After fumbling oil spill, White House tries to control backlash

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 reelection in 2012.

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

That battleground state will be a heavy lift. In interviews conducted 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 the state’s 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 reelection campaign and that the issue required more hands-on attention.

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

Liberalism: There ain't no such thing as good news

The percentage of blacks marrying whites has risen by 3 times since 1980. Asians are just as likely to marry whites as they were in 1980 (40%), even though there is a much larger Asian population to choose from, and Hispanics are significantly more likely to marry whites than in 1980 (38% compared to 30%), even though there is a much larger Hispanic population to choose from. The sheer number of interracial marriages has risen 20% since 2000.

This is good news, right? Not the way the Washington Post spins it, complete with a commentary by Cornell Prof. Daniel Lichter that is completely at odds with the data, but supports liberal shibboleths about 9/11 and the recent Arizona illegal immigrant law:

The number of interracial marriages in the U.S. has risen 20 percent since 2000 to about 4.5 million, according to the latest census figures. While still growing, that number is a marked drop-off from the 65 percent increase between 1990 and 2000.

About 8 percent of U.S. marriages are mixed-race, up from 7 percent in 2000.
The latest trend belies notions of the U.S. as a post-racial, assimilated society. Demographers cite a steady flow of recent immigration that has given Hispanics and Asians more ethnically similar partners to choose from while creating some social distance from whites due to cultural and language differences.

White wariness toward a rapidly growing U.S. minority population also may be contributing to racial divisions, experts said.

“Racial boundaries are not going to disappear anytime soon,” said Daniel Lichter, a professor of sociology and public policy at Cornell University. He noted the increase in anti-immigrant sentiment in the U.S. after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks as well as current tensions in Arizona over its new immigration law.

“With a white backlash toward immigrant groups, some immigrants are more likely to turn inward to each other for support,” Lichter said.

In fairness to Prof. Lichter, reporters have been known to quote sources out of context, but there’s no excuse for how the Post reporter, Hope Yen, reported this story. It’s possible that there is actually some hidden bad news in the data, but if so, it’s not apparent from the story.