According to Katty Kay, it was not a “massively good week” for President Obama as BP's oil leak “played into a perception that this is a president who finds it difficult to empathize with ordinary people.” After all, the “biggest thing” Obama managed to do this week -- and, in Kay's own words, “all people were talking about” in the Gulf region -- was to secure $20 billion from BP to compensate Gulf residents for financial damages caused by the catastrophe, a fund that could alleviate many of the problems Gulf residents encountered in filing claims in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Discussing BP executives' agreement to set aside $20 billion in a private escrow account in order to pay claims arising from the Gulf oil spill, Meet the Press host David Gregory asked whether the fund would inspire confidence in the administration's handling of the crisis. Kay would have none of it. After saying, “I'm not sure that there should be that level of confidence,” Kay added,

I don't think this was a massively good week for the president. The twenty billion dollar fund was very important, but the oil spill has played into a perception that this is a president who finds it difficult to empathize with ordinary people, and that was one of the criticisms of him early on in this, that he didn't show enough emotion, he didn't show enough anger. And that he's not totally in control of this and that his vision of big government is not particularly fixing this. And I think that narrative is still dominating the scenario.

What he needed to do is come up with a concrete result. The speech that he gave from the Oval Office I think was pretty much a wash. I'm not entirely convinced of the need to have given that. The biggest thing that they got out of this was the $20 billion fund, and certainly down on the Gulf Coast that was all people were talking about, and they were talking about it particularly because these were people who had come out of Hurricane Katrina, battled with insurance companies to try and get money back, found that it was a very complicated, very long-winded process, and they like the idea that the money is there in escrow administered by somebody else.

So by Kay's own reckoning the “biggest thing” the administration accomplished last week -- a $20 billion fund paid for by BP -- was the main thing that people most directly affected by the spill were talking about, in particular because the very existence of that fund would directly address some of the hassles those same Gulf coast residents encountered after Hurricane Katrina. Yet this was not a “massively good week” for Obama precisely because this week “played into a perception that this is a president who finds it difficult to empathize with people.”

One has to wonder just what Obama would have to do to challenge Kay's perception.