There is no way to know how many lives were lost because of the failure to address the Hurricane Katrina crisis adequately in the critical first three days after the storm hit. The weak and confused response of President George W. Bush to the death and destruction in the South is an apt metaphor for his continuing failed presidential leadership.
New Yorker Editor David Remnick explains, “To a frightening degree, Bush’s faults of leadership and character were brought into high relief by the crisis … The whole conceit of his presidency, that he was an instinctive chief executive backed up by ‘grown-ups’ like Dick Cheney and tactical wizards like Karl Rove, now seemed as water-logged as Biloxi and New Orleans.”
Despite his promise in 2001, after his disputed election victory, to be a “uniter not a divider,” Bush has adamantly refused to govern our politically divided nation from the center. University of Maryland professor William Galston says, “Bush is the most partisan president in modern history.” Galston adds rightly, “As a result, voters in both parties are focusing on him rather than the specifics of his policies.” Repeatedly passing up opportunities to govern from the center, Bush chooses to service the interests of his conservative base exclusively at the expense of needed national unity.
Buoyed by support for his “war on terrorism” after 9/11, Bush has chosen the polarization route to deepen his approval by the most strongly conservative elements in his party rather than work for bipartisan consensus and more broad appeal among all voters.
Driven by the rigid ideology that he shares with Bush – which dismisses the notion that government should be there for the public during a catastrophe – Joe Allbaugh, Bush’s 2000 campaign manager who was named head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency in 2001, told Congress that “the organization was an oversized entitlement program” and advised states and cities “to rely instead on faith-based organizations … like the Salvation Army and the Mennonite Disaster Service.”
Even some of his most ardent supporters agree that the Bush administration’s response to Katrina has been blundering and inept. Bush’s catastrophic lack of immediate response to the horrors that threaten to turn a great city into a polluted burial ground is consistent with a chronic indifference to the basic needs of the poor and needy by both parties over the years. The current abandonment of the largely African-American victims on the Gulf Coast is an extension of the nation’s chronic abandonment of the poor.
The real priorities of the Bush administration are seen in Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist’s desire to push permanent repeal of the estate tax, despite this period of national travail and Bush’s cavalier assurance that “there won’t have to be any tax increases” to rescue the coastal South from this historic calamity. Tax relief for the wealthy with their magnificent estates, not basic relief for the poor stranded and left homeless in the storm, is where Bush’s interests and sympathies lie. The Hurricane Katrina disaster has exposed his choice of priorities as lacking – at the very least, for a highly industrialized, diverse nation.