Just eight days ago, Time’s Mike Allen summarized what he had heard from administration sources about the Bush gang’s “three-part comeback plan” after the debacle that was the federal response to Hurricane Katrina. Let’s take a moment to revisit the list and see how they’re doing.
Step One was to “spend freely, and worry about the tab and the consequences later.” That one was taken care of quickly. Step Two was to avoid dwelling on their collective screw-up and avoid any compromise on an independent investigatory commission. We can safely put a check mark next to this one too.
Step Three, of course, featured a plan to “gin up base-conservative voters for next year’s congressional midterm elections.” This is the one everyone needs to keep an eye on, because it’s the step that shows the cravenness of the Bush machine’s political agenda.
Over the weekend, Donna Brazile wrote a piece for the Washington Post describing her reaction to the president’s remarks from Thursday.
[A]fter watching him speak from the heart, I could not have been prouder of the president and the plan he outlined to empower those who lost everything and to rebuild the Gulf Coast.
Bush called on every American to stand up and support the rebuilding of the region. He told us that New Orleans and the entire Gulf Coast would rise from the ruins stronger than before.
I think Brazile may have been right about the potency of the president’s carefully-crafted speech, and the lofty goals certainly sounded admirable, but as for any connection between the rhetoric and the reality, I’m afraid she may be off base.
After seeing the series of steps Bush has take over the last week or so, a number of emotions come to mind, but “pride” isn’t one of them.
There have been criticisms of the way in which the president and his administration dealt with the possibility of this disaster before Katrina even existed. There have also been critiques of how the administration failed in the immediate aftermath of the storm. But take a moment to consider everything we’ve seen from the White House over the last 10 days.
* By executive order, Bush suspended the Davis-Bacon Act in areas of Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi, allowing federal contractors to pay local workers less money on construction projects. (This will, forevermore, be known as the “Gulf Coast Wage Cut.”)
* Once construction workers were out of the way, the White House then began working on suspending wage supports for service workers in the region.
* The administration imported the contracting practices it’s used in Iraq to begin awarding no-bid contracts to companies for Katrina-related work.
* The companies that won contracts enjoy close ties to the Bush White House and Republican politics.
* The president has drawn up plans to help rid business of regulation, subsidize private schools, and protect tax cuts for the wealthy.
* And perhaps best of all, Bush tapped Karl Rove to be in charge of the reconstruction effort.
The White House, in other words, is treating this disaster just as it has treated everything else — as an opportunity to pick a fight, advance its agenda, divide the nation along ideological lines, and Swiftboat anyone who gets in the way. Considering the speed with which the Bush gang moved on these items, it apparently never even occurred to them to put politics aside and rally the nation behind the idea of working together to address the crisis. We’re talking about a political operation that only knows one move.
There was a time in American politics when it was accepted that there were some things you just don’t do. I wonder if anyone still believes such a standard even exists anymore.