Gingrich: Katrina exposed Republicans couldn't govern well

Katrina's Damage to Bush's Standing Still Haunts His Presidency
Aug. 25 (Bloomberg)

Hurricane Katrina's flood waters have long since receded. The human toll and political wreckage wrought by the killer storm continue to haunt George W. Bush almost a year later.

As the president and still-reeling Gulf Coast residents prepared to mark Katrina's anniversary, political experts say that dismay over Bush's response to the disaster continues to undermine public confidence in his managerial abilities.

``It was Katrina that broke the sense that the Republicans could govern well,'' former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said in an interview. Bush ``was still seen before Katrina as a relatively strong leader, and somewhere in this process there was a substantial erosion because Americans were shocked'' by the government's failure to perform.

Bush has never appeared comfortable talking about the catastrophe, and the storm's continuing ability to bedevil him makes it a domestic counterpart to the Iraq war -- a setback that fundamentally altered perceptions of a presidency.

The White House's Katrina relief effort seemed off-kilter from the start, said Gingrich, a Republican. Citing Bush's initial praise for then-Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Michael Brown, Gingrich said that ``from that point on, people just look at us and see `Brownie, you're doing a great job,' and they just think we're not in touch with reality.''

Swooping Over New Orleans

Bush waited for two days -- days filled with television images of anarchy and desperation -- before inspecting the storm area as Air Force One, returning from Waco, Texas, swooped low over New Orleans. He saw a surreal scene of burning buildings and submerged neighborhoods.

``President Bush seemed to be far above the fray and didn't really understand the scope of the damage,'' said Daniel Aldrich, a Tulane University professor who is researching the government's reaction to the disaster.

A year later, Democrats as well as many Republicans view the administration's Katrina response as a case study in bureaucratic failure. Among the causes cited: a detached White House high command, a FEMA team hobbled by political cronyism, and a president who oscillated between an emotional desire to aid storm victims and a conservative ideology that is leery of federal bailouts.

In ways large and small, Bush is still paying for the inadequate storm response.

``Sadly, George Bush has forgotten us,'' says a radio advertisement running this week in New Orleans. The narrator is Joe Lavigne, a Republican candidate who is seeking a House seat in November. Bush is ``spending too much time and money on Iraq and not enough living up to his promise to rebuild New Orleans,'' the ad asserts.

`Cronyism'

Bush's approval ratings were slipping even before the hurricane hit, said Charles Franklin, a professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison who analyzes perceptions of the presidency. Backlash over the Iraq war and a polarizing debate with Democrats over Bush's call for partial privatization of Social Security were taking a toll.

``Katrina made the issue for the fall incompetence and cronyism,'' Franklin said. ``Some of the incompetence may still haunt the administration.''

Bush's handling of the emergency also hurt his already shaky ties to the black community, as TV viewers saw pictures of poor, largely black New Orleans residents abandoned to face the harsh aftermath of the storm.

``Republicans very much hoped to reach out to African- Americans and bring them into the Republican tent,'' said David Gergen, a government professor at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and an adviser to Presidents Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. ``Katrina really turned that around.''

Eight Trips

Scrambling to recover from initial missteps, Bush entered a frenetic Katrina-centric phase after the floodwaters receded. He traveled to the region eight times in the six weeks after the Aug. 29 hurricane hit and spoke of the disaster almost every day in September.

Then he fell largely silent on the topic and hardly mentioned the storm for the rest of the year. In his State of the Union speech in February, he didn't utter the word ``Katrina,'' and devoted only 160 words of a 5,400-word address to the costliest disaster in modern U.S. history.

This year, he traveled to Louisiana and Mississippi four times between January and April. On Aug. 29, he plans to spend the anniversary of Katrina by making his 13th post-Katrina stop to the storm zone with a visit to New Orleans and Mississippi. One point the president is sure to make: Washington has already promised $110 billion for victims.

More Attention

Still, the president hasn't paid enough attention, residents and local officials say.

``We don't have transportation, we don't have health care, there are a lot of places that still don't have electricity,'' said Roger Villere, a New Orleans florist and chairman of the state Republican Party. ``Things don't look much different than they did a year ago.''

Some of the unhappiness stems from an address Bush made in New Orleans on Sept. 15. Designed to regain the political initiative, the speech seemed to promise an expansive federal relief effort. In language that evoked President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, he pledged: ``We will do what it takes, we will stay as long as it takes, to help citizens rebuild their communities and their lives.''

Blank Check

Although much of Bush's relief plan was based on conservative principles -- local control, regulatory easements, tax-advantaged opportunity zones, aid vouchers -- Republican fiscal conservatives cringed at what they deemed was a blank check. They saw it as an open-ended commitment that ran counter to the free-market principles of a president who took office in 2001 pledging to play a ``limited'' role in people's lives because ``too much government crowds out initiative and hard work, private charity and the private economy.''

In trying to appeal to Katrina victims calling for a massive aid package and conservatives urging a limited bailout, Bush managed to disappoint both camps.

As a believer in self-reliance, ``Bush's first inkling is always to let people do their job,'' said James Carafano, an analyst with the Heritage Foundation, a Washington-based think- tank that favors limited government. The result was that ``Bush took it on the chin.''

As criticism mounted, the president tried to reach out to friendly locals. In March, he stopped by the freshly painted sandwich shop of Calvin Stewart Jr. in New Orleans' Ninth Ward.

``Everybody's hollering about the president,'' Stewart said in an interview six months after Bush posed for pictures in his restaurant. ``I'm not going to put it on the president, because right here in this state they're not doing nearly enough themselves to help.''

Bigger and Better

Bush's prediction that citizens would flock back to a bigger, better, New Orleans hasn't panned out so far. The reasons range from a lack of skilled workers to bureaucratic delays in obtaining temporary trailers to fears that the repaired levees aren't safe.

More federal relief funds are on the way, said Donald Powell, Bush's Gulf Coast coordinator. About $77 billion in aid for the region has been allotted, $44 billion of which has been spent. The balance, about $30 billion, will be distributed in coming months.

As the anniversary of the storm approaches, Bush is reaching out to some of the victims. Rockey Vaccarella, 41, who lost his home in Saint Bernard Parish, spent time with Bush at the White House two days ago to ``remind the president that the job's not done.''

It isn't as if Bush needs much reminding on that score.

``Katrina is one piece of a larger theme that the president is struggling with: that he's out of touch with what's going on,'' said Michael Dimock, associate director of research at the Pew Center for the People and the Press, a Washington-based polling outfit. ``That totally knocked the administration off its feet. And in some ways, they have never recovered.''