What happened to Obama's passion for the Gulf?
By Colleen Carroll Campbell

When President Barack Obama was still candidate Obama, few issues inspired more passionate outrage from Illinois' junior senator than the devastation on the Gulf Coast. Obama routinely blasted then-President George W. Bush for his "badly botched" and "achingly slow response" to the wreckage wrought by Hurricane Katrina.

Some said Bush did not deserve the bulk of the blame because local and state officials who had primary legal responsibility for addressing Katrina's fallout bungled the job and impeded federal efforts to intervene. Others argued that the hurricane was an unprecedented natural disaster for which the president should not be held responsible.

Obama dismissed such excuses. Americans have a right to expect "that our government will be prepared, will protect us and will respond in a catastrophe," he said. Joining the chorus of Democrats who blasted Bush for taking his time to visit the Gulf, Obama charged that "there is not a sense of urgency out of this White House." Bush's "unconscionable ineptitude" represented nothing less, Obama said, than a "catastrophic failure of leadership."

What Obama knew then — and seems to have forgotten since — is that presidential leadership is about optics as well as action. Even if fixing a problem is not entirely within a president's power, Americans want to see that their commander-in-chief is moving swiftly and decisively in a crisis to fix what he can and is maintaining focus even after the media circus has moved on.

That is not what Americans have seen since April 20, when the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explosion killed 11 workers and resulted in the largest offshore oil spill in U.S. history. Instead of leading the charge to avert further damage, Obama has spent two months dithering and distancing himself from the unfolding catastrophe.

Although addressing this spill in federal waters falls squarely within the scope of the federal government whose power Obama is typically eager to expand, his administration spent the first few weeks after the explosion treating it as the exclusive problem of BP. It took Obama 12 days to pay his first visit to the scene — three times as long as it took Bush to see Katrina's wreckage firsthand — and Obama has visited the golf course more than the Gulf since then. Images from his few Gulf visits have been uninspiring: While unemployed fishermen and their families are seen huddling at food pantries, weeping in churches and scrambling to save wildlife washing up on their tar-studded shores, we see Obama slurping Sno-Cones and mugging for photos on the beach.

Criticized for his lack of engagement, Obama has reacted with a mixture of whiny defensiveness ("I can't dive down there and plug the hole") and affected outrage (about his need to "know whose [expletive] to kick"). His few attempts at showing mastery of the situation — including last week's widely panned speech and his announcement of a $20 billion BP escrow fund — have not reversed public perception that he is unwilling or unable to address the worst environmental disaster in American history. A CBS/New York Times poll released this week found that nearly six in 10 Americans believe Obama has no plan to plug the leak and slightly more say his response has been "too slow."

Such concerns do not seem to register at the White House, where no public events related to the spill made the president's schedule this week. Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel did find time to blast BP CEO Tony Hayward for attending a yacht race last weekend — the same weekend that Obama spent watching a Washington Nationals baseball game and playing golf for four hours. Obama's spokesman defended his leisurely weekend by saying that it "probably does us all good as American citizens" to see the president having fun.

With as much oil spewing into the Gulf every few days as the total amount spilled by the Exxon Valdez and no end in sight, Gulf Coast residents might disagree. Not long ago, there was a junior senator who shared their sense of urgency, one whose website still features a pledge "that the federal government will never again allow such catastrophic failures in emergency planning and response." Too bad Obama's laser-like focus on the Gulf did not last past campaign season.

Colleen Carroll Campbell is a St. Louis-based author, former presidential speechwriter and television and radio host of "Faith & Culture" on EWTN. Her website is www.colleen-campbell.com.