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Katrina Rips Bush a New One, by Mark Jurkowitz

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Katrina Rips Bush A New One
Submitted by editor on September 8, 2005 - 2:32pm.
By MARK JURKOWITZ
Source: Boston Phoenix

Hurricane Katrina did not simply destroy physical infrastructure, social fabric, and countless lives on America’s Gulf Coast. It blew away the ground rules that had defined post-9/11 American politics and protected the most polarizing administration in recent history — one that failed to articulate a coherent domestic agenda, tossed gasoline on the smoldering culture wars, and dragged the country into a divisive and very likely disastrous war in Iraq.

All the elements that George W. Bush and Karl Rove had exploited for political gain — a timid and kowtowing mainstream media, a deafening silence about America’s growing underclass, the fear that criticizing the White House in the era of Al Qaeda was tantamount to treason, and Bush’s can-do, cowboy image — were shattered by the same winds and rains that savaged casinos in Biloxi and homes in Jefferson Parish.

What emerged from the rubble — with the nation’s collective psyche now a toxic stew of shock, shame, fear, and anger — were the hard truths about our society’s frightening inequities and our government’s horrifying incompetence.

• Rapper Kanye West, appearing during a NBC concert/fundraiser, stared straight into the camera and declared that "George Bush doesn’t care about black people."

• Jefferson Parish president Aaron Broussard openly sobbed during a television interview in which he declared that the "bureaucracy has committed murder here in the Greater New Orleans area."

• A grim-faced Tim Russert, appearing barely to conceal his fury, opened a Meet the Press interview with Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff by demanding: "Are you, or anyone who reports to you, contemplating resignation?"

• Reporting from New Orleans, Fox News’s Geraldo Rivera stiff-armed bloviating Bill O’Reilly’s efforts to shift responsibility away from the White House by declaring: "This is Dante’s Inferno, Bill. There is no way to sugarcoat it. This is the worst thing I’ve seen in a civilized nation."

THIS IS ABOUT RACE AND CLASS

In an interview with Fox News, Chertoff warned that "we need to prepare the country for what’s coming. It is going to be about as ugly a scene as you can imagine." He was referring to the many rotting corpses that will be unearthed when New Orleans is drained of floodwater. But he could have also been speaking about the much deeper national trauma to come.

Yes, the cameras will be on hand for the grisly scenes when the dead are finally found. And survivors will eventually tell their wrenching tales of death and delay on the TV newsmagazines. But there will also be shocks to the economy. There will be serious political implications for the White House. And there will be what columnist David Brooks, quoting historian John Barry, called the "human storm," a social backlash to Katrina that will highlight the yawning chasms and simmering resentments of race and class.

What happened in New Orleans, when a largely minority underclass was trapped in a drowning city to suffer, die, and, on occasion, engage in criminal violence, not only reinforced the notion that our society is deeply divided by color and money. It sent the inescapable message that the third world exists right here in 21st-century America.

Jesse Jackson drove that point home with blunt-force trauma when he assessed the scene in New Orleans and declared that "it looks like Africans in the hull of a slave ship." Musician and New Orleans native Wynton Marsalis eloquently, albeit more subtly, raised the specter of different treatment for different classes when he said that "we hear a lot of words, but we don’t see a lot of action."

There were some smaller race-based brushfires that leapt up from the ruins of the storm in the media. A controversy erupted over two photographs, one that described a black youth with groceries as a looter and another of two lighter-skinned people described has having found groceries. There was a debate over the use of the word "refugee" to describe the displaced residents, with some arguing that the word connotes second-class status. But those battles only direct our attention to the overriding issue, illustrated by statistics from a New York Times story on racial disparity in New Orleans: 35 percent of the city’s black residents — almost 110,000 people — lived in poverty, according to the 2000 census. More than half of the impoverished black households in that city did not have an automobile — and thus had little hope of escape from Katrina.

Surveying the displaced poor who have been shipped off to the Houston Superdome, Fox News Channel’s Greta Van Susteren put it succinctly. "The rich people are lucky," she said. "These people aren’t."

THE MEDIA GETS ITS BARK BACK

The nation’s mainstream media has had a rough couple of years. They had been battered into near submission by a tight-lipped and contemptuous Bush administration that created its own phony news vehicles to circumvent them. The press’s dismal failure to scrutinize the White House’s faulty WMD rationale for going to war in Iraq has already elicited mea culpas from outlets such as the New York Times and Washington Post.

