The waters are receeding in New Orleans and it seems as if some positive developments are happening — but the political firestorm continues unabated.
At first glance, the political context would seem a normal one: a President of the United States arriving on the scene of a disaster to symbolize the government’s commitment to restore normalcy and its quick aid to its citizens:
President George W. Bush arrived in New Orleans on Sunday for a two-day visit to the Gulf Coast region during which he will for the first time tour the interior of the city devastated by Hurricane Katrina.
It was the third trip to the area for Bush since the hurricane struck two weeks ago, and coincided with the fourth anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attack, the other major disaster on U.S. soil that his administration has been forced to deal with.
Bush was greeted at the airport by New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and then they took a helicopter to the USS Iwo Jima, where they met Coast Guard Vice Adm. Thad Allen, who is heading relief operations, and Army Lt. Gen. Russel Honore, the military commander in New Orleans.
On Monday, Bush will receive a Katrina briefing on board the Iwo Jima, after which he was scheduled to tour New Orleans in military vehicles. He will then take an aerial tour of one of the parishes and meet with parish officials. Bush will end his visit with two stops in Gulfport, Mississippi, before returning to Washington.
The trip gives Bush the opportunity to “continue to assess the situation on the ground and visit with those who are overseeing operations on the ground to hear from them” about immediate needs and future recovery and rebuilding efforts, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said.
But, as this Reuters report notes, this is NOT a normal case of a disaster that is perceived as having unfolded in the normal way — and that includes the White House’s and federal bureaucracy’s response:
Bush, whose approval ratings hit an all-time low in recent public opinion polls, has faced harsh criticism that his administration was too slow in responding to the crisis in which hundreds of thousands of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama residents were displaced by Katrina.
Sen. Mary Landrieu, a Louisiana Democrat, said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” program that the Bush administration was trying to shift blame to local officials.
“While the president is saying that he wants to work together as a team, I think the White House operatives have a full-court press on to blame state, local officials, whether Republican or Democratic,” she said.
McClellan rejected that accusation and said the administration was working with state and local officials to deal with the disaster.
Indeed, when Landrieu talked about blame, she was responding to the full-court press by the White House in recent days, using the phrase the “blame game” — a phrase that has become the phrase-of-the-day for GOPers who are the administration’s staunchest defenders. It’s the administration’s political mantra du jur.
Why can you conclude that? Because those who use the phrase “blame game” often launch into an attack blaming local and state officials (who also performed poorly and probably cost lives) and seem to be trying to shift attention and responsibility on them, while defending the White House.
Indeed, you can now see several responses to this tragedy:
- The “Blame Game” Warners: You don’t see this phrase used by independent voters, Democrats or Republicans who are lambasting the administration. It’s used by White House spokesmen, the staunchest partisans (who defend everything the administration does and says), and those who in effect get the establishment line out (radio and cable TV talk show hosts).
- The Gang Bangers: They note that there is enough BLAME to go around to ALL levels. That means the White House doesn’t escape responsibility for its actions, escape any criticism, or fail to be put under the microscope in a non-whitewash investigation. The Gang Bangers want the truth to come out about all levels of government so that flaws can be corrected for a more competent — and life-saving — response next time.
- The Good Jobbers: Related to the blame gamers. They argue that the White House did a wonderful job during this crisis and it’s therefore a conspiratorial liberal news media working with Democrats (which implies some Republicans are actually Democrats, or media moles, since some Republicans have also strongly criticized the feds) are going after the White House strictly for political gain.
- The Bush Is The Only Oners: They will argue that local and state officials had nothing to do with it at all, and that the shockingly poor storm response was due to not only federal bungling but the federal government hating or ignoring black Americans.
Larger policy issues of getting experts in disaster relief to staff key positions, the development of viable contingency plans that can be slapped into place in a flash, better federal/state/local coordination, etc. all get shunted aside as some of these groupings skirmish for political war.
But there is a problem now: indepth news reports are coming out now. Detailed news reports that will start to reveal more of the mindset at various levels.
The “blame game” is really the “responsibility game.” And the news reports are beginning to flesh out where some things went wrong. Here are some of the more jarring and recent ones:
NEWSWEEK’S “HOW BUSH BLEW IT”:
Time Magazine paints a picture of poor local response coupled with state/local efforts to get a surprisingly uninformed and lethargic White House headed by a President out of the loop to act:
The reality, say several aides who did not wish to be quoted because it might displease the president, did not really sink in until Thursday night. Some White House staffers were watching the evening news and thought the president needed to see the horrific reports coming out of New Orleans. Counselor Bartlett made up a DVD of the newscasts so Bush could see them in their entirety as he flew down to the Gulf Coast the next morning on Air Force One.
