Let’s face it: Hurricane Katrina now seems to be the quintessential 21st century disaster.
A brutal hurricane whose victims are given for relief…$2,000 debit cards. So much political finger pointing that the saying “it’s not polite to point” is now absolutely passe (why should the kiddies not point when all the supposed adults are doing it?). A debate over whether banning the press from taking pix of dead bodies is banning free speech, blatant news control, political manipulation or a serious effort to honor the dead by protecting images of their remains. A key member of the majority party canceling a hearing in Congress and making it clear that he has already decided the federal government (coincidentally controlled by his party) is not as much to blame as the local and state governments (coincidentally controlled by the minority party).
And analysts noting something downplayed by the President’s partisans: the man in the White House not only had one of his worst weeks ever in terms of possibly enduring imagery, but is likely now presiding over a country hopelessly polarized…where even the death, destruction and the decimation of a city are filtered through the prisms of uncompromising political viewpoints.
And next we’ll tell you about the GOOD news…. And there is some, as the AP reports:
With much of New Orleans still under water, the White House announced that Bush is asking lawmakers to approve another $51.8 billion to cover the costs of federal recovery efforts. Congressional officials said they expected to approve the next installment as early as Thursday, to keep the money flowing without interruption.
Also Wednesday, Congress’ top two Democrats furiously criticized the administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina on Wednesday, with Sen. Harry Reid demanding to know whether President Bush’s Texas vacation impeded relief efforts and Rep. Nancy Pelosi assailing the chief executive as “oblivious, in denial.”
White House spokesman Scott McClellan said the new request, which is in addition to $10.5 billion already approved and was being sent to Capitol Hill later Wednesday, would not be the last.
“We are sparing no effort to help those that have been affected by Katrina and are in need of help,” he said. “There will be more that will be needed.”
Included in the request are $1.4 billion for the military and $400 million for the Army Corps of Engineers, which is working to plug breached levees that submerged most of New Orleans and to drain the city of the rank floodwaters, McClellan said. The rest would go to the Federal Emergency Management Agency
Have you heard of FEMA? That’s the agency that will now likely go down in history as having had under the Bush administration perhaps the most inept and controversial leadership ever, sparking calls from people of MANY ideologies and BOTH parties for a resignation (but the administration prides itself on loyalty and President Bush reportedly said nothing with the government response to the storm went wrong.)
FEMA and its former horse-association bigwig leader Michael Brown are under intense fire these days from Democrats and many independent-minded Republicans. So perhaps it isn’t surprising that the move to prevent the press from taking and showing photos of the storm dead comes from…..correct…FEMA (which has a vested interest in damage control):
When U.S. officials asked the media not to take pictures of those killed by Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, they were censoring a key part of the disaster story, free speech watchdogs said on Wednesday.
The move by the Federal Emergency Management Agency is in line with the Bush administration’s ban on images of flag-draped U.S. military coffins returning from the Iraq war, media monitors said in separate telephone interviews.
“It’s impossible for me to imagine how you report a story whose subject is death without allowing the public to see images of the subject of the story,” said Larry Siems of the PEN American Center, an authors’ group that defends free expression.
U.S. newspapers, television outlets and Web sites have featured pictures of shrouded corpses and makeshift graves in New Orleans.
But on Tuesday, FEMA refused to take reporters and photographers along on boats seeking victims in flooded areas, saying they would take up valuable space need in the recovery effort and asked them not to take pictures of the dead.
In an e-mail explaining the decision, a FEMA spokeswoman wrote: “The recovery of victims is being treated with dignity and the utmost respect and we have requested that no photographs of the deceased by made by the media.”
…Rebecca Daugherty of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press found this stance inexplicable.
“The notion that, when there’s very little information from FEMA, that they would even spend the time to be concerned about whether the reporting effort is up to its standards of taste is simply mind-boggling,” Daugherty said. “You cannot report on the disaster and give the public a realistic idea of how horrible it is if you don’t see that there are bodies as well.”
There are several ways of looking at this:
- FEMA doesn’t want the bodies shown because of the dignity issue.
