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WEB SITES  Journal photographer Josh Stephenson photo slide show from Hurricane Katrina.
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Saturday, September 3, 2005
Bush Gets Slow Start On Second Big Test
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JOURNAL EDITORIAL: The White House chief of staff whispers word of the second plane hitting the World Trade Center in a Sept. 11, 2001, film clip taken of President Bush's visit to a Florida elementary classroom. For more than five minutes, the president sits looking shell-shocked— like most of the rest of America that day.
Unlike the rest of us, the president would take on the mantle of commander-in-chief. He would be at Ground Zero, he would say the right things, he would be decisive and he would shore up the nation's spirit.
It was Bush's first test and he rose to the immediate challenges.
His second such test blew in with Hurricane Katrina, and his initial reaction recalls the dazed minutes ticking away in the Florida classroom— only extended across the first few critical days of the disaster.
As the city drowned, the drinking water and the food ran out, and the armed gangs looted any remnants of order, the commander-in-chief was mostly missing in action.
Television broadcast scenes of a U.S. city that looked and felt like Mogadishu. Americans came face-to-face with anarchy, and the peeling away of the veneer of civilization looked more horrifying than the demolition of the Twin Towers.
When the president did begin to address this natural and human disaster from his bully pulpit, he wasn't up to the level of his finest post-9/11 performances.
Bush seemed more intent on responding to partisan sniping, as his approval rating dropped to the low 40s, than on responding to the needs of the stricken.
In his defensiveness, Bush stumbled badly Thursday in claiming that nobody could have foreseen the levee breaks that would second Katrina's motion to destroy the Crescent City.
Media and government officials, including federal officials, could and did foresee the potential for what angry disaster victims are calling Lake George for years before this hurricane appeared on the gulf.
But nobody knew when the hurricane that would transform The Big Easy into The Big Ordeal would come. They didn't know it would come when the manpower and equipment of the Gulf States' National Guard would be severely drawn down by deployments in Iraq.
Nobody knew that so many people would refuse to evacuate, and that the city and state would be so ineffective in moving people out. And they certainly didn't plan for the difficult logistics of getting relief workers into the flooded city. Nobody knew that lawlessness would be such an impediment to relief and rescue.
But it's not lack of perfect preparation for unknowns that shakes confidence in the president; it's the inadequacy and the slowness of response after the enormity of the disaster has been revealed.
On Friday, National Guard convoys rolled in to reclaim the lawless ruins of a city, relieve the disaster victims' thirst and hunger, and get the rest of them out. And on Friday, Bush arrived on the ground of what looks like the biggest natural disaster in U.S. history after acknowledging that the results of government efforts had been unacceptable.
That may be as close as this president gets to conceding mistakes. Maybe it will be the turning point.
Bush's second test isn't over yet. He can bring up his test score. If he does, good for him. Better for the United States would be real leadership that plumbs the weaknesses of the bureaucratic levees, then commits to making vast improvements in how government responds to future disasters.