The Right-Wing Noise Machine is belching smoke and narratives on the one-year anniversary of the British Petroleum Gulf Oil disaster. The conservative meme, then and now, is that Obama didn’t do enough to halt the fiasco, and that therefore it is his Katrina, as uberspinmeister and Fox News’ resident turd blossom Karl Rove smirked, the emphatic period to the rightwing fantastical storyline.
Never mind this meme makes no sense, contradicting as it does the “Big Government,” regulation meme. Conservative memes aren’t supposed to be consistent; they’re more like episodes of South Park, where Kenny dies at the end of every episode, but is always alive in the next.
And it worked. With no countermeme, Obama looked like less like a president and more like he was auditioning for an appearance on Jeopardy. He did the right thing (that is, the insufficient thing), and reviewed the facts and tried to expeditiously solve the problem. Like tourists on the Gulf coast, there wasn’t a narrative in sight from either him or the Democrats.
It didn’t have to be that way. The counternarrative fell right into the Democrats’ lap. Obama should have set sail on the Gulf in the Presidential Dingy with a bullhorn roaring “This is what happens when you deregulate industry, like the GOP wants. Deregulation is the problem; Government is the solution.”
Gentleman Harry Reid should have pounded his fist and opened every session of the Senate with the equivalent of what Cato insisted in that other Senate long ago: Delenda est Carthego! Not a day should have gone by without the White House issuing a statement that deregulation and underregulation leads inevitably to oil spills that threaten ecological Armageddon (and more to the point cost small business money). Every day. Day in day out.
Doesn’t matter that foolish conservative Democrats were almost as responsible for underregulating the oil industry as the Republicans. So what? It’s a narrative not a meeting of fact checkers for the Vulcan Council. Do the meme right, and there won’t be any more foolish conservative Democrats.
And of course, this should have been the ongoing narrative from the Bush financial meltdown, also the result of deregulation. Obama should have put a banner on the White House balcony with words: “Bush Deregulation = Your Foreclosure Notice.”
But Obama doesn’t like banners. Nor has he produced a meme for the budget pseudocrisis, which the Tea Party is using to play him like slide guitar. Obama please read George Lakoff before saying one more word.
So the real lesson of the BP oil spill is not so much that powerful industries are dangerous and greedy, and unless regulated destroy lives and cause billions of dollars in damage. We know that. The lesson is, the party without a narrative, loses. And for the past two years that party is the Democrats.
Crossposted at http://leftwingnoisemachine.com/...