Crisis Management

Paul Rubin's column in the Wall Street Journal provides a useful reminder and comparison to the Louisiana-area disasters that befell the Bush and Obama administrations: Hurricane Katrina under George Bush and Deepwater Horizon under Barack Obama.

The leftist media lambasted Bush for not doing more to ameliorate Katrina, ignoring the most profound fact: the law required Bush to provide disaster assistance only after Louisiana's Democratic governor Kathleen Blanco asked for help, which delayed the federal government from providing disaster assistance. One can lament the law, and lament that Blanco was disastrously slow in asking for help, but Bush acted aggressively to provide help when asked.

Obama, on the other hand, is dealing with solely a federal responsibility. His administration has been torn by its need to appease environmentalists, as evidenced its vacillating on the use of chemical dispersant's; by its need to assuage its union supporters, by not suspending the Jones Act which prohibits foreign ships from operating in American waters (the Netherlands has offered to send ships, since they have expertise in cleaning oil spills but needs the law suspended - which is what Bush did for Katrina); and by its need to maintain safety regulations by delaying the use of barges to skim oil until they had sufficient life preservers on board.

And the Academy Award for comedy (or is it tragedy?) should go to Obama for asking movie director James Cameron for technical advice on stopping the gusher because of his experience in filming underwater for his Titanic movie.

And the regulatory failure occurred on Obama's watch.

Instead, Obama's great "contribution" to the disaster has been to use the government's power to coerce BP, outside of a normal settlement process, to pony up $20 billion without going through normal legal channels such as settling a lawsuit.

If you think that's the one good thing Obama has done, realize that all businesses took note of the non-legal assault and will be that much more cautious in growing their businesses. The big reason we are having a jobless recovery in the private sector is the extraordinary uncertainty and fear the Obama administration has created in businesses due to its regulatory, legal, spending, and tax policies. The $20 billion from BP will only add to that fear.