The AP noted this morning, “On the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, anger over the stalled rebuilding was palpable Wednesday throughout the city where the mourning for the dead and feeling of loss doesn’t seem to subside.”
How could anyone feel anything but anger? For all the rhetoric from the administration, exactly two years after Katrina ravaged New Orleans, “none of the 115 ‘critical priority projects’ identified by city officials” for publicly funded rebuilding efforts “has been completed.” Of the $34 billion “earmarked for long-term rebuilding,” less than half “has made its way through federal checks and balances to reach municipal projects.”
Bush’s presidency has had a series of turning points (coincidentally, they were all turns to the right), but Katrina was the point of no return. After the public soured on the war in Iraq and rejected Bush’s effort to privatize Social Security, Bush’s standing was weak and getting weaker by the summer of 2005. But the nation truly recoiled at the humiliating response to this natural disaster. It encapsulated so many of the president’s tragic flaws: the incompetence, the dishonesty, the willingness to put unqualified hacks in key positions of authority based solely on politics. It was as if the hurricane made landfall, and washed away the emperor’s clothes.
But this is not to just look back and marvel. The crisis began two years ago today, but it has not yet ended. Historian Douglas Brinkley had a powerful piece on the subject the other day, in which he described the “reckless abandonment” of New Orleans.
We’re still in the middle of the Katrina saga. Bold action has been needed for two years now, yet all that the White House has offered is an inadequate trickle of billion-dollar Band-aids and placebo directives. Too often in the United States we forget that “inaction” can be a policy initiative. Every day the White House must decide what not to do.
The stubborn inaction appears to fall under the paternalistic guise of helping the storm victims. Bush’s general attitude — a Catch-22 recipe if ever there was one — appears to be that only rank fools would return when the first line of hurricane defense are the levees that this administration so far refuses to fix. […]
Shortly after Katrina hit, former House speaker J. Dennis Hastert declared that a lot of New Orleans could be “bulldozed.” He was shot down by an outraged public and media, which deemed such remarks insensitive and callous. Two years have shown that Hastert may have articulated what appears to have become the White House’s de facto policy. He may have retreated, but the inaction remains.
Given this, re-reading Bush’s speech from Jackson Square, more than two weeks after the storm hit, is almost comically painful.
This video, from the Campaign for America’s Future’s Anne Thompson, hammers the point home perfectly:
Rumor has it that the president is not aware of his current predicament, and is thinking more and more about his “legacy.” I have a hint for Bush: history will not be kind.