How this could be—how the president of the United States could have even less “situational awareness,” as they say in the military, than the average American about the worst natural disaster in a century—is one of the more perplexing and troubling chapters in a story that, despite moments of heroism and acts of great generosity, ranks as a national disgrace.
President George W. Bush has always trusted his gut. He prides himself in ignoring the distracting chatter, the caterwauling of the media elites, the Washington political buzz machine. He has boasted that he doesn’t read the papers. His doggedness is often admirable. It is easy for presidents to overreact to the noise around them.
Then you have to ask the question: doesn’t Bush watch TV? Americans seemed to know how grave it was before the President did. Newsweek provides what could be an answer:
But it is not clear what President Bush does read or watch, aside from the occasional biography and an hour or two of ESPN here and there. Bush can be petulant about dissent; he equates disagreement with disloyalty. After five years in office, he is surrounded largely by people who agree with him. Bush can ask tough questions, but it’s mostly a one-way street. Most presidents keep a devil’s advocate around. Lyndon Johnson had George Ball on Vietnam; President Ronald Reagan and Bush’s father, George H.W. Bush, grudgingly listened to the arguments of Budget Director Richard Darman, who told them what they didn’t wish to hear: that they would have to raise taxes. When Hurricane Katrina struck, it appears there was no one to tell President Bush the plain truth: that the state and local governments had been overwhelmed, that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was not up to the job and that the military, the only institution with the resources to cope, couldn’t act without a declaration from the president overriding all other authority.
Here’s the passage that will be used by Bush’s critics for some time to come:
Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, a motherly but steely figure known by the nickname Queen Bee, knew that she needed help. But she wasn’t quite sure what. At about 8 p.m., she spoke to Bush. “Mr. President,” she said, “we need your help. We need everything you’ve got.”
Bush, the governor later recalled, was reassuring. But the conversation was all a little vague. Blanco did not specifically ask for a massive intervention by the active-duty military. “She wouldn’t know the 82nd Airborne from the Harlem Boys’ Choir,” said an official in the governor’s office, who did not wish to be identified talking about his boss’s conversations with the president. There are a number of steps Bush could have taken, short of a full-scale federal takeover, like ordering the military to take over the pitiful and (by now) largely broken emergency communications system throughout the region. But the president, who was in San Diego preparing to give a speech the next day on the war in Iraq, went to bed.
By the predawn hours, most state and federal officials finally realized that the 17th Street Canal levee had been breached, and that the city was in serious trouble. Bush was told at 5 a.m. Pacific Coast time and immediately decided to cut his vacation short. To his senior advisers, living in the insular presidential bubble, the mere act of lopping off a couple of presidential vacation days counts as a major event. They could see pitfalls in sending Bush to New Orleans immediately. His presence would create a security nightmare and get in the way of the relief effort. Bush blithely proceeded with the rest of his schedule for the day, accepting a gift guitar at one event and pretending to riff like Tom Cruise in “Risky Business.”
So here you have it: (a)a more clear explanation of what went wrong (which doesn’t make it defensible) (b)proof that the President needs to fire his p.r. people: that guitar bit was a huge mistake and you can already see how that photo has come back to haunt him.
All Bush’s advisors forgot to do was to write “My Pet Goat” on it.
Does this piece show that the White House did a “good job” — one of the best in the history of disaster relief? Hardly. Unless you’re a defense lawyer for the White House. Does it show that state and local official were all victims of an uncaring federal government? Hardly. Unless you’re a defense lawyer for state and local officials. And does it show that those who raise questions about White House performance on the air, on weblogs, and in Congress are playing a “blame game?” Hardly. Unless you’re a defense lawyer for the White House, FEMA and for high levels of the GOP.
TIME’S “LIVING TOO MUCH IN THE BUBBLE?”
Meanwhile, a Time report also paints a picture of a President who did NOT not care, but who lived in a self-created “bubble” that had disasterous consquences. Some excerpts:
Bush, more fidgety than usual, was hearing a jumble of conflicting reports about the number of refugees in the Convention Center and the whereabouts of two trucks and trailers loaded with water and food.
Furious, he interrupted and glared at the camera transmitting his image back to Mississippi. “I know y’all are trying as hard as you can, but it ain’t cuttin’ it,” the Commander in Chief barked. “I wanna know why. We gotta do better.”
This was not so much a moment of executive command as one that betrayed Bush’s growing sense that his presidency was taking a beating too. A TIME poll conducted last week shows how badly it has been wounded: his overall approval rating has dropped to 42%, his lowest mark since taking office. And while 36% of respondents said they were satisfied with his explanation of why the government was not able to provide relief to hurricane victims sooner, 57% said they were dissatisfied—an ominous result for a politician who banks on his image as a straight shooter.
Longtime Bush watchers say they are not shocked that he missed his moment—one of his most trusted confidants calls him “a better third- and fourth-quarter player,” who focuses and delivers when he sees the stakes. What surprised them was that he still appeared to be stutter-stepping in the second week of the crisis, struggling to make up for past lapses instead of taking control with a grand gesture.
Just as Katrina exposed the lurking problems of race and poverty, it also revealed the limitations of Bush’s rigid, top-down approach to the presidency. “The extremely highly centralized control of the government—the engine of Bush’s success—failed him this time,” a key adviser said.
The Time piece details how Bush did realize the situation — but too late:
Bush has always said the presidency is about doing big things, and a friend who chatted with him one evening in July said he seemed to be craving a fresh mission even though the one he has pursued in Iraq is far from being on a steady footing. “He was looking for the next really important thing to do,” the friend said. “You could hear him almost sorting it out to himself. He just sort of figured it would come.”
But when it did, he did not immediately show that he sensed its magnitude. On the Monday that Hurricane Katrina landed and the Crescent City began drowning, Bush was joshing with Senator John McCain on the tarmac of an Air Force base in Arizona, posing with a melting birthday cake. Like a scene out of a Michael Moore mockumentary, he was heading into a long-planned Medicare round table at a local country club, joking that he had “spiced up” his entourage by bringing the First Lady, then noting to the audience that he had phoned Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff from Air Force One. “I said, ‘Are you working with the Governor?'” Bush recounted.
“He said, ‘You bet we are.'” But the President was not talking about the killer storm. He was talking about immigration, and the Governor was Arizona’s.
The day after Katrina’s landfall, Bush awoke in San Diego and just after 5 a.m. local time talked to an aide about the seriousness of the storm, then convened an emergency conference call of his top staff. He was scheduled to spend a few more nights at the ranch, but an aide said he blurted out, “We’re going back.” Bush also said he wanted Cabinet members recalled from vacations. At a Cabinet meeting last week, according to a participant, Bush said he knew he had “a big problem to solve.”
Time then analyzes the bubble: an administration lacking devils’ advocates. And perhaps the most damning paragraphs are these:
Katrina has shown the incredible weakness of the notion that you can have weak players in key spots because the only people who matter are in the White House,” said a lobbyist who is tight with the Administration. “You can’t have a Mike Brown at fema unless you can guarantee that there isn’t going to be a catastrophe.”
The result is a kind of echo chamber in which good news can prevail over bad—even when there is a surfeit of evidence to the contrary.
For example, a source tells TIME that four days after Katrina struck, Bush himself briefed his father and former President Clinton in a way that left too rosy an impression of the progress made. “It bore no resemblance to what was actually happening,” said someone familiar with the presentation.
Meanwhile, Time confirms that there is INDEED a “blame game” — but it’s being played by the White House:
The White House has sent delegates to meetings in Washington of outside Republican groups who have plans to blame the Democrats and state and local officials. In the meantime, it has no plans to push for a full-scale inquiry like the 9/11 commission, which Bush bitterly opposed until the pressure from Congress and surviving families made resistance futile. Congressional Democrats have said they are unwilling to settle for anything less than an outside panel, but White House officials said they do not intend to give in, and will portray Democrats as politicking if they do not accept a bipartisan panel proposed by Republican congressional leaders. Ken Mehlman, the party’s chairman and Bush’s campaign manager last year, told TIME that viewers at home will think it’s “kind of ghoulish, the extent to which you’ve got political leaders saying not ‘Let’s help the people in need’ but making snide comments about vacations.”
The question is whether a bipartisan committee means just that: bipartisan and not weighted in any direction. And if there is an “independent” commission, can a commission be created that truly has independent thinkers?
But the bigger issue is this: Americans have a choice whether they want to (a)find out what happened, make sure all the local, state AND federal officials officials are held accountable and the extent of their successes and failures revealed totally via information that will be not only published in a report but in the press or to (b)redefine RESPONSIBILITY as blame…and “blame” i.e. hold RESPONSIBLE, only officials who don’t belong to a certain political party…while all the while insisting you’re against “the blame game.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.