on you, and you need to step up and deal with it. Yeah, you get blamed for things that aren’t your fault. That’s life, it’s happened to every other president; you wanted the job, you got the job—all of it, not just the good parts. President Obama seems to be trying to only accept the good parts, and that has to stop.

To some extent, none of this should be at all surprising; at the time of his election, Barack Obama had no track record of successful executive experience to support the idea that he would in fact be a competent executive rather than just someone who talked a good game. I expected, wrongly, that we would see a major terrorist attempt on U.S. soil during his first year in office, as we had with his two immediate predecessors; I’m deeply glad to have been wrong about that, but not at all glad that the “ineffective, dithering response” I predicted to such a crisis has been the sort of response we’ve seen to the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Indeed, it’s been worse than I thought, because as well as ineffective and dithering (even to the point of hamstringing the state of Louisiana’s efforts to protect itself), the President’s response has also been remarkably disengaged, which is something I would not have predicted.

Taken all in all, it’s enough to make one wonder—something which, as Sarah Palin noted, the media certainly would have wondered about a Republican president—if there’s any significance here to the fact that

During his time in the Senate and while running for president, Obama received a total of $77,051 from the oil giant and is the top recipient of BP PAC and individual money over the past 20 years, according to financial disclosure records.

The administration and its allies have been trying to deny, play down, and obfuscate this fact, but the records show the falsity of their denials, and the fact that other oil companies have given more to other politicians really isn’t on point: the only actors here are the Obama administration and BP, and President Obama has been America’s biggest beneficiary of BP money. Has this influenced the way the White House has treated BP in all this? Did it play a part in their decision to “keep a close watch” on BP’s efforts and otherwise let the company deal with the mess as it chose? We don’t know; we ought to. The media ought to be asking, and they aren’t. Eventually, those questions are going to have to be faced, and answered. Right now, it certainly looks as if all that BP money to Barack Obama bought a fair bit of accommodation and slack from his administration.

As a final note, I think the guy who’s come off best in this disaster is James Carville. I’ve never cared much for the man, but I have to respect his honesty and passion on this one . . . this whole story makes me sick, and I’ve never even been to Louisiana—I can only imagine his agony at what’s happening to his home state.