Obamacare is Obama’s Obamacare

It's not his Katrina

By Ezra Klein, WashPost, Updated: November 20, 2013

On Tuesday, I mocked the Hurricane Katrina/Obamacare comparisons. Hurricane Katrina, after all, killed more than 1,800 people. Obamacare's Web site isn't working well yet.

Ron Fournier, among others, defends the comparison, arguing that of course the crises themselves aren't similar. The analogy is really about "the ways that Bush and Obama handled their crises, and [how] those actions changed the public's view of their presidencies."

But that's precisely the point: The political fallout is driven by the nature of the crises. Or, to put it more starkly, reality drives politics — politics doesn't drive reality.

Start with the basic premise of the analogy: Did Hurricane Katrina really doom George W. Bush's presidency? Here's Gallup's chart of President Bush's approval ratings. Can you pick out Katrina?

Hurricane Katrina hit in August of 2005. To be specific, it hit from August 23rd to August 30th. That's a hard period to spy on this chart.

(More here.)