It occurs to me that the timing of Gustav is most inconvenient for the GOP, especially if the storm heads directly for NOLA. Indeed, even with it heading only in the general direction of the city, it is unavoidable that Hurricane Katrina will be brought up, and brought up continually, on the news. And even absent political commentary about the Bush administration’s response to Katrina (and there will be plenty of that), any discussion of the storm will bring back memories that Republicans in general would prefer stay out of sight and mind.
At the moment, the projections put the eye right off the US coast on Monday morning, just at the RNC is starting in the Twin Cities. Invariably, there will be news coverage of the storm alongside the political coverage on all the networks–especially if the storm is heading straight for New Orleans.
It is already being reported that President Bush (who is slated to speak on Monday) might forgo the convention because of the storm. On the one hand, McCain might be happy to have a Dubya-less convention, on the other, he can’t be too happy to have one of Bush’s second term failures (i.e., the administration’s response to Katrina) to be a major story the week he is formally nominated.
This is more, by the way, than simply something that is “gotcha” politics about the past. The response to Katrina was one of several events in the early days of the second Bush term that took the already building frustration with Bush amongst many Republicans over the top. There is a reason that “heckuva a job, Brownie” is emblematic of much of what has been wrong with this administration.
Indeed, 2005 was hardly a good year for Bush, as it contained (amongst other things) the Terri Schiavo situation (March), Katrina (August) and the Harriet Miers debacle (October). The Miers nomination (and subsequent withdrawal) is especially worth mentioning in the context of Katrina, as like with the Brown appointment to FEMA, the Miers pick for SCOTUS underscored poor judgment by the president in terms of appointments (Brown was not qualified to run FEMA and Miers was not qualified to be on the Court).
Indeed, the President’s approval ratings have been a downhill ride since the start of 2005:
In regards to Katrina, here are some past posts on the politics thereof:
- Katrina: Who Knew What When?
- More on Investigating the Federal Response to Katrina
- The Bush Administration and Katrina
The views expressed in the comments are the sole responsibility of the person leaving those comments. They do not reflect the opinion of the author of PoliBlog, nor have they been vetted by the author.
August 28th, 2008 at 2:21 pm
You also might want to mention where Bush was in 2005 as Katrina hit New Orleans: giving McCain a birthday cake.
I can’t believe the White House still has the picture posted on their website, but expect to see it a lot over the next couple of days: http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/08/images/20050829-5_p082905pm-0125-515h.html
As for Bush staying away from the RNC convention because of the storm, what is he going to do? Fly over the disaster area a couple of times and look out the window like a bewildered child as he did in 2005? (once again, I don’t know why they haven’t taken the photo down: http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/08/images/20050831_p083105pm-0117jas-515h.html
August 28th, 2008 at 3:53 pm
Not Katrina again.
Call me a Bush apologist - but would who-knew-what-when really have changed anything? What could the President or anyone else have done to prevent Hurricane Katrina from doing the damage that it did? Whatever anyone knew about levee failures - at the point the levees failed - there was not much anyone could do. The damage was done, the flood waters were coming (FAST) and there was no way to stop them, or to get people out of the way. Those folks had already made their choice.
As far as I can remember people were advised to evacuate before the storm hit. I own a summer home on the Georgia Coast, and believe me, if I was staying there right now I’d be getting the storm shutters out NOW in preparation for the possibility that Hanna will hit (it already is borded up, I do this when we leave for the summer). I’d have my house borded up by Monday and would be ready to leave at that time. And if my car broke down - I’d have time to WALK far enough inland to avoid storm surge before the storm hit, even if I only managed a couple miles a day - which even a very out of shape person should be able to do. I wouldn’t wait for someone else to tell me to go. I’d have the common sense to go on my own.
Yeah, I know, I’ve heard the sob stories about someone who is disabled, or elderly, or whatever. Come on. Are we that stupid and uncreative? Over a week of advance warning and we can’t figure out a way to get out of the surge zone? I don’t believe it.
I really see all of the finger pointing about the Katrina response as a way for people to avoid personal responsibility. In the information age, there is no excuse for anyone living in hurricane country to be caught off guard by a storm. It is baffling to me why anyone was in that city at all. It should have been a ghost town, not because of anything the President or FEMA said, but because of COMMON SENSE.
It all bespeaks lack of humility in the face of nature, and stinks of scapegoating - blaming someone else, some politician, for the poor decisions of individuals who knew the storm was coming and didn’t do anything about it, or waited until it was too late.
August 28th, 2008 at 4:50 pm
There was plenty of blame to go around, but if you look back at the federal response in the aftermath (and that is the key here) then one finds a rather unimpressive performance. The time it took FEMA to respond to the after effects of the storm was disgraceful.
There is a reason the “Brownie” soon left his job at FEMA.
Let’s put it this way: the main issue was the failure of the levies after Katrina passed and the wretched response thereto.
What if the levies had been breeched by an al Qaeda or other terrorist bombing, with the commensurate flooding and such–would you still consider the response by FEMA and DHS to have been adequate? Remember: they are the same folks who were supposed to be in place to deal with such an occurrence.
No, the Katrina situation was far, far more than simply an issue of the disaster and the lack of proper evac–it was about a human tragedy unfolding and the federal government being exceptionally slow to react.