- FEMA doesn’t want the bodies shown because it will underscore how many people died under its possible mismanagement.
- FEMA and the administration don’t want the bodies shown because it brings home the human aspect of this tragedy, which will eventually be dominated by cold statistics about how many perished while waiting for delayed or never-delivered emergency services.
It’ll be interesting to see in coming weeks what independent reporters discover the FAMILIES OF VICTIMS think about photos.
Also: did FEMA have the same policy during 911? Or is this something new?
But, above all, the natural disaster is turning into a life-and-death political issue for the administration. Perhaps that explains a “shrill” (apologies to Shrill Blog) tone to the response of the administration and administration critics (including on weblogs). He or she who raises questions about the administration and FEMA is accused of ignoring the also bungled job by local and state officials. (You can watch a video of Keith Olbermann’s timeline here.)
One difference, though: the local and state officials don’t run the federal government, don’t run FEMA, haven’t received millions of dollars to set up a Homeland Security Department and haven’t repeatedly assured Americans that they are better protected than ever under machinery put in place since September 11th.
Some administration defenders, meanwhile, seemingly undermine their own side by making statements like these that can at best be described as at varience with the facts. The idea seems to be: if it’s repeated enough it becomes real (this approach doesn’t generally work with independent voters which is why we predict the GOP will lose more of them in coming months unless more accurate statements are made).
The administration’s image problem was further underlined by this tidbit: the White House found itself in the position of having to finess widely quoted foot-in-mouth comments by former First Lady Barbara Bush.
Barbara Bush was making “a personal observation” when she said poor people at a relocation center in Houston were faring better than before Hurricane Katrina struck, President Bush’s spokesman said Wednesday.
Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, did not answer directly when asked if the president agreed with his mother’s remarks.
(Attn. Scotty: you should have answered that and not left that one hanging…)
Meanwhile, some grave consequences are yet to come: there are already predictions that the new bankruptcy bill will make it difficult for many families to recover. And a Congressional report noted that the storm could cost 400,000 jobs.
So — amid strands of news reports, puffed up left and right talk show hosts, bloggers, commentators (which definitely includes “trolls) — what does all this mean politically?
A superb analysis in the San Diego Union-Tribune (which has never been called a liberal newspaper, by the way) by George Condon bluntly looks at the situation.
Condon flatly says what many staunch-partisan writers, broadcasters and activists will not say: that even people within the GOP think the White House blew it on this one:
Even Republicans concede that the administration stumbled out of the gate and was slow to gauge the enormity of the disaster. In recent days, the White House has become a flurry of activity with cameras capturing events showing the president in command.
But the damage done by the early missteps will be difficult to undo and could further jeopardize a second-term agenda already weighed down by casualties in Iraq and the inexorable creeping toward lame-duck status at home.
Condon quotes pollster John Zogby (who didn’t have a stellar election year) as saying this was a “very bad week for the president” — one that has left Bush “radioactive.” He predicts the Bush agenda has about had it.
Analyst Stuart Rothenberg agrees Bush is hurt but thinks it’s too early to say how much. And he notes this KEY reason why Bush will need to turn it around:
Rothenberg said many Republicans have felt free to voice their unhappiness with the administration “because they don’t care about Bush’s job approval. They only care about their own positioning for their re-elections.”
Charles Cook, author of an influential nonpartisan political newsletter, said Republicans in Congress are warily watching developments.
“There was a growing nervousness on Capitol Hill over the summer from Republicans as gas prices went up, as the situation in Iraq got worse, as Social Security (restructuring) crashed and burned,” he said. “There is a lot of anxiety up there.”
Cook said he doubts Bush can reverse all of the Katrina-related damage to his standing in part because it “exacerbates two pre-existing problems.” The first is his failure to communicate his feelings of compassion and empathy for Americans suffering. The second, said Cook, is that “the war in Iraq is siphoning off resources and attention that people think could be better spent here at home.”
