Maureen Dowd has been really on lately. After what is mostly an indictment of a President so incurious about the world that he doesn’t seem to watch the news, she gets to the punchline:
The president should stop haunting New Orleans, looking for that bullhorn moment. It’s too late.
One of the maddening things about the whole Katrina disaster as it’s played out in the political realm is that on top of all of the policy failures beforehand and emergency response failures during, the Bush administration responded with its worst instincts, playing up photo ops, suppressing negative media coverage, and pursuing its non-reality-based model of politics. Not to mention the condescension of his speeches: do we really need him to tell us that the rescue workers are working hard? We have TV sets and we actually watch them. On top of the substantive failures, it’s the symbolic ones which rub salt in the wound.
But I have a question about what Dowd writes,
The president had to be truly zoned out not to jump at the word "hurricane," given that he has always used his father’s term as a reverse playbook and his father almost lost Florida in 1992 because of his slow-footed response to Hurricane Andrew.
At this point, I think I’ve heard a half dozen reasons for Bush I’s electoral failure: the grocery store scanner, Message: I Care, the vomit moment in Japan, Greenspan jumping the gun on raising rates, Perot’s "sucking sound" speech, Hurricane Andrew. Which is it? Clearly more than one factor is at play, but somehow people never mention that when making X the decisive turning point.
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