Barge in backyard, Lower Ninth Ward
An all-star lineup of GOP pols has gathered in New Orleans for the Southern Republican Leadership Conference. But do they have any idea where they are?
Here’s what J.C. Watts told the conference-goers:
“Some might think that George W. Bush had his shortcomings,” said Watts, “but let me tell you something — history’s going to be kind to George W. Bush.”
Just up the street from the GOP’s venue at the Hilton Riverside is the New Orleans Convention Center, where tens of thousands of people gathered in the days after Hurricane Katrina and waited in stifling heat without food or water for rescuers who didn’t know they were there. Even though they were on TV.
That was probably the low point in a catastrophic breakdown of government capacities at all levels – local, state, and federal. But the biggest single failure was at the top: George W. Bush was the one man who would have cut through it all. But he was oddly disengaged for the balance of that terrible week. Some of it wasn’t his fault. The New Orleans hurricane levee system had never been a national priority, so it’s hard to lay their flawed designs on the Bush White House. But the Bush administration made an organizational hash of FEMA and Homeland Security, and, populating offices throughout the federal government with Mike Brown and other political hacks, degraded its capacity to act.
So no, I doubt that history is going to vindicate Bush on this particular point. