Has Hurricane Katrina set a new dividing line in the Bush Presidency? Are new approaches in the offing as President George Bush addresses the nation?
It sure seems that way. As yet another poll underscores the clear trend that GWB’s numbers are going south, the President prepares to address the nation. And the Washington Times, in an editorial, has some suggestions about what GWB should offer the nation in terms of how Homeland Security can be beefed up to handle not just terrorism but natural disastersa:
The president must reassess the full gamut of our vulnerabilities, from the porous borders to the paucity of Arabic translators in the military to the need for more cargo inspectors in our ports. Those are just a few of the problems the president needs to seriously re-address. Only real leadership can elevate the debate above the recriminations evident in the last two weeks.
Toward that end, we hope to see him announce a top-to-bottom review of the nation’s homeland-security and disaster-preparedness capabilities. There are some indications Mr. Bush will do this. For one, on Tuesday the president pointed toward bold actions to fix the problems. “Are we capable of dealing with a severe attack or another severe storm?” he asked. “That’s a very important question and it’s in our national interest that we find out exactly what went on so we can better respond.”
According to ABC News, an anonymous administration official appeared to second the likelihood of bold moves by telling reporters that tonight’s address will be unlike anything the president has delivered previously. It will be “explanatory,” the official said. It will lay out a strategy in the way that a State of the Union address does and will “sketch a vision of the future.” But it is not a rally speech; its intent is to get the country thinking about the future it wants and what it takes to get there. He is also reportedly planning to address the racial accusations swirling around efforts in the Gulf Coast.
Indeed. A rally the nation speech may be difficult if it even slightly veers off onto partisan territory. And the racial accusations need to be addressed and answered (polls show most white don’t believe them and many black Americans do). MORE:
The most necessary elements of the president’s vision are already evident to the American people. They will include a renewed Federal Emergency Management Agency, to be accomplished after exhaustive study of its evident decline and the reasons behind it; a hard look at what it takes to make the Department of Homeland Security live up to its name; a call for Congress to revamp the appropriations processes by which money was spent on virtually everything but levee fortification; and moves toward better coordination with authorities at the state and local levels.
But it should also include the same homeland-security fundamentals we’ve been writing about since before the September 11 attacks. Whatever the president does, the success of his second term and probably his entire presidency will hinge upon it, and rightly so.
And that truly seems to be it. The President must lay out some specifics of what could be done to ensure the nation that response to another catastrophe will be handled differently. He also has to avoid keeping ongoing controversies alive by not hedging on the poor performance of the federal government. The argument that local and state governments were bad too doesn’t osbcure the problems at the federal level since the federal government is supposed to be our country’s safety net in times of disaster. If he can do that, he may begin to recoup some of the non-GOP clout and credibility he needs to effectively govern. A pro forma speech this time won’t do.
UPDATE: The national political context for this speech is already contaminated by the Senate’s decision yesterday to nix an independent commission.
We noticed one tiny coincidence, though.
Every Republican senator (except one who didn’t vote) voted against an independent commission.
Americablog (a Democratic activist blog) has published this list in case you want to contact these elected officials and find out why they find an INDEPENDENT commission so distasteful. We predict this kind of thing is going to go over very poorly with independent voters.
UPDATE II: A law professor and liberal blogger’s prediction here that the hurricane will blow in the winds of a new polarizing chapter in the culture wars with the next Supreme Court nomination as catalyist. (In other words: he’s predicting don’t hold your breaths for moves for national unity).
NOTE: An alert reader in Texas informs us that we mistakenly attributed this editorial the Washington Post — and it’s really the Washington Times. We’ve fixed it. Thanks for the tip — and sorry for the error!!
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.