August 28th, 2008 at 7:40 pm
What people who live in coastal areas subject to hurricane weather should have taken away from Katrina is a sense of personal responsibility for safety. You should know, living in hurricane country, that the worst can happen and you should make plans accordingly. You should not expect FEMA, the national guard, the police, the fire department, or Santa Claus to help you. You should understand that what the government does, it does slowly. You should take responsibility for yourself. You should know how to get out, on foot if necessary, and have what supplies are needed to do that on hand at all times. You should take charge of yourself.
I saw painfully little of that after the storm, and altogether too much finger-pointing. The difference between a terrorist attack and a hurricane is that with one you have detailed forecasting and know with great certainty when and where it will strike, and how bad it will be; with the other, you have no idea. You can’t watch radar images of Al Qaida in real time; you can watch a storm in real time on weather.com. While the government response to a given crisis is always subject to scrutiny (and rightly so), I just don’t think it’s fair to lay such a severe case of blame on the federal government for Katrina’s death toll.
Could FEMA have responded sooner? Probably. Would it have saved any lives? I’m not so sure about that. No matter how fast they knew in Washington that the levies were failing, I just question whether it would have been realistic to mount any kind of rescue operation for people in the affected areas before the water got dangerously high.
Let’s look at the components of that rescue operation for a minute. We’re talking about identifying the scattered people who hadn’t evacuated; somehow getting word to them that the levies failed and they need to get to high ground; and then somehow rescuing those individuals, all before the water reaches its highest flood level. Oh, and by the way, the communication and transportation infrastructure in the whole region is trashed, and you don’t know who chose to ignore the evacuation orders, or where they are located; they are scattered here and there in an urban environment that has been trashed by a huge storm.
Do you really think that could have been done, before the flood reached maximum pool?
Maybe the government could have deployed trailers for people to live in a few weeks faster. Maybe it could have done a lot of things better - but it couldn’t have saved any lives, and when it comes to it, isn’t that what really matters? I mean, the rest of it is “stuff”. Stuff can be replaced, even if slowly; lives are what we really measure human tragedy in. And I don’t believe a faster FEMA response would have saved anybody; the scope and nature of the catastrophe was simply too larger.
I still say there shouldn’t have been anyone there to rescue. Ignoring a cat 5 hurricane is tantamount to suicide.
August 28th, 2008 at 8:01 pm
The thing is: the problems weren’t post-landfall, post levies breaking. The hurricane itself wasn’t main problem.
Go back and look at the timelines–how long it took to feds to even take the situation seriously and tell me that FEMA and DHS did a good job.
And yes: there were state and local problems as well, not just the feds.
Again: had that disaster been man-made from a terrorist attack, would you be as forgiving of FEMA’s policy implementation?
It took us days just to get basic emergency water and food to the people at the convention center and the SuperDome. It shouldn’t have been that hard.
Further, if you go back and look, the Bush administration had been warned, and the President had been briefed, about the potential problems and yet, there was no preparation made to plan for the problem. For example, see here.
The very fact that feds are behaving differently for Gustav than they did for Katrina supports my position, i.e., that they failed to do their job adequately with Katrina.
August 28th, 2008 at 9:56 pm
Look, what I’m really trying to get at is that if we’re going to play the blame game, and call the governments (local, state, federal, whatever) on their unpreparedness for this disaster, we have to call the people who were on the front line for their unpreparedness, too. I’m not really forgiving the administration. What I am advocating for is self-reliance. I think that relying on the government to provide for your needs in the immediate wake of a disaster is a foolish, foolish plan.
I don’t need the federal government to give me water or food in an emergency because I’ve planned for an emergency, and at least in the short term, I’m going to have enough to sustain my family no matter what FEMA does, and it doesn’t matter if it’s a terrorist attack, a natural disaster, or a thunderbolt thrown down by Zeus. It doesn’t take a lot of money to stockpile a few weeks worth of food and water. And it doesn’t take a lot of space. What it does take is forethought. I mean, seriously. How much does a case of bottled water cost? A can of beans? How hard is it to highlight your escape route on a map? How hard is it to stick these things along with other basic survival items in a container for easy transportation?
In a truly horrific disaster - let’s say a nuclear attack on a major U.S. city - people are going to be waiting a lot longer for help than they waited after Katrina. Assuming the government will help assumes that the government can help; perhaps it can’t, for whatever reason, be it incompetence, the scale of the disaster, or whatever. Bottom line to me is that lots of folks living below sea level in one of the most hurricane prone areas of the country had no personal disaster plan to speak of; they had no evacuation plan; they had no emergency rations ready to take with them if they were ordered to leave.
How anyone who loves their family could endanger them by this type of neglect is something I simply can’t understand, and there’s no way that picking apart the federal response to the disaster will ever change that.
Leaving those who are most directly responsible - the individuals themselves - out of the conversation about culpability stinks of scapegoating to me.
August 28th, 2008 at 9:59 pm
[...] of a conversation developing in the comments section of this post, let me say a few things about the politics of [...]
August 28th, 2008 at 10:03 pm
I just posted a lengthy post on the subject that perhaps makes clear where I am coming from.
I take the point on self-reliance, and I am hardly saying that there aren’t things people ought to do to prepare for disasters. However, the bottom line is that there is a disaster relief function for the feds, and it didn’t work too well in NOLA after Katrina. It is fair to point that out and ask that the administration be held responsible.