And to those who defend Bush’s activities leading up to the point when Katrina was proclaimed an absolute catastrophe he writes:
Bush’s missteps included what is now seen as an ill-advised decision to stick with his planned schedule after Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast last Monday. A day later, Bush delivered a speech at the North Island Naval Air Station on Coronado designed to build support for his Iraq policies. That, said pollster Zogby, was “absolutely a mistake . . . It made it seem he cared more about the war than the suffering in Mississippi and Louisiana.”
Republicans do not disagree that Bush hit some sour notes immediately after the storm. But they insist the political damage is temporary. For conservative strategist Keith Appell, the most pain comes from comparing this administration’s handling of the natural disaster with the record of its Democratic predecessor.
“One of the few good things I could say about the Clinton administration is that they dealt with these things very well,” he said. “And right now, the contrast is tough to take.”
But, Appell added, “there is no way this cuts into Bush’s political base. Over time, as the response becomes stronger and the good stories begin to outnumber the bad . . . the political winds will change for Bush.”
The Washington Post has a piece detailing how polarized the country is today which reads, in part:
Wherever reality lies between these mutual recriminations, the path from post-9/11 unity to the rancor and finger-pointing in the aftermath of Katrina’s fury charts a clear deterioration in political consensus in the United States and a growing willingness to interpret events through a partisan prism. It is a problem that now appears destined to follow Bush through the final years of his presidency — a clear failure of his 2000 campaign promise to be a “uniter, not a divider.”
A Washington Post-ABC News poll taken last Friday illustrates the point vividly. Just 17 percent of Democrats said they approved of the way Bush was handling the Katrina crisis while 74 percent of Republicans said they approved. About two in three Republicans rated the federal government’s response as good or excellent, while two in three Democrats rated it not so good or poor.
“Bush is the most partisan president in modern American history,” said William Galston, a professor at the University of Maryland and previously a top domestic adviser to former President Bill Clinton. “As a result, voters in both parties are focusing on him, rather than on the specifics of the policies.”
In Galston’s view, Bush bears principal responsibility for that condition, saying that on three occasions he passed up opportunities to govern from the center and work more constructively with the Democrats and instead chose a path designed to mobilize conservatives. The first came after the disputed election of 2000, in the early days of Bush’s new administration. The second came after the Sept. 11 attacks, when Bush’s approval rating rose to 90 percent. The third came after the hard-fought and polarizing election last year.
So where are we headed today?
- The administration is in trouble over it’s job performance, particularly the bureaucratic, slow and historically inept performance of FEMA, symbolized by its political appointee chief.
- As always, George Bush is holding his political base.
- Some Democrats (the real ones, not the ones who claimed they were Democrats but always hate and blast Democrats) voted for Bush over John Kerry because they thought the country would be safer due to the administration convincing them that it had the nation’s act together on emergency response and terrorism prevention. Polls show Bush is losing Democrats in droves to the point where he has virtually no Democratic suppport.
- Independent voters who often bend over backwards to give the administration the benefit of the doubt and who don’t like some of the Democratic leadership are fleeing the GOP tent…quickly.
- To turn around the situation, the administration will have to activate and govern via its base — which would explain the shift to go after not just officials with Ds in front of their names, but anyone who raises questions as somehow playing a “blame game” (which some top GOPers are playing with gusto as they try to blame the disaster on state and local officials when as news reports note there is plenty of blame to go around for all levels of government…and that certainly includes the Bush White House).
What does it mean in the long term?
A polarized investigation. Intense efforts at information and image control.
But, mostly, it means that less than a year into his second term George Bush has probably used up his political capital — except among his most loyal political troops who’ll stand by him and unquestioningly accept his administration’s explanations and defend almost all of his actions.
That doesn’t bode well for the rest of the agenda — and the prospect of more, even worsening, polarization doesn’t bode well for national healing and national unity.
UPDATE: Centrist blogger Bull Moose says its time to send in the adults (Bull Moose used to work for one: a Senator named John McCain).
Note to readers: this is a LONG post. There are other excellent NEW POSTS FOR TODAY written by this site’s co-bloggers BELOW this post. Please scroll down and read them as well.
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.