Mary Kate Cary

I’m back from a long visit with my cousins in Northern Ireland--I’ve got more of them there than I do here--and the highlight of the trip was walking the ancient walls of Derry with my cousin. For years he was the economic development officer for the city, a devout Catholic with a Protestant surname who appealed to both sides in a city known around the world for its polarization and divisions.

We stood in the square in front of the Guildhall, where only days earlier the Saville commission released its long-awaited report on the Bloody Sunday Inquiry. That report, published after the longest and most expensive inquiry in British history, exonerated the 14 unarmed Catholic protestors who were killed by British troops on the Bogside area of town in 1972 in what would be the Irish equivalent of the Kent State killings.

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By Mary Kate Cary, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

A new media narrative has developed, that President Obama doesn’t “get it” when it comes to understanding and sharing the outrage of the American people. The story first started with the public outcry over the AIG bonuses, continued through the shock of the Christmas Day underwear bomber, and now has grown with the horror at the scale of the devastation caused by the BP oil leak. His cerebral, “No Drama Obama” style of leadership is playing against him publicly in the short term—in poll after poll, his approval ratings are dropping—and in the long term, it’s feeding a larger sense among Americans that government at all levels is failing them.

“We’re incompetent,” Oklahoma GOP Sen. Tom Coburn said recently, referring to the public’s perception of Congress. But what’s going on is bigger than Congress or even the federal government. As Americans see failing schools, a lack of border security, continuing crises in the financial markets, and two wars that have dragged on for years, it’s easy to see why voters are so disillusioned. The worst oil leak in American history has slowly become a metaphor for everything wrong with government.

[See which members of Congress get the most money from the oil and gas industry.]

That’s why Obama needs to “pivot,” as political consultants say, and reverse the narrative. Here are five ways the president could take control of the BP story:

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By Mary Kate Cary, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

A new Washington Post/ABC News poll shows that two-thirds of Americans have a negative view of how the federal government is handling the BP oil leak--which tops the number of people who said the same thing about the federal government’s response to Katrina. In this week’s poll, 69 percent said they had a negative view and 28 percent had a positive one of the federal response; in the 2005 poll two weeks after Katrina hit, 62 percent of Americans held a negative view, and 38 percent positive.

It’s tempting to say that those numbers are attributable to the fact that this disaster in many ways is worse than Katrina, in terms of long-term effects on the environment and the possibly widespread damage threatening the Eastern seaboard this fall. The poll shows that pretty much everyone, regardless of party, agrees that this is a major disaster, a fact that could be driving some of the overall disapproval numbers. And certainly President Obama has come across as disconnected and disinterested at times, further driving up his negatives. But comparing these polls is a little like comparing apples and oranges. What makes things different this time is that the government’s response has been better than it was during Katrina; in the Katrina situation, there was no corporate culprit to further aggravate voters. And the two polls were taken at different intervals after the two disasters (14 days vs. 45 days).

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By Mary Kate Cary, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

How did it all start going wrong for President Obama on the BP oil leak? He may have done some things right on the substance behind the scenes, but now the media narrative is getting overwhelmingly negative against him. My theory: it all began when Rep. Ed Markey, in a May 19 hearing with BP executives, asked that they put the live feed of the gusher on their website for everyone to see. That’s when the “optics” starting setting the tone. Having Americans watch “spillcam” for themselves changed everything. The live video stream of the leak quickly became one of the hottest searches on the Web, and cable news used it as filler during the daily chatfest. Here’s how Hank Stuever of the Washington Post described it:

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