July 25th, 2010

White House Sends Damage Control team To Gulf to Clean-Up Obama's Damaged Reputation

Posted by: Barry Secrest
Published on July 25th, 2010 @ 09:40:56 pm , using 918 words

Posted in Events and Issues: Credible Resources

: The Obama White House is responding to calls and letters from Florida Dems. unhappy with

Politico

Carol E. Lee

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. – The White House has quietly launched an effort to confront the political backlash along the Gulf Coast over its handling of the BP oil spill – giving special attention to Florida, the only state in the region President Barack Obama won in 2008 and one he will need again when he runs for re-election in 2012.

The White House dispatched political and communications aides to the Gulf Coast states on July 12, with Alabama and Mississippi each receiving one, sources familiar with the effort said. Some aides went to Louisiana. Florida received four.

The battleground state will be a heavy lift. In interviews along the coast, Florida Democrats accused the administration of largely ignoring their calls and letters, and complained of a White House that’s out of touch.

Alex Sink, Florida’s chief financial officer and presumptive Democratic gubernatorial nominee, even characterized Vice President Joe Biden’s recent visit to the state as “a screw-up,” saying she was “embarrassed” by his speech.

“It was just so off-target and out of touch with the reality of what’s going on over there,” Sink said in an interview at the Florida Democratic Party headquarters in Tallahassee.

It’s the type of criticism the White House wants to avoid. The administration aides in Florida function similarly to a campaign. They do rapid response and media coordination, and they report back to senior aides in the West Wing in nearly real time about what they’re hearing on the ground.

The effort came about after the White House grew concerned over political damage from not having a permanent presence in the Gulf Coast states. Obama’s top advisers summoned a small group of young, former campaign staffers working in the administration to the White House for a meeting, said a source with knowledge of the meeting. No one mentioned 2012 specifically, but it was clear the administration’s approach to the oil spill had the potential to hurt the president’s re-election campaign, and the issue required more hands-on attention.

“Someone recognized that all we were doing was playing defense,” an administration official said. The aides were sent to the Gulf Coast five days later.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said the officials are on the Gulf Coast to ensure an effective response but did not offer details of the effort.

"This was an unprecedented disaster, the likes of [which] we haven't ever seen," Gibbs said. "We moved folks there as the disaster lasted longer and needed to ensure we had the personnel there to do what needed to be done to respond effectively."

The Florida team arrived in New Orleans to begin a series of briefings that took them to Mobile, Ala., and ultimately, Tallahassee, Fla. They set up shop in Florida's Emergency Operations Center, where they work alongside the Coast Guard and down the hall from BP and state officials.

Their task is to improve the administration’s outreach with local leaders, and to tend to political fields the White House has largely neglected. The immediate focus is on residual angst in the Panhandle, the area hit hardest by the oil spill.

But the White House also has its eye cast further south, to areas along the Gulf Coast that were pivotal in putting Obama over the top in Florida in 2008: the traditionally conservative counties around Tampa and St. Petersburg, down to Sarasota.

The political stakes are clear. Obama’s approval rating in Florida is around 40 percent. His numbers in red states that he picked up in the election, such as Virginia and North Carolina, make his 2008 campaign’s 50-state strategy look increasingly implausible for 2012, elevating the importance of Florida.

And within Florida, the Tampa Bay area on the west end of the I-4 corridor is key for Obama. Yet it is here where anxious residents, small business owners and elected officials languished for months without answers from the administration about what to expect and how to prepare for oil to wash ashore. Oil never arrived – and by most predictions never will – but the damage was done.

Now the region’s economies are suffering under the perception that there’s oil on their shores, crippling the tourism and fishing industries. BP recently opened an office in the area, and in Miami, but White House officials have yet to make an appearance. It’s created a palpable sense of disenchantment with a president many people here worked hard to get elected.

“The Obama campaign was brilliant at connecting with people emotionally, and what I’m seeing and feeling on the ground as I talk to people in Sarasota is that is not happening,” said state Rep. Keith Fitzgerald, a Democrat who organized for the Obama campaign and introduced him at a rally in Sarasota two days before the election.

“And so they have some catching up to do,” Fitzgerald added. “He can’t lose those votes.”

The White House team in Florida includes Jon Wright, the Obama campaign’s deputy political director in northwest Florida who works in legislative affairs for the Commerce Department; Tom Reynolds, the campaign’s deputy communications director in Ohio and now the deputy director of public affairs at the Energy Department; Rohan Patel, the campaign’s Indiana political director who is a senior adviser to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack; and Kevin Lewis, a White House press assistant who also worked on the campaign.