Steady as the criticism flows
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
Barack 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 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 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. 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, 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 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, 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 Bush’s strength.
When Hurricane Katrina hit, Franklin calculated,
Bush’s approval rating was already dropping by 1 percentage point a
month. The rate of decline doubled in the wake of Katrina’s televised
images of human suffering.
Fortunately for 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 is the administration’s effort to
publicize its attempts to respond and hold BP accountable. That effort
included 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 Obama,
because “they overwhelmingly see the president making this his top
priority.”
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. McInturff noted that Katrina, by
eroding Bush’s reputation for competence, had deeper long-term
ramifications for his presidency than were apparent in fall 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 Obama’s standing cuts
both ways. If BP hasn’t eroded it, the administration’s signal
achievement – passage of health care legislation – hasn’t much enhanced
it, either, as joblessness hovers near 10 percent.
And one thing Democratic strategists agree on:
they need Obama’s approval rating to move higher to ease their Election
Day pain.
As Obama visited the gulf this month, 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.
© 2010 New York Times
