In oil-soaked news, Obama out of picture

Presidents can’t always make things better. But the country always wants them to look like they’re trying.

As crude oil flooded the Gulf waters, Obama and his team acted like this disaster was someone else’s problem, specifically BP’s, the company that owns the rig that exploded on April 20.

The candidate who talked about the fierce urgency of now turned into a chief executive who didn’t know what to do when it stared him in the face. Because of the gap between campaign rhetoric and actual White House response, Obama lost this public relations war. That became clear when MSNBC host Chris Matthews and Democratic strategist James Carville publicly criticized his handling of the crisis.

Part of the problem was that no one in industry or government really knew what to do, or they would have done it. The suggested cures for plugging the well — which included golf balls and tires — sounded like jokes. Indeed, the suggestion from humorist Andy Borowitz to plug the well with BP executives sounded almost as plausible as the real options, and much more satisfying.

The collective helplessness in the face of this massive environmental disaster starkly illustrates the limits of technology. Companies know how to get oil from the ocean floor; apparently no one had a plan for stopping the flow after an explosion like the one that occurred on the Deepwater Horizon.

But when oil is washing up on beaches and wetlands and coating birds and other marine wildlife, no one wants to hear about technology and its limits. The people most affected by the mess want a president who looks like he’s in charge.

It’s the symbolism and Obama failed on several fronts.

He was supposed to be a post-partisan president. In Washington, that was a short-lived phase that has now morphed into the usual partisan poison. But beyond the Beltway, is there no common ground to be found between a Democratic president and a Republican governor? Can’t Obama and Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal find a way to stare down this environmental crisis together? That would distinguish Obama in an important way from the Hurricane Katrina model, which pitted a Republican president against a Democratic governor with terrible, well-documented results.

The White House blog on the Obama response to the BP oil spill is packed with details about who was deployed and what actions were taken. But the public face of the disaster mainly featured a cranky press secretary who appears to dislike answering questions as much as Ron Ziegler back in the Nixon White House days; and various administration officials who lurched from confusion to frustration to foolish statements about boots on the neck.

Obama responds to crises like this with a cerebral approach that is fine for academia but risky business in the political world. Does any reasonable citizen really believe that Obama wasn’t concerned about the Gulf — at the very least, from a political perspective — and wasn’t pressing his administration to resolve the crisis? He has a problem showing he cares.

That was part of George W. Bush’s problem, too, in Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath. Perhaps it did, at some point, illustrate an admirable unwillingness to grandstand for the sake of grandstanding. But in politics, optics matter. Once a script is written, it’s hard to change it.

Both presidents got off to a slow start in understanding the scope of disaster. Neither did a heckuva job of responding afterwards.

Obama still has a chance to make sure that BP is held accountable for the accident and its aftermath.

He also has a chance to turn this disaster into a teachable moment about the need for alternative energy sources.

With the right mix of passion and outrage, he can usher in a new era of clean energy — after he cleans up the mess left by the old era.

Joan Vennochi’s e-mail address is vennochi@globe.com.