Calling the Obamacare rollout the president's 'Katrina moment' is absurd

 

Two men paddle in high water after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005.

Katrina killed 1,800 people, and it didn't end Bush's presidency. Obama's big problems are House Republicans and the economy..

Comparing the failed rollout of Barack Obama's signature health care legislation to President George W Bush's bungled handling of Hurricane Katrina is, how shall we say, problematic. The most obvious reason is that 1,800 people lost their lives during Hurricane Katrina.

 

Thankfully, no one has yet lost their life because they couldn't log on to healthcare.gov.  And for those who were able to navigate the site and buy coverage, they can now look forward to additional years of good health and economic security. That's a very different outcome – and a much more positive one – then what one might expect from one of the worst natural disasters in American History.

 

But the crassness of persistent Obamacare-Katrina comparisons is only one part of the problem. When political observers argue, as the New York Times did, that President Obama's website issue "threatens the rest of his agenda but also raises questions about his competence in the same way that the Bush administration's botched response to Hurricane Katrina undermined any semblance of Republican efficiency", they are making an argument that is grounded almost entirely on a myth.

 

Hurricane Katrina didn't destroy George W Bush's presidency. Iraq and a faltering economy did. Along the same lines, Obamacare's woes are highly unlikely to destroy Barack Obama's presidency. An economy that continues to putter along with high unemployment and mediocre growth will keep his approval ratings in negative territory. And truth be told, that agenda wasn't going anywhere anyway.

 

To understand why the "Katrina moment" argument is such a fallacy the above chart, which aggregates Bush's second term approval rating, provides compelling evidence. A Category 3 storm hit the Gulf Coast in August 2005, thousands died, many others were uprooted from their homes or lost everything. The New Orleans Superdome became a house of horrors, the country was introduced to the over-his-head Fema director Michael Brown ... and yet George W Bush's approval ratings barely moved. Instead, they simply continued the downward spiral that had begun just a few months after his second term inauguration.

 

If there was a more visible drop-off in Bush's support anywhere, it comes in the spring of 2006.

What happened then? War deaths in Iraq increased dramatically, both among US troops and also Iraqi civilians. That is very much consistent with political science research, which, as a general rule, finds that economic factors, major scandals, wars and battle deaths move approval ratings, as opposed to one-off events, no matter how much pundits want to hype them.

 

Ironically, Bush was a beneficiary of these exact factors. His approval ratings shot up after September 11th (it was both the strongest polling rally in Gallup's history – 35 points – and the longest lasting). They remained high through the initial stages of Iraq War. By 2005 into 2006, as the conflict worsened, his numbers began to plunge, particularly as violence in Iraq increased. They took an even further hit when the economy started to go south at the end of his presidency, finishing up at a extraordinarily dismal 26%.