Oil has gushed into the Gulf of Mexico for eight weeks now — and sent a bipartisan wave of criticism crashing into the White House.
Allies and adversaries have accused President Obama of reacting too slowly, deferring too much to BP, displaying too little emotion and demonstrating incompetent management. Fans of historical analogy compare his performance to ineffectual responses by President Jimmy Carter during the Iran hostage crisis, and President George W. Bush during Hurricane Katrina.
In other words, the crisis in the gulf has become a first-class political crisis, too.
Right?
Maybe not — or at least, not so far.
Polls show that American voters give Mr. Obama the same mixed evaluation as before the spill. They like him personally but have reservations about his policies. Roughly half approve of his performance in the Oval Office, about where the president has remained since last fall, after his initial honeymoon with Americans faded.
“It’s hard to make the case that the BP oil spill has a substantial impact on Obama’s job approval,” said Bill McInturff, a Republican pollster.
Charles Franklin, an analyst for pollster.com, has tried to make it. Mr. Franklin examined polls that run “hot” for Mr. Obama, like the Washington Post/ABC News survey that recently measured a 52 percent job approval rating.
He parsed polls that run colder, like Rasmussen Reports, whose automated phone survey recorded 47 percent approval over the weekend. Neither has moved significantly since the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded on April 20.
Gallup’s daily “tracking” has shown a slight decline. But after examining the surveys used in the tracking, and finding scant movement in other polls, Mr. Franklin isn’t convinced of genuine deterioration beyond routine survey-to-survey “noise.”
“I see current approval about in line with the fluctuations we’ve seen all year for each pollster,” said Mr. Franklin, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin. “Little evidence of real change.”
Presidential job approval is the most-watched statistic in American politics, a proxy for the chief executive’s power to persuade lawmakers, capacity to win re-election and ability to help or hurt in midterm elections.
It rarely moves rapidly. Because Americans know so much about presidents already, new information must be extraordinarily powerful to change impressions.
National security crises can do it when the public rallies around the president. After 9/11, Mr. Bush’s approval rating quickly jumped to the 80s from the 50s.
Political fiascos can have the opposite effect, if not as dramatically. By mid-2005, setbacks in Iraq, a star-crossed effort to overhaul Social Security and the right-to-die controversy involving Terri Schiavo were sapping Mr. Bush’s strength.
When Hurricane Katrina hit, Mr. Franklin calculated, Mr. Bush’s approval rating was already dropping by one percentage point a month. The rate of decline doubled in the wake of Katrina’s televised images of human suffering.
Fortunately for Mr. Obama, the BP spill hasn’t produced comparable images. Also shielding him is the presence of BP, a corporate giant in an unpopular industry, as a lightning rod.
A third factor is the administration’s effort to publicize its attempts to respond and hold BP accountable. That effort will include another trip to the gulf on Monday and a presidential address on Tuesday night.
“His standing with the American people is not being negatively affected,” said Joel Benenson, a pollster for Mr. Obama, because “they overwhelmingly see the president making this his top priority.”
Mr. Obama may be sustaining damage in subtler ways. Gallup’s slight decline could prove the leading edge of a trend that shows up later in other surveys.
The spill could also increase White House vulnerability to future setbacks. Mr. McInturff noted that Katrina, by eroding Mr. Bush’s reputation for competence, had deeper long-term ramifications for his presidency than were apparent in the fall of 2005.
Moreover, attention to the spill has cost the administration opportunities to communicate on what Democrats want to be their 2010 centerpiece: recovery from the Great Recession.
The spill “adds to the burdens he carries,” said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center. “But none of it is as central to judgments about him as the economy and unemployment.”
Indeed, the stickiness of Mr. Obama’s standing cuts both ways. If BP has not eroded it, the administration’s signal achievement — passage of health care legislation — has not enhanced it much, either, as joblessness hovers near 10 percent.
And one thing Democratic strategists agree on: they need Mr. Obama’s approval rating to move higher to ease their Election Day pain.
Earlier this month, as Mr. Obama visited the gulf, the Labor Department reported that just 41,000 new private sector jobs had been created in May, down from more than 200,000 in April. That flow rate is likely to prove most critical to the president and his party this fall.
Posted By: Richard Kigel
Monday, June 14th 2010 at 12:48PM
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