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A BUSH NIGHTMARE  |
Fumbling, stumbling Bush
drops the ball again
of TheColumnists.com
If there is one thing the Bush Administration is really good at, it’s manipulating the media, doing political sleight-of-hand, and convincing people that facts and statistics don’t necessarily mean anything.
This is, remember, the administration that has convinced a substantial number of Americans that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11, that the war in Iraq is a war on terrorism, that global warming isn’t really happening, and that science should be manipulated for religious or ideological purposes. It’s a remarkable record of world-class media chicanery.
At least, it has been up to now. Then Katrina turned New Orleans into a putrid lake in one of the worst, if not the worst, natural disasters in American history. The Bushies were slow getting off the mark in the relief effort and found themselves on the receiving end of a great deal of criticism, some of it justified.
But if the Bush Administration seemed to be moving through a fog on the relief effort, they really dropped the ball on their political/media stance. First we had a picture of Bush peering out of an airplane window, looking detached as he viewed the damage. It wasn’t until three days later that we had the president on the ground, walking around. Even then, he didn’t seem in the moment.
Can you imagine what Bill Clinton would have done? He would have loaded Air Force One with bottled water and baby food. He would have been in New Orleans in two hours, hugging people, ogling the women, getting photographed handing out water bottles and seeing to it that the federal government stepped in quickly and effectively, no matter what the obstacles. He would have, in short, exercised leadership.
But in contrast to his swift rallying of Americans after 9/11, Bush has stumbled and bumbled this time around. It might mark the beginnings of a sea change in the way the American public regards Bush. It’s true that his approval ratings have been declining steadily over the past several months, but the inept response to Katrina promises to accelerate the decline and turn Bush into one of the most unpopular presidents in U. S. history.
What happened? Is it second-term fatigue? It could be. I think the nature of the catastrophe had more to do with the poor response than anything else. It wasn’t a dramatic thing that you could deal with dramatically. It was instead a quiet, deadly inundation. You had no way of quickly getting to critical areas. And no one high up in the Administration had any real idea of just how vulnerable people in the poorer areas were to disastrous flooding. We don’t pay much attention to poor people these days.
In the weeks to come, we will hear over and over again how the war in Iraq caused us to be short of troops needed in the Gulf Region, how the Bush Administration chopped tens of millions of dollars out of proposals from the Army Corps of Engineers for levee improvement, and how the Congress approved more than $231 million for a bridge to nowhere in Alaska while not allocating money where it was needed much more urgently.
The Bush Administration is now scrambling to play political catch-up. If they haven’t already done so by the time you read this, expect them to soon announce some sort of sweeping, grandiose scheme to help the Gulf Region and its people. Karl Rove will have designed it to recoup the political/media momentum and it will cost billions. Much of the money will be stolen by local politicians, this being New Orleans and Louisiana.
It’s very likely that Bush will also turn to Dick Cheney for counsel. Cheney may suggest to the president that New Orleans’s poorer citizens should simply have gotten into their SUVs and driven out of the city when told to evacuate.
And, of course, there is always the promise of comic relief in all this. We have yet to hear from Pat Robertson.
©2005 by Charles M.
McFadden. The McFadden caricature is ©2001 by Jim Hummel.
The illustration is from IMSI's Master Clips Collection, 1895
Francisco Blvd. East, San Rafael, CA, 94901-5506, USA. This column first posted on Sept.
5, 2005.
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