Deepwater Horizon is not Obama’s Katrina, because Katrina was not Bush’s.

The Katrina hurricane should have been addressed by state and local governments and residents who didn’t evacuate despite warnings of the impending storm.

Similarly, the Gulf spill should be dealt with by the company that caused it and has the best understanding of how to end it, British Petroleum.  The federal government’s role should be to adjudicate claims against BP.

Of course Obama and every liberal on the planet have been hollering for years that Bush was personally responsible for the Katrina-induced death of every man, woman, and crawfish in New Orleans.

Conservatives’ longstanding wish that liberals please stop trying to put the government in charge of everything recently prompted Frank Rich to sneer, “The only good news from the oil spill is that when catastrophe strikes, even some hard-line conservatives, like Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, start begging for the federal government to act, and act big.”

Rich’s solution is nonetheless preferable to two other New York Times columnists’ strategy for Obama, which is: to cry.

Maureen Dowd counsels Obama to offer President Clinton a job: “Bill would certainly know how to gush at a gusher gone haywire.  Let him resume a cameo role as Feeler in Chief.”  Tom Friedman, in his column “Malia for President,” advises that “the most important thing Mr. Obama can do is react to this spill as a child would.”  read more »