The Hill:
The Ebola crisis in the United States has become an anchor threatening to sink the Obama presidency.
Already under fire from critics who saw the federal response to the outbreak as disorganized and timid, things went from bad to worse on Wednesday, when it was revealed a second nurse had contracted the disease while treating a Liberian man at a Dallas-area hospital.
More alarmingly, the diagnosis was made just hours after the nurse, 29-year-old Amber Vinson, had flown from Cleveland to Dallas on a commercial airliner, despite reporting to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that she had a fever.
That Vinson was allowed to travel at all — along with continued questions about why federal procedures for Ebola treatment appear not to have been implemented in Dallas — have prompted serious questions about the administration’s handling of the disease less than three weeks before the midterm elections.Democrats are expected to lose significant ground in those contests, in no small part due to public dissatisfaction with Obama and resilient questions about the president’s competency.
And concessions from the White House and CDC that there were multiple “shortcomings” in the administration’s response are only likely to deepen those fears.
The president has little political capital to spare.
Obama’s approval ratings were already at a record low of 40 percent according to a Washington Post/ABC News poll released Wednesday — and taken before news broke about the new Ebola patient. That same survey found 39 percent of voters view the Democrats favorably — the worst showing for Obama’s party since 1984.
The precipice on which the president now rests is eerily similar to the one that confronted former President George W. Bush at the same point in his term.
The former president, doomed by a series of political and policy missteps, became quickly viewed as incompetent, limiting his ability to govern effectively.
Obama hasn’t had a major error like Katrina or the Iraq War. But the cumulative effect of careening through an unrelenting two years of crises, from the Department of Veterans Affairs to the Secret Service, has had a similar effect on perceptions of the president.
The “No drama Obama” White House has long prided itself on not overreacting to crises.