I was away with family yesterday and this morning and not able to follow much of the Katrina coverage in depth. But it didn’t take much catchup reading today to figure out what’s going on: the Bush administration’s counteroffensive is underway, and the focus is not on solving problems but on placing blame. The line coming from the administration — it’s well traced in a number of places, including this post from Josh Marshall — is that all the trouble with getting relief quickly enough to a devastated American city was the fault of local officials.
This Washington Post piece included a charge, anonymously sourced to a “senior Bush official” — did Karl Rove not learn his lesson from the Plame investigation? — that the governor of Louisiana had failed to declare a state of emergency. But, of course, she had. The story now sits with a big fat correction on the Post’s Web site. This is the old Rove-school tactic of planting a lie that, proverbially, can make it halfway round the world while the truth — and the newspaper correction — is still putting on its boots.
But it’s not just the president’s men anonymously pointing fingers. Here’s what the president himself had to say in his weekly radio address yesterday: “The magnitude of responding to a crisis over a disaster area that is larger than the size of Great Britain has created tremendous problems that have strained state and local capabilities. The result is that many of our citizens simply are not getting the help they need, especially in New Orleans. And that is unacceptable.”
Meanwhile, others in his administration are complaining about Louisiana’s tardiness in reaching out for a “multi-state mutual aid pact” and suggesting that state and local authorities failed to take quick enough action to get the federal aid that, it’s implied, Washington was just itching to send.
I don’t doubt that state and local officials made mistakes. And in due time we’ll learn much more. But this disaster is epochal in scale; one reason we have a federal government in the first place is to deal with crises when their scale is simply too great for a state to handle. Instead of taking charge, the Bush administration botched its initial reaction — and now, instead of accepting responsibility and focusing on helping the victims, its officials are covering their posteriors.
The simple juxtaposition in the Post story’s lead says it all:
“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.”
No one knows how many thousands are dead. A minimum of hundreds of thousands are homeless. And Bush and his men are passing the buck. It doesn’t get much lower than this.
Nowhere in his actions or statements is there any indication that President Bush understands what the American people expect of a leader faced with a situation like the one we’ve watched unfold this past week. Why are we hearing about the legalisms and the quibbling over jurisdictions and wondering about reports that help was available but waiting on paperwork? Isn’t it the role of a chief executive to know when there’s a crisis that threatens lives and mobilize all his powers to resolve it? If the locals failed to dot the i’s, shouldn’t the president himself have been on the phone with them, doing what politicians do, arguing and cajoling and shouting as needed until the people’s business was taken care of? Isn’t it the president’s job to man the executive branch with officials who know how to flag a looming crisis and say, “Boss, you better pay attention to this?” Wasn’t there anyone in the White House team who knew enough to say to Bush, “Forget the trip to California, don’t touch that guitar, get back here to Washington — we better get out in front of this thing”?
Plenty of people who haven’t in the past borne partisan animus against Bush are personally angry with him now, and rightly so. This “CEO president” has repeatedly failed in the realm that was supposed to be his strong suit — basic management. When crisis management fails on this large a scale, the calamity may only take a quick moment, a day or a week, but inevitably it has been years in the making. In Katrina’s case, it’s the kind of outcome you get when you have a national leader who never fires anyone for doing a lousy job but who instantly dismisses anyone who breaks ranks or speaks out of line. You end up with a government of incompetents and yes-men placeholders who owe their jobs to loyalty and patronage, not achievement and skill. (Cf. Michael Brown, the head of FEMA, whose chief previous experience was as lawyer for the Arabian Horse Trading Association, a job from which he was fired, “forced out of the position after a spate of lawsuits over alleged supervision failures,” according to the Boston Herald.)
So now we see the administration revert to type. 9/11 was Bill Clinton’s fault, and the CIA’s fault. The recession was Clinton’s fault, too. The deficit has nothing to do with tax cuts, but is the fault of the famous “trifecta” of war, recession and national emergency. The little screwup about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was, once more, the CIA’s fault, and had nothing to do with the administration’s own misuse of intelligence. And the failure to put enough boots on the ground in postwar Iraq to control the country? That must have been the fault of the generals who didn’t ask for more troops. Torture in Abu Ghraib? No one’s really to blame there except a few bad apples.
Now comes Katrina, and Bush is once again saying, don’t look at me — the buck stops nowhere. If so many lives weren’t on the line in so many places and in so many ways, it might even be funny.
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