As a diminished but still deadly Hurricane Rita slams into Texas, the Washington Post notes another wind is blowing strong….a political wind….and one that suggests there may be a significant learning curve underway at the White House:
The president said he wanted to see the emergency response system from the ground floor at U.S. Northern Command headquarters. “I need to understand how it works better,” he told reporters before leaving Washington. But Bush was also embarking on a broader, and possibly more important, mission: restoring strength and confidence in his presidency.
Thus, there’s confirmation of what despite official and nonofficial spin many in both parties, and independents have known: Hurricane Katrina did not rate a cry of good job for GWB but, at the very least, a need for the White House to take stock and find a way to do a better job. And if you read this Post piece you indeed sense a White House trying mightily not to repeat past mistakes — and admitting that some were made:
A president who roamed across the national and world stages with an unshakable self-assurance that comforted Republicans and confounded critics since 2001 suddenly finds himself struggling to reclaim his swagger. Bush’s standing with the public — and within the Republican Party — has been battered by a failed Social Security campaign, violence in Iraq, and most recently Hurricane Katrina. His approval ratings, 42 percent in the most recent Washington Post-ABC poll, have never been lower.
A president who normally thrives on tough talk and self-assurance finds himself at what aides privately describe as a low point in office, one that is changing the psychic and political aura of the White House, as well as its distinctive political approach.
In small, sometimes subtle but unmistakable ways, the president and top aides sound less certain, more conciliatory and willing to do something they avoided in the first term: admit mistakes. After bulling through crisis after crisis with a “bring ’em on” brashness, a more solemn Bush now has twice taken responsibility for the much-criticized response to Hurricane Katrina.
This suggests that the people who are “stuck on stupid” are those who want to paper over the fact that the feds know they need to do it BETTER this time…which means the “blame game” has in fact quietly been conducted within the White House itself in an effort to find out what went wrong. The Post notes:
Aides who never betrayed self-doubt now talk in private of failures selling the American people on the Iraq war, the president’s Social Security plan and his response to Hurricane Katrina.
So some will say: “Then these officials MUST be closet liberals…”
The president who once told the United Nations it would drift into irrelevancy if it did not back the invasion of Iraq last week praised the world body and said the world works better “when we act together.” A White House team that operated on its terms since 2000 is reaching to outside experts for answers like never before.
“I think they are showing a greater willingness to look for new suggestions, new ideas, new approaches than at any time in the presidency,” said former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.). “I think they realize the larger system has failed: They are not where they want to be on Iraq; the first week after Katrina was an absolute failure.”
So some will say: “That means Gingrich’s heart is with the Democrats…”
David Gergen, who has advised Republican and Democratic presidents going back to the 1970s, said that “there is no question [Bush and his advisers] changed their tone. . . . That is a chastened White House talking.
The Post goes onto say some White Housers say it’s the challenges facing Bush that have changed. But the bottom line — as any parent knows — is this: to correct behavior you must first point to the behavior that needed to be corrected. And if you read the news accounts about efforts by the three levels of government, that’s precisely what seems to have happened here.
The bottom line is that Katrina seemed to be a very deadly wake up call for:
- the press which went back to pre-911 adversarial coverage of the government as it asked increasingly tougher questions. Here’s one example (some will applaud it; others will say it’s going too far).
- local and state governments everywhere led by people who under no circumstances want to want to look like New Orleans’ or Louisana’s hapless leadership.
- a White House that doesn’t want to ever again look several beats behind the conductor as it did during Hurricane Katrina.
The final outcome? It’s too early to tell. But so far Hurricane Rita is seemingly being handled far more skillfully than its angrier cousin Katrina at all levels of government.
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.