And yet, what appeared to start out as another overhyped TV story about extreme weather has turned into one of journalism’s finest moments in recent memory. Down in the hell of New Orleans — where reporters risked life and limb and were literally shocked by what they saw — they finally found the courage to believe their own eyes. CNN’s usually mild-mannered morning anchor Soledad O’Brien roasted FEMA director Mike Brown, who claimed not to know of the despair at New Orleans’s Morial Convention Center until he heard news reports.

"How is it possible we’re getting better intel than you’re getting?" O’Brien snapped. "I don’t understand how FEMA cannot have this information.... In Banda Aceh in Indonesia, they got food dropped two days after the tsunami struck."

During Bush’s photo-op visit to the region last week, he ran into the kind of questioning that explains why he rarely holds news conferences. "There are a lot of people wondering why you weren’t fixing the problems yesterday or the day before and why the richest country on earth can’t get food and water to those people that need it," one questioner asserted, leaving the president to say that on the one hand he was "satisfied with the response," but on the other that he was "not satisfied with all the results."

In the days to come, tougher questions will be asked as journalists switch from chronicling the scope of the disaster to piecing together how it happened. (The new issue of Newsweek describes a "strange paralysis" that set in at the White House, which wasted time in lengthy debates over "who was in charge.") Even more important than the answers they find is the fact that journalists now smell blood in the waters of Bush’s troubled second term.

"This is different" than 9/11, said USA Today’s Susan Page on the Fox News Sunday show. "People will be more willing to criticize him. I think this [the Katrina fallout] takes over the rest of the administration."

BUSH HIMSELF

Now reportedly in the hands of Karl Rove, White House efforts at damage control will likely take several forms. One will include a compassion campaign, a smoother version of his father’s infamous "Message: I care," theme from the 1992 election. The other will feature surrogates, who will deflect blame onto other officials — most likely local and regional ones. Any serious postmortem is likely to find fatal shortcomings at all levels of government, including state and city. But Bush himself will have to face several layers of damning questions in the aftermath of Katrina.

The first concerns his belated and inappropriate response to the events unfolding on every television screen last week. Bush’s remarks on ABC’s Good Morning America that "I don’t think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees," have already come back to haunt him.... His first journey to the area, during which he uttered the immortal words, "Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job," about the largely clueless FEMA director, struck the wrong emotional chord and was viewed as a public-relations failure.

The administration will be asked to explain its failure to heed dire warnings about New Orleans and its refusal to allocate funds to protect against the kind of havoc wrought by Katrina. That will trigger even larger debates about Bush’s priorities and his decision to pour human and financial resources into a war in Iraq that is losing the support of the American people. And finally, Katrina raises legitimate questions about the administration’s ability to protect us from and react to a terrorist attack, the linchpin of the Bush presidency.

"As a test of the homeland-security system, this was a failure," declared former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, one of the many critics of the government’s response to Katrina to have emerged from the right flank of the political spectrum.

Once the bodies are found and buried, expect some high-profile stagecraft in Washington. Noisy congressional hearings seem very likely. Despite this White House’s preference for loyalty over competence, someone’s head is likely to roll, with FEMA chief Brown’s the most obvious candidate. And Bush’s next decision on how to fill the new Supreme Court vacancy will have to also take into account the post-Katrina political calculus.

Even before the fallout from the storm, the American public was souring on Bush’s stewardship. A late-August Gallup survey found 52 percent of the respondents critical of his handling of foreign affairs; 59 percent disapproving of the situation in Iraq; 60 percent saying he is doing a bad job on the economy; and 76 percent upset with his handling of rising gas prices. Until now, he had somehow managed to remain largely unaccountable for those problems. But Katrina may well prove to be the tipping point.

"I think he’s really undermined his credibility at this point, and it really saddles him with the kind of problems that Johnson and Nixon faced," historian Robert Dallek, referring to two presidents who suffered disastrous second terms, told the New York Times.

Thanks to the forces unleashed and exposed by a hurricane’s fury — a torrent of bipartisan criticism, a newly emboldened media, and the ugly truth about race and class in this country — Bush will finally have to pay the overdue bill for a legacy of failed policies and costly mistakes.

- Mark Jurkowitz can be reached at mjurkowitz@phx.com.

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