shouting loudly

There’s a post up on DailyKos right now with the latest poll data on Obama and the Gulf Spill.  They reference a very nice piece by John Harwood about the political implications (or perhaps the lack thereof) of the spill.  At the risk of piling on, I want to make one small point:

This oil spill is a tragedy.  We don’t know the scale of the tragedy yet, but the options appear to range between “really really big” and “cataclysmic.”  It’s occupying a large portion of the media agenda, as well it should, and it appears to have attracted the national conversation like no environmentally-related tragedy has since Katrina.

When polling on this issue, it seems to me that pollsters face a pretty basic issue.  Do we, the people, approve of the Administration’s handling of the disaster?  Well, the oil is still gushing, and we’d reaaaaaaally like it if SOMEONE would (pretty please) stop it from gushing.  So that’s probably a no.  Like the Saturday Night Live skit from last year, the baseline reaction that any poll is going to pick up right now is “Fix It!”

That’s different from public opinion on Katrina.  There, the hurricane had ended.  A disaster had occurred and the question was “do you blame the federal government, local officials, both, neither, etc.”  In this case, the disaster is ongoing. And while we’d all like someone to Fix It, it’s unclear whether we think that’s the government’s role, BP’s role.  We expect the government to build levees.  We don’t generally expect it to plug leaks miles into the ocean floor.

My point is that, like Harwood, I’d hold off on calling this “Obama’s Katrina” or focusing on electoral implications just yet.  And certainly, any poll data discussing approval of “Obama’s handling of the situation” should be viewed with suspicion at this point.  Polls are useful for discerning changes in the gut reaction of the populace.  That gut reaction right now can be summed up as “my God, can somebody do something, please?!?”  So long as the oil is still spilling, any poll question about the spill is going to pick up negatives because the situation just continues to be alarmingly, depressingly bad.