The idiocy of the media's "Obama's Katrina" trope

There is an inherent laziness in the press, a habit of latching on to a single narrative and regurgitating it to the point at which death seems like the only sweet release from the bombardment of stupidity. The mainstream press has, in the last few years, shown a tendency to latch on to any sort of governing or natural disaster under the Obama Administration and refer to it as “Obama’s Katrina.” And if not say it directly, they show a willingness to spread such declarations by pundits or other politicos. The inherent properties of the disaster that was Katrina put it into a category all its own, transcending any sort of comparison, least of all to governing failures. Which is why my rancor was stirred by different sources drawing a comparison between the deadly, historic storm (which directly affected me as I was a New Orleans resident at the time) and the botched rollout of Obamacare.

Perhaps the most egregious would be Michael Shear’s story in the New York Times on Obama’s concession yesterday to allow the renewal for one year of plans that would have been canceled by the Affordable Care Act. Yes, it was a big rollback for Obama, one done in an attempt to save face after the cancelations directly contradicted what the president himself had previously said. That, plus the technical boondoggle of HealthCare.gov’s rollout make the already highly contentious health care reform, a PR disaster.

No one will disagree with that. But what Shearer lays out in the second paragraph of his story is what pushes the levels of taste and ridiculousness.

There’s a hint of truth in the comparison, I’ll admit: the complete lack of preparedness by an administration for a big task. But to compare a policy issue and glitch-filled technical rollout to a natural disaster that claimed the lives of nearly 2,000 Americans is not only tone-deaf, it’s preposterous. And it’s made all the more ludicrous by the fact it’s far from the first time this has happened. The cliche has become so prevalent it’s to the point it probably deserves its own Wikipedia page.

Other occurrences that have inspired the misguided comparison include:

The BP Oil Spill

The 2010 Haiti earthquake

The NSA scandal

Everything about the Spring of 2013: NSA, IRS, and Benghazi backlash

So, basically, the trope is this: any time there’s a scandal, apply the “Obama’s Katrina” tag to the scandal.

(There are two rather silly results that come out of this string of comparisons:

1) A recent poll showed that a third of Louisiana Republicans actually blame Obama for Katrina, which occurred three years before he was elected President.

2) The actual event that could be compared to Katrina was Hurricane Sandy, a storm that prompted such a response from Obama that only right-wing rabble-rousers pushed the comparison – Mike “Heckuva job, Brownie” Brown actually criticized the response for being “too fast” – and liberal pundits saw the response as something that helped pushed Obama over the top for his 2012 election win.)

But here’s why this is stupid and wrongheaded: a scandal is a scandal and Hurricane Katrina was a historic natural disaster that killed 1,833 people, rendered tens of thousands of people homeless, prompted a diaspora not seen in over 100 years, and ohbytheway caused over $100 billion in damage to an entire region that was already economically crippled by a sagging infrastructure and the recent financial meltdown.

To equate every time something goes wrong for the administration to the natural disaster is a trope that only serves to underscore the general laziness of the mainstream media to rehash the same rhetorical questions… for what? Debate? Provocation? No, it’s laziness, plain and simple. Politicos throw the term around, too: both Democratic strategist Garry South and Peter D. Feaver, “a top national security official” from the George W. Bush administration, is cited in Shear’s Times piece today echoing the exact sentiments.

But rather than refute the claims – the claims that have been rehashed throughout Obama’s entire presidency – the media hooks on to them and allows the story to cycle. Using just the samples I cited above, it seems President Obama has withstood half a dozen Katrinas by now. It’s a habit that’s become so commonplace it’s actually replaced the similarly annoying habit of appending “-gate” to every scandal.

The devaluation of human life and destruction that the trope shows is also mind-blowing. Never would a news outlet stoop to refer to something as “Obama’s 9/11.” The same pundits and politicos who throw around “Obama’s Katrina” at every rough moment for the administration would savage the first reference comparing, say, Obama contradicting himself on a campaign promise to the terrorist attacks of September 11. And rightly so: the events of that day were so horrific, so wounding to a nation, that it holds a rare place in our history alongside Pearl Harbor as events that transcend anything else. We don’t belittle the events by making it a trope; why Katrina or Sandy or any other natural disaster is okay is baffling.

The focus on the federal response being at the crux of the argument is also misguided: Katrina was a disaster that exploited the lack of preparedness and weak leadership. But it was also something that had a lead time of around five days. Meanwhile, the roll out of health care has been years in the making and Obama’s “fix” on the cancelation policy is a head-scratcher: how did he not know his own policy? Yet, the roots for comparing this to Katrina are still weak. It disregards the completely different nature of the two things being compared. Not for nothing, it’s the same reason people (rightfully) scoffed when former New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin drew a comparison between 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina: the two events were so different at their very core, such a comparison was outlandish even if there were some commonalities. (Ironically, the most Katrina-like event anywhere recently is happening half a world away as the Philippines and other areas of Southeast Asia deal with the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan.)

Relying on comparing anything goes wrong with a weather event or natural disaster is even lazier for reasons that should remain obvious. (Motorists stranded on Lake Shore Drive during the 2011 blizzard? To the trope’s definition, that was Mayor Daley’s “Katrina moment” but that’s not how it was treated.)

And yet… here we go again. The echo chamber reverberates with the question relating the Obama Administration’s botching of the health care rollout with one of the country’s worst natural disasters, undermining the victims and destruction that storm wrought. And in the same instance, the media’s necessity to draw the comparison also undermines the issue at hand. There are livelihoods at risk with this health care debacle. Lives were lost at the embassy in Benghazi. These are important events that deserve are full attention in the way they affect those involved and the impact these events have on us as a nation. But Katrina was a historic crumbling of leadership on not just the federal level, but the city and state level as well, a complete breakdown of communication and command that extended a disaster from days to weeks.

The continuing game the media plays with the trope builds up our resistance, it thickens the callous of our collective memory where these vivid photos used to reside. A presidential grimace is not the symbol of an epic natural disaster. Yet the media continues to rehash the trope and as they do, and as the memories of Katrina fade, they trivialize trivialize not only the looming issues at hand but the death and destruction of August 2005. It’s a dangerous cycle but one, just like so many others, the media is happy to perpetuate.

So I’m left to describe it as succinctly as I can.

This:

AFP PHOTO / Karen BLEIER

And this:

AFP PHOTO/Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images

Does not equate this:

AP Photo

Or this:

AP Photo

Or this:

AP Photo

Or this:

AP Photo