As troops moved into New Orleans with a firm mandate to restore order and help in rescues, a political battle was shaping up amid efforts by the administration to launch a massive public relations campaign.
There seem to be two prongs here (1)step up efforts to alleviate the situation and show movement in terms of top officials physically out there and talking to the media, (2)increasingly assert that state and local authorities were if not partly to blame, then largely to blame for what is shaping up as one of the biggest and most ineptly handled natural disasters in American history.
Meanwhile, a new ABC News poll shows that while most Americans think federal government response was poor, most aren’t holding Bush personally responsible:
The most critical views cross jurisdictions: Two-thirds in this ABC News/Washington Post poll say the federal government should have been better prepared to deal with a storm this size, and three-quarters say state and local governments in the affected areas likewise were insufficiently prepared.
Other evaluations are divided. Forty-six percent of Americans approve of Bush’s handling of the crisis, while 47 percent disapprove. That compares poorly with Bush’s 91 percent approval rating for his performance in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but it’s far from the broad discontent expressed by critics of the initial days of the hurricane response. (It also almost exactly matches Bush’s overall job approval rating, 45 percent, in an ABC/Post poll a week ago.)
Similarly, 48 percent give a positive rating to the federal government’s response overall, compared with 51 percent who rate it negatively — another split view, not a broadly critical one.
When it gets to specifics, however, most ratings are worse: Majorities ranging from 56 to 79 percent express criticism of federal efforts at delivering food and water, evacuating displaced people, controlling looting and (especially) dealing with the price of gasoline. In just one specific area — conducting search and rescue operations — do most, 58 percent, give the government positive marks.
News reports aren’t painting the picture of real efforts to find out what went wrong but, instead, efforts at spin control. The New York Times paints a portrayal of a White House under fire — including friendly fire, from it’s own traditional supporters. And, overall, news stories are show a pattern about how the White House is responding to it. For instance:
WASHINGTON (AP) – The Bush administration kept its Hurricane Katrina response and its public relations campaign in overdrive on Sunday, even as first confirmation came from Washington of a dreaded statistic – that the storm probably killed thousands of people.
Responding to accusations of racial insensitivity, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said, “Nobody, especially the president, would have left people unattended on the basis of race.”
Rice, who was dispatched to her native state of Alabama, was among four Cabinet secretaries and other high-ranking administration who fanned who out across the storm-ravaged region on Sunday. President Bush was planning to return to the area Monday, three days after an initial visit.
Six days after Katrina lashed much of the Gulf Coast into oblivion, and five days after levee breaks drowned New Orleans and turned it into a place of lawless misery, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said military personnel and National Guard troops have secured the city and ensured that those still stranded can be moved out.
But he said significant challenges remain – including how to care for the people being relocated.
“We are still in the middle of the emergency. This is not the time that we can draw a sigh of relief,” Chertoff said on CNN’s “Late Edition.” “We are moving the city of New Orleans to other parts of the country.”
WASHINGTON – The White House worked furiously yesterday to try to convince skeptics it had a grip on unrest in New Orleans and make the case that the federal response to Hurricane Katrina was finally pressing forward with a monumental recovery effort.
Amid the furor over the failure to quickly help those suffering in the aftermath, Bush committed 7,000 more active-duty soldiers and Marines to help hasten evacuations and restore order, starting with New Orleans.
The Pentagon also will send another 10,000 members of the National Guard to Louisiana and Mississippi, and total troop strength will rise to about 40,000.
Another 300 Air Force airmen based in Biloxi, Miss., will return from Iraq and Afghanistan the next two weeks to help their families and join recovery efforts at Keesler Air Force Base, which took a direct hit from Katrina.
“The enormity of the task requires more resources,” said Bush, who plans to return tomorrow to the Gulf Coast to view operations. He decided to postpone a meeting next week with Chinese President Hu Jintao. “In America, we do not abandon our fellow citizens in their hour of need.”
Still, with critics fuming, Team Bush tried to emphasize some benchmarks, highlighting that the Coast Guard has saved 9,500 victims, evacuated another 25,000 people, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency has delivered 6.7 million liters of water and 1.9 million field rations. Amtrak also will soon run four trains a day out of New Orleans.
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff tried to blame the feds’ slow response on the disastrous breaches in levees a day after Katrina hit, even though various officials now claim they’d warned about the weaknesses in the levees for years.
“The second catastrophe, frankly, added a level of challenge that no one has seen before,” Chertoff said.
News reports and various bloggers have shown that Chertoff’s argument is, at best, inaccurate, and, at worst a lie.
Journalists and experts are pointing to the record. And seemingly each hour more comes out that points to outright falsehoods. Here’s the lead from a story by The Independent’s environmental editor:
Vital measures to protect New Orleans from “catastrophic” hurricane damage were scrapped by the Bush administration to pay for its wars on terror and in Iraq, despite official warnings of impending disaster.
