The politics of disasters
Posted: Wednesday, August 30, 2006 12:28 PM by firstread
The Times-Picayune notes that after meeting with Bush earlier in the day yesterday, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin "was noticeably absent for the remainder of Bush's visit." For the President, "quickening the flow of relief money was a major theme of the anniversary visit, and a topic on which Bush strove to display his mastery of Katrina details... He at times came up lacking," including in a local radio interview in which he overestimated Army Corps of Engineers spending.
As Bush urged scattered New Orleans residents to come home, "[t]op Democrats said [residents] are not to blame for not returning. They said the president and Republicans must do more than take the blame, by opening up the federal checkbook and making sure programs he promised last year get up and running."
The Washington Post, always attuned to staging, notes of Bush's schedule yesterday that the White House "carefully chose the scenes it wanted to highlight on this, the anniversary of one of Bush's biggest political embarrassments." The high school he spoke at "has reformulated itself as a charter school... New Orleans has seen a flowering of such charter schools in the past year, and Bush hailed the trend, a small example of his more conservative policies taking root in the aftermath of Katrina."
"In the midst of the otherwise sober commemorations..., Bush made two last-minute stops that brought him in touch with the city's music and one of its icons," including delivering "a National Medal of Arts to Antoine 'Fats' Domino to replace the one lost when the singer's home in the Lower 9th Ward was destroyed."
"The key for me is to keep expectations low," Bush told NBC's Williams during their interview yesterday in discussing his reading list -- a possibly inadvertent recognition of one of the reasons behind his success both on the campaign trail and as president.
