The Obama White House is responding to calls and letters from Florida Democrats unhappy with its response to the oil spill. W.H. sends 2012 rescue team to Fla.

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.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said the officials are on the Gulf Coast to ensure an effective response, but he 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 [we] 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 for a series of briefings that took them to Mobile, Ala., and ultimately, Tallahassee. 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 farther 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 during 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 Interstate 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 washing 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 the 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 in the area 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 [it] is not happening,” said state Rep. Keith Fitzgerald, a Democrat who organized for the campaign and introduced Obama at a rally in Sarasota two days before the election.

“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 political director in Indiana, who is director of advance for Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack; and Kevin Lewis, a White House press assistant who also worked on the campaign.

For some Florida Democrats, the administration’s handling of the oil spill irritated pent-up frustration over what they say has been a lack of communication from the White House on key issues for the area, including Obama’s pre-spill decision to open up the waters off the coast of Florida to oil drilling.

“When that decision was made, to my knowledge, there was no consulting of a lot of these coastal communities,” said Sarasota Mayor Kelly Kirschner, a Democrat who organized for Obama’s campaign.

For Sink, Biden’s June 29 visit to Pensacola fed into a larger perception that the administration was disengaged. She said the White House invited her to meet briefly with Biden, but instead she saw him “for about 10 seconds” and watched his speech on TV.

Biden’s communications director, Jay Carney, said in response to Sink’s comments: “The administration’s response to the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill has been unprecedented at every level. The vice president visited Louisiana and Florida on June 29 to assess the federal response to the spill and to meet with people affected by it. He did the same thing this week when he returned to the Gulf Coast region, this time to Alabama.”

The president’s recent weekend vacation in Maine didn’t help.

“Sometimes, it’s just how you communicate, and when you go to Maine instead of coming down here it kind of sends a message,” said state Rep. Bill Heller, a Democrat and early Obama supporter whose Pinellas County district includes St. Pete Beach. “He’s my president and I like him, but at the same time that was not good for us.”

That sentiment threatens to persist despite the White House’s announcing on Thursday that Obama plans to spend a weekend family vacation on Florida’s Gulf Coast in mid-August. Panama City Mayor Scott Clemons welcomed the news, however. “I think that’s quite a statement that they’re willing to bring their family here,” he said.

The administration’s Florida team already appears to be having an impact.

In Apalachicola, a coastal community 160 miles from Pensacola Beach that produces 90 percent of Florida’s oysters, Mayor Van Johnson Sr. said his letters to the White House went unanswered for a month until he received a call last week. An administration official also recently attended a town hall in Apalachicola, where some 100 residents vented their frustrations.

“It was heated,” said Johnson, whose office is steps from a BP Community Outreach Center. “You have to realize, though, we’re not just whistling Dixie — we’re talking about survival.”

Certainly not everyone along the Gulf Coast takes issue with the administration. Officials in panhandle cities like Pensacola and Panama City had positive things to say about the current state of the response. Pensacola Mayor Mike Wiggins praised Biden’s stop in his city as “terrific.” Others across the coast almost unanimously said the response has gotten better, including Sink, who specifically said she believes the administration aides in Tallahassee will be “very, very helpful.”

“I’ve been hearing a lot of frustration with BP, not so much with the administration,” said Rep. Kathy Castor (D-Fla.), an Obama supporter who represents the Tampa area.

But the economic strife that the oil spill has reintroduced into the region has raised new ire. Property values are declining. Real estate is not moving. Hotel reservations are being canceled. Customers walk into restaurants, if they enter at all, and ask if the fish is safe.

With the oil well essentially capped and the Florida economy under siege, state officials are asking for more funds for a tourism campaign and pushing for claims to be quickly paid to small businesses.

Ken Feinberg, the administrator of the $20 billion BP claims fund, has been meeting with officials in the state, but Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) criticized the White House for not including state and local government claims under Feinberg’s jurisdiction, forcing claimants to deal directly with BP.

“That needs to be done by Feinberg as well so they get BP out of having to haggle with our local governments,” Nelson said. Indeed, Florida’s attorney general, Bill McCollum, a Republican gubernatorial candidate, said the state will soon file a “very sizable” claim with BP.

Dan Gelber, a state senator from Miami and Democratic candidate for attorney general, described the oil spill as a “cancer” that will linger into 2012. “The impact of this is not going away,” he said.

For Obama that potentially means trouble, particularly on the coast around Tampa Bay. He picked up far more votes in this region than Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) did in 2004, said Daniel Smith, a political science professor at the University of Florida, yet he performed worse in smaller counties where Democrats usually do well.

“He needs to keep the margins that he had in the I-4 corridor and keep the turnout high in southeast Florida, where he had very strong support, if he wants to keep Florida,” said Smith. “That’s a steep hill to climb between now and 2012.”