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Tomgram: The Presidency Shines, by Tom Engelhardt

Tomgram: The Presidency Shines

The Can-do Bush Administration Does...
and the Presidency Shines (for twenty-six minutes)
By Tom Engelhardt

Don't say they can't. They can -- and they did. Despite every calumny, it turns out that the Bush administration can put together an effective, well-coordinated rescue team and get crucial supplies to militarily occupied, devastated New Orleans on demand, in time, and just where they are most needed. Last Thursday, in a spectacular rescue operation, the administration team delivered just such supplies without a hitch to one of the city's neediest visitors, who had been trapped in hell-hole surroundings for almost three weeks by Hurricane Katrina. I'm speaking, of course, of George W. Bush.

That night, he gave his 26-minute "FDR" speech in a blue work shirt (meant assumedly to catch something of the White House work ethic) in floodlit Jackson Square, whose brilliantly lit cathedral had the look of Versailles amid a son-et-lumière spectacle. It was -- however briefly -- a triumph of the White House rescue team, headed, naturally, by Karl Rove, and seconded by the evangelical Christian, first-term speechwriter, Michael Gerson (once upon a pre-steroidal time known in the press as "the Mark McGwire of speechwriting"). He was brought back from White House domestic advisor-hood to shove a passel of religious imagery and Iraq-War-style catch phrases into the gaping hole Katrina had punched in the administration's political levees. Add to those two the White House's chief lighting designer, former NBC cameraman Bob DeServi, and the man long in charge of "visuals," former ABC producer Scott Sforza. The key designer of the quarter-million dollar stage set that, during the invasion of Iraq, passed for the United States Central Command forward headquarters in Doha, Qatar, Sforza had with DeServi helped produce the infamous Top-Gun-style, color-coordinated Presidential landing on the deck of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln ("Mission Accomplished!") on May 1, 2003. Both men went to Jackson Square, according to New York Times White House correspondent Elizabeth Bumiller (in a pre-speech press-pool report from New Orleans) to handle "last minute details of the stagecraft," including the "warm tungsten lighting" that was to give the President his empathetic -- or, depending on how you look at the man, his sci-fi -- glow in that utterly deserted setting.

As for those crucial supplies: Without a single mishap, the rescue team delivered to central New Orleans its own generators, lights (not just the warm-glow ones for the President but the HMI movie lights to set the cathedral in the background ablaze), the camouflage netting that was needed to hide from viewers any sign of the surrounding devastation, and even its own communications equipment. And then there was the matter of crowd control -- okay, maybe not exactly crowds in depopulated New Orleans, but soldiers from the 82nd Airborne were effectively deployed, just in case, "to keep regular citizens several blocks back."

Even more impressively, as NBC news anchor Bryan Williams reported at his blog, they managed to get the lights turned on along the President's route into Jackson Square "no more than 30 minutes before POTUS drove through," so that looted mini-malls and abandoned gas pumps leapt into sight. Of course, an hour after he was done and gone -- rescues of this sort being limited affairs -- the area was "plunged into total darkness again, to audible groans." (As Williams concluded, "It's enough to make some of the folks here who witnessed it... jump to certain conclusions.")

It may be true that, for a week or more, this administration couldn't get a bottle of water to a diabetic grandmother, but when something was actually at stake -- what reporters far and wide referred to as the "rebuilding" not of New Orleans but of a presidency, or simply of the presidential "image" -- efficiency, coordination, and togetherness were the by-words of the day.

As for the speech, there were some genuine can-do steps forward in it as well. Though many in the media focused on the major financial commitments the President seemed to make to the New Orleans area and Katrina evacuees, more striking was his progress in accepting "responsibility" for administration error. When he first stunned reporters on September 13th by speaking such words while standing side by side with the Iraqi president at a White House welcoming ceremony ("...to the extent that the federal government didn't fully do its job right, I take responsibility."), he seemed a good deal less than comfortable. In fact, despite that wonderful little "to-the-extent" loophole phrase, he looked, as a Western pal of mine commented, like he had just swallowed a grasshopper and was feeling the legs go down. In New Orleans, similar words slipped down more like a smooth shot of single-malt scotch as did that toll-free number for those needing help (which has evidently hardly worked ever since), not to speak of all sorts of hardly noticed charmers right out of the Bush administration's non-Katrina wish-book. Take, for instance, this reminder that we are ever less a civilian society capable of saving ourselves in a civil fashion: "It is now clear that a challenge on this scale requires greater federal authority and a broader role for the armed forces -- the institution of our government most capable of massive logistical operations on a moment's notice."

Click here to read more of this dispatch.

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posted by Annamarie at 6:38 PM