Republican governors of Gulf Coast states, like Louisiana's Bobby Jindal, have lately criticized President Obama for not being quick enough to intervene in the Deepwater Horizon disaster.
Nate Silver touches on the oddness of the Republican line:
On the other hand, it's not exactly clear what the critique is. The most widespread criticism of Obama is simply that he's expanding government too much, too fast (in other words, that he's too liberal). In the case of the oil spill, however, the prevailing sentiment seems to be that Obama was not quick enough to get the government involved, and was too deferential to BP. I don't mean to oversimplify this -- I recognize that there's a perfectly coherent intellectual position which holds, for instance, that deficits are a huge problem, but also that the White House needed to intervene more forcefully in the Gulf. Nevertheless, the criticisms have been somewhat orthogonal to the usual ones that the Administration receives.
The undirected frustrations Americans feel about the economy are only reinforced by this slow-moving, ridiculously huge catastrophe, and that could be really bad for the Democrats in November.
--Monica Potts
