After spending much of the day on the campaign trail, President Obama declared the H1N1 flu pandemic a Federal emergency late Friday night, the White House announced Saturday morning. As though the timing of the declaration wasn’t enough to minimize coverage (signed on a Friday night; announced on a Saturday morning), the White House sought to further downplay its significance. Reports the New York Times:

“Government officials emphasized that Mr. Obama’s declaration was largely a administrative move that did not signify any unanticipated worsening of the outbreak of the H1N1 flu nationwide.”

As if to drive home the point, some naïve White House official drew a false comparison that could nonetheless prove frighteningly accurate. Reported the Associated Press:

“Officials described the move as similar to a declaration ahead of a hurricane making landfall.”

If the White House wants to minimize the urgency of the situation, that’s a bad analogy. As the White House’s “lessons-learned” study post-Katrina reported, President Bush’s declaration of a Federal emergency prior to the storm’s landfall was unique:

“The issuance of a Presidential emergency declaration before landfall is extremely rare, and indicative of the recognition that Katrina had the potential to be particularly devastating. Since 1990, only one such incident, Hurricane Floyd in 1999, resulted in declarations before landfall.”

If the White House did not want to minimize the urgency of the H1N1 pandemic, then why did they announce it in the manner they did? The signing of a Federal emergency is a good opportunity for the President to address the nation — or at least the media — and provide further guidance on how citizens can protect themselves. (To the contrary, as of Saturday night, the declaration was still not mentioned on the front page of WhiteHouse.gov.)

Bottom-line, there are only two ways to fight pandemics: Vaccines and public information. The nation has failed on the former: Not nearly enough vaccines are available from Federal contractors as the Obama Administration had projected. And, even if there were, the infrastructure does not exist to effectively distribute them, according to Reuters.

That leaves public information and education the last best defense against the pandemic. That requires Presidential leadership, yet he has not publicly addressed the flu’s spread and severity for weeks. Why not???

The Obama Administration’s handling of the H1N1 flu at the outset was a disaster: The White House contributed to misbranding it as “swine flu”; the President distractingly injected politics into the outbreak; and both the President and Vice President delivered incorrect information and advice in the early days.

As the pandemic now takes hold and we’re seeing the terrifying beginnings of what could be a very deadly and disruptive flu season, the President should put public health first (or at least before Friday’s politicking) and use his microphone to do everything possible to raise awareness of the virus and how to avoid it.

Otherwise, his pre-emptive emergency-declaration could be as forgotten as President Bush’s declaration prior to Katrina … and their legacies in dealing with a natural disaster could be the same.