My twice-voted-for President Bush & his FEMA/DHS flunkies dropped the ball on Katrina, just as did the La & NO gov’ts- there was a general “stuck on stupid” mode at all three levels. (Thanks to Craig Crawford for that phrase.)
I have no confidence that a President Kerry or a President Gore would have responded any better.
BUT, much as it pains me, I must admit that President Clinton, Bill OR Hillary, probably would have been in there like Superman overriding bureaucratic paperwork, state & local chains of command & everything in the way of getting in help.
I say Gore would have done a better job of remaking FEMA and whatever his version oh DHS would have been, thus creating a better response from them. Kerry probably wouldn’t have been on vacation at the time, and would have been much quicker to personally respond, although its hard to say what that would have meant, practically speaking, since he would have been working with the same flawed departments (although perhaps not with Chertoff and Brown, another plus) as Bush.
President Superman, of course, would have redirected the hurricane himself, thus sparing all lives and property. And in the end, his presidency is just as relevant to the real world as any other totally hypothetical presidency.
Put bluntly, the President should not even be getting involved, except possibly to ask Congress for some more relief money. I agree FEMA did not handle this issue flawlessly (far from it), but all in all it is accomplishing its mission at the speed which it projected. That you think the mission ought to be something else is a wholly different story. But certainly, the President should not take time to personally organize relief efforts.
The real blame lies with Louisiana’s incompetent governer and Mayor Nagin. They were the eones in charge of immediate disaster relief and prevention, and they completely dropped the ball. It’s national policy that local services must be ready to deal with things for the first 72 hours, and from what I see they pretty much stood around and played ping-pong.
As smiling bandit pointed out, it’s not the president’s job to directly orchestrate the relief efforts. That said, it makes a difference what priorities the administration has focused on before the crisis, not during. After five years of draining domestic resources to redistribute wealth to the rich, and after five years of the White House favoring policies designed to “starve the beast” of the federal government, I’d say the mess in New Orleans is a cascading failure on the part of Bush’s five years of administration, rather than his slow movement in the first 72 hours or so. Bush’s having appointed a complete incompetent as FEMA director was also inexcusable, but to be fair, many presidents and politicians have appointed people who are more valuable to them politically than they are valuable to the office they’re appointed to.
So it’s fair to say that President Gore would have done a better job because he wouldn’t have worked with a Republican Congress that was hot to slash taxes and defund FEMA and other government agencies. Fourth-term President Clinton would have made everyone feel better than Bush did, which is a bonus, but the real different would lie in what he would have done where keeping the government going is concerned.
President Kerry wouldn’t have been able to handle it as well, though, because he would have entered office after four years of the White House working with the Congress to smash the machinery of government and defund programs to help people. Likewise, Bush’s successor, Republican or Democrat, is going to have similar headaches if anything horrible like this happens.
Please provide some evidence that the budget for FEMA was slashed.
Yes, taxes have been cut. Government spending has been going through the roof. FEMA’s problems are not due to Bush’s spending cuts because there haven’t been any spending cuts.