Finding for flood prevention was slashed by 80 per cent, work on strengthening levees to protect the city was stopped for the first time in 37 years, and planning for housing stranded citizens and evacuating refugees from the Superdome were crippled. Yet the administration had been warned repeatedly of the dangers by its own officials.
In early 2001, at the start of Mr Bush’s presidency, his Government’s Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) warned that a hurricane hitting New Orleans would be the deadliest of the three most likely catastrophes facing America; the others were a massive San Francisco earthquake and, prophetically, a terrorist attack on New York.
Fema’s then director, the Bush appointee Joe Allbaugh, said that the warning caused him “great concern”. But the President emasculated the agency, subsuming it into the Department of Homeland Security set up after the 11 September 2001 attacks, which concentrated on the terrorist threat.
This was only one of a series of warnings that predicted what happened last week, including the storm surges brought by the hurricane, the breaching of the levees, the floods covering the city, and the “toxic gumbo” of sewage, oil and chemicals.
And as officials now predict that when it’s all over the death toll will be in the thousands, other reports sketch a picture of warring levels of governments contributing to the delays…and a White House now playing up that aspect via unnamed sources in news reports, in an effort to shift criticism aimed at it for a slow and inept response despite millions pumped into a Homeland Security system over the past four years.
It’s as if the White House trying to grab the elbow of the media, straying Republicans and furious independents and pointing it in a totally different direction. And all within the context of heartbreaking stories of life-taking incompetence such as this (and also here) and growing outrage such as this and expressions of dismay from pros like this.
Some of the most damning stories are in the Washington Post, not just because of what they say about the thousands still left stranded and beause of the failures of state and local officials, but because they show a transparent White House effort to shift the blame so attention and political heat falls on others and not them.
Consider this from the Post:
Tens of thousands of people spent a fifth day awaiting evacuation from this ruined city, as Bush administration officials blamed state and local authorities for what leaders at all levels have called a failure of the country’s emergency management.
President Bush authorized the dispatch of 7,200 active-duty ground troops to the area — the first major commitment of regular ground forces in the crisis — and the Pentagon announced that an additional 10,000 National Guard troops will be sent to Louisiana and Mississippi, raising the total Guard contingent to about 40,000.
Fair enough. The Post notes progress and that a lot more needs to be done. And then there’s this:
Behind the scenes, a power struggle emerged, as federal officials tried to wrest authority from Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (D). Shortly before midnight Friday, the Bush administration sent her a proposed legal memorandum asking her to request a federal takeover of the evacuation of New Orleans, a source within the state’s emergency operations center said Saturday.
The administration sought unified control over all local police and state National Guard units reporting to the governor. Louisiana officials rejected the request after talks throughout the night, concerned that such a move would be comparable to a federal declaration of martial law. Some officials in the state suspected a political motive behind the request. “Quite frankly, if they’d been able to pull off taking it away from the locals, they then could have blamed everything on the locals,” said the source, who does not have the authority to speak publicly.
A senior administration official said that Bush has clear legal authority to federalize National Guard units to quell civil disturbances under the Insurrection Act and will continue to try to unify the chains of command that are split among the president, the Louisiana governor and the New Orleans mayor.
Louisiana did not reach out to a multi-state mutual aid compact for assistance until Wednesday, three state and federal officials said. As of Saturday, Blanco still had not declared a state of emergency, the senior Bush official said.
IMPORTANT NOTE TO READERS: In comments, a reader has alerted us to the fact that it now turns out that the “senior Bush official” is apparently mistaken (yet another factual “error” coming out of the White House when it is under fire). The reader informs us:
“The WaPo has issued a serious correction: A Sept. 4 article on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina incorrectly said that Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (D) had not declared a state of emergency. She declared an emergency on Aug. 26.” Josh Marhsall comments on the “error” here. Atrios here.
More from the article:
“The federal government stands ready to work with state and local officials to secure New Orleans and the state of Louisiana,” White House spokesman Dan Bartlett said. “The president will not let any form of bureaucracy get in the way of protecting the citizens of Louisiana.”
More from the article:
Blanco made two moves Saturday that protected her independence from the federal government: She created a philanthropic fund for the state’s victims and hired James Lee Witt, Federal Emergency Management Agency director in the Clinton administration, to advise her on the relief effort.
Bush, who has been criticized, even by supporters, for the delayed response to the disaster, used his weekly radio address to put responsibility for the failure on lower levels of government. The magnitude of the crisis “has created tremendous problems that have strained state and local capabilities,” he said. “The result is that many of our citizens simply are not getting the help they need, especially in New Orleans. And that is unacceptable.”
