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Bush Debate: Natural catastrophes are "a
time to test your mettle."
The New Yorker
UNDER WATER
Issue of 2005-09-12
Posted 2005-09-03
One of the creepier vanities of most political leaders is the private
yearning to be tested on a historical scale. Bill Clinton used to confide that,
no matter what else he did as President, without a major war to fight he could
never join the ranks of Lincoln and F.D.R. During the Presidential debates in
2000, George W. Bush informed his opponent, Al Gore, that natural catastrophes
are "a time to test your mettle." Bush had seen his father falter after a
hurricane in South Florida. But now he has done far worse. Over five days last
week, from the onset of the hurricane on the Gulf Coast on Monday morning to
his belated visit to the region on Friday, Bush';s mettle was tested-;and he
failed in almost every respect.
Obviously, a hurricane is beyond human blame, and the political
miscalculations that have come to light-;the negligent planning, the delayed
rescue and aid efforts, the thoroughly confused and uninspired political
leadership-;cannot all be laid at the feet of President Bush. But you could
sense, watching him being interviewed by Diane Sawyer on ABC's "Good
Morning America"-;defensive, confused, overwhelmed-;that he knew that he had
delivered a series of feeble, vague, almost flippant speeches in the early days
of the crisis, and that the only way to prevent further political damage was to
inoculate himself with the inevitable call for non-partisanship: 'I hope people
don't play politics during this period of time."
And yet, to a frightening degree, Bush's faults of leadership and character
were brought into high relief by the crisis. Suntanned and relaxed after a
vacation so long that it would have shamed a French playboy, Bush reacted with
fogged delinquency, as if he had been so lulled by his summer sojourn that he
was not quite ready to acknowledge reality, let alone attempt to master it. His
first view of the floods came, pitifully, theatrically, from the window of a
low-flying Air Force One, and all the President could muster was, according to
his press secretary, 'It's devastating. It's got to be doubly devastating on
the ground." The moment demanded clarity of mind and rigorous governance, and
yet he could not summon them. The performance skills Bush eventually mustered
after September 11th-;in his bullhorn speech at Ground Zero, in his first
speech to Congress-;eluded him. The whole conceit of his Presidency, that he
was an instinctive chief executive backed by 'grownups" like Dick Cheney and
tactical wizards like Karl Rove, now seemed as water-logged as Biloxi and New
Orleans. The mismanagement of the Katrina floods echoed the White House
mismanagement-;the cavalier posture, the wretched decisions, the
self-delusions-;in postwar Iraq.
Just as serious, the President's priorities, his indifference to questions
of infrastructure and the environment, magnified an already complicated
disaster. In an era of tax cuts for the wealthy, Bush consistently slashed the
Army Corps of Engineers' funding requests to improve the levees holding back
Lake Pontchartrain. This year, he asked for $3.9 million, $23 million less than
the Corps requested. In the end, Bush reluctantly agreed to $5.7 million,
delaying seven contracts, including one to enlarge the New Orleans levees.
Former Republican congressman Michael Parker was forced out as the head of the
Corps by Bush in 2002 when he dared to protest the lack of proper funding.
Similarly, the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, which is
supposed to improve drainage and pumping systems in the New Orleans area,
recently asked for $62.5 million; the White House proposed $10.5 million.
Former Louisiana Senator John Breaux, a pro-Bush Democrat, said, 'All of us
said, 'Look, build it or you're going to have all of Jefferson Parish under
water.' And they didn't, and now all of Jefferson Parish is under water."
The President's incuriosity, his prideful insistence on being an
underbriefed 'gut player," is not looking so charming right now, either, if it
ever did. In the ABC interview, he said, 'I don't think anyone anticipated the
breach of the levees." Even the most cursory review shows that there have been
comprehensive and chilling warnings of a potential calamity on the Gulf Coast
for years. The most telling, but hardly the only, example was a five-part
series in 2002 by John McQuaid and Mark Schleifstein in the New Orleans
Times-Picayune, a newspaper that heroically kept publishing on the Internet
last week. After evaluating the city's structural deficiencies, the
Times-Picayune reporters concluded that a catastrophe was 'a matter of when,
not if." The same paper said last year, 'For the first time in 37 years,
federal budget cuts have all but stopped major work on the New Orleans area's
east bank hurricane levees, a complex network of concrete walls, metal gates
and giant earthen berms that won't be finished for at least another decade." A
Category 4 or 5 hurricane would be a catastrophe: 'Soon the geographical 'bowl'
of the Crescent City would fill up with the waters of the lake, leaving those
unable to evacuate with little option but to cluster on rooftops-;terrain they
would have to share with hungry rats, fire ants, nutria, snakes, and perhaps
alligators. The water itself would become a festering stew of sewage, gasoline,
refinery chemicals, and debris." And that describes much of the Gulf Coast
today.
-; David Remnick
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