The idea that the horrific environmental catastrophe in the Gulf is somehow the Obama administration's Katrina has been floated in both the mainstream media and the blogosphere for several days now.
While it's perfectly fair to criticize various aspects of the Obama administration's response to the oil spill, I would like to remind everyone what "Bush's Katrina" problem actually was. It wasn't just a terrible disaster happening on the Louisiana Gulf coast.
It was, in many ways the turning point for the Bush administration, a revelation of incompetence from which that administration never fully recovered politically.
The main difference between Bush's Katrina disaster and Obama's Deepwater Horizon disaster is simple: What Bush could have done, and should have done, was easy and well known. In the horrific week after Katrina hit New Orleans and the levies broke, we the public watched helplessly while thousands upon thousands of the people of New Orleans begged on live television for water. The federal government, in all its majesty, under George W. Bush was incapable of flying a helicopter to the Convention Center and setting down a palet of bottled water. Either that, or they just didn't care. George Bush was spotted eating birthday cake and clowning around with a guitar. The Bush administration was either incapable or too callous to drop or deliver MREs to people who eventually died of thirst and starvation. The armed forces of the United States of America under Bush administration seemed incapable of arriving in New Orleans as quickly as the Canadians. Foreign governments offered to provide assistance, but at the State Department, it seemed no one was home to answer the phone while Condi Rice was seen buying high priced shoes in a New York City department store by day and attending a musical comedy on Broadway. Vice President Dick Cheney was in an undisclosed location, on vacation, shooting small feathered or furry animals.
The Obama administration's problems with Deepwater Horizon are different. In 1964, in a Scientific American article on arms control, J. B. Wiesner and H. F. York wrote the disturbing but prophetic line: "It is our considered professional judgment that this dilemma has no technical solution." Deepwater Horizon is not Obama's Katrina for the simple reason that this is not a problem -- like delivering water to people dying of thirst on the streets of a major American city -- to which there is an easy solution that everyone is aware of. The Obama administration faces a problem to which, right now, there is no solution. That's different from playing the guitar, eating cake, buying shoes, watching Spamalot and just generally being on vacation while a catastrophe unfolds.
We are horrified by what is going on in the Gulf not just because the Obama administration isn't "solving the problem" but because we are increasingly aware that at present, there is presently no technical or scientific or engineering solution to the problem that BP created.