Indeed, so far there is no sign that Bush thinks his team has performed poorly — in fact he has praised the official under the most fire. The Post also had a piece on that department — saying it’s actually IN WORSE SHAPE NOW than before Sept. 11:
Despite four years and tens of billions of dollars spent preparing for the worst, the federal government was not ready when it came at daybreak on Monday, according to interviews with more than a dozen current and former senior officials and outside experts.
Among the flaws they cited: Failure to take the storm seriously before it hit and trigger the government’s highest level of response. Rebuffed offers of aid from the military, states and cities. An unfinished new plan meant to guide disaster response. And a slow bureaucracy that waited until late Tuesday to declare the catastrophe “an incident of national significance,” the new federal term meant to set off the broadest possible relief effort.
Note that this is NOT the line being pitched now by the administration, if you read the earlier story.
And readers take note: will what you read in this story be what you hear on talk shows on Monday? Or will it be whatever the White House line is at the time (we will take bets on THAT..). MORE:
Born out of the confused and uncertain response to 9/11, the massive new Department of Homeland Security was charged with being ready the next time, whether the disaster was wrought by nature or terrorists. The department commanded huge resources as it prepared for deadly scenarios from an airborne anthrax attack to a biological attack with plague to a chlorine-tank explosion.
But Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said yesterday that his department had failed to find an adequate model for addressing the “ultra-catastrophe” that resulted when Hurricane Katrina’s floodwater breached New Orleans’s levees and drowned the city, “as if an atomic bomb had been dropped.”
If Hurricane Katrina represented a real-life rehearsal of sorts, the response suggested to many that the nation is not ready to handle a terrorist attack of similar dimensions. “This is what the department was supposed to be all about,” said Clark Kent Ervin, DHS’s former inspector general. “Instead, it obviously raises very serious, troubling questions about whether the government would be prepared if this were a terrorist attack. It’s a devastating indictment of this department’s performance four years after 9/11.”
Here’s the critical “nut graph” on FEMA:
Indeed, the warnings about New Orleans’s vulnerability to post-hurricane flooding repeatedly circulated at the upper levels of the new bureaucracy, which had absorbed the old lead agency for disasters, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, among its two dozen fiefdoms…
But several current and former senior officials charged that those worries were never accorded top priority — either by FEMA’s management or their superiors in DHS. Even when officials held a practice run, as they did in an exercise dubbed “Hurricane Pam” last year, they did not test for the worst-case scenario, rehearsing only what they would do if a Category 3 storm hit New Orleans, not the Category 4 power of Katrina. And after Pam, the planned follow-up study was never completed, according to a FEMA official involved……
The roots of last week’s failures will be examined for weeks and months to come, but early assessments point to a troubled Department of Homeland Security that is still in the midst of a bureaucratic transition, a “work in progress,” as Mencer put it. Some current and former officials argued that as it worked to focus on counterterrorism, the department has diminished the government’s ability to respond in a nuts-and-bolts way to disasters in general, and failed to focus enough on threats posed by hurricanes and other natural disasters in particular. From an independent Cabinet-level agency, FEMA has become an underfunded, isolated piece of the vast DHS, yet it is still charged with leading the government’s response to disaster.
“It’s such an irony I hate to say it, but we have less capability today than we did on September 11,” said a veteran FEMA official involved in the hurricane response. “We are so much less than what we were in 2000,” added another senior FEMA official. “We’ve lost a lot of what we were able to do then.”
Writes blogger Bull Moose:
Would you entrust your life and the lives of your family to Michael Brown and Michael Chertoff? In view what has happened over the past week, do you believe that these men should continue to be responsible for the safety and security of your family, your community, your country ? Look at your loved ones and contemplate the notion that these two individuals could have your fate in their hands.
This has nothing to do with “recriminations.” The nation continues to be threatened with both terrorist attacks and natural disasters. We cannot allow a repeat of the events of the past week. These two men have a track record – New Orleans. Mr. President, ask for their resignations. Where have you gone Rudy Giuliani? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you.
So is FEMA’s decline the fault of local or state leaders? Will Americans hear the reason for its decline acknowledged by the administration and will journalists talking to administration sources for their stories have this explained to them as well?
Or will the focus on what Americans in general, journalists in particular and — most certainly — what listeners to talking-points-talk-shows are told be an attempt to deflect attention away from FLAWS in the federal set-up in order to short-circuit growing demands to dump incompetent officials who are still “administering” programs with life-or-death consequences?
And, the big question: will images of death and destruction, tales of people not hung out to dry but left out there to drown, mean little in the end — and will this deteriorate into yet one more issue dominated by the kind of World Wrestling Federation political polarization that has marked late 20th century and early 21st century America?
Or — given the suffering, evidence of incompetence, and the remaining potential threat to national security that the poor storm response revealed — will it be different this time? The storm is over; the story isn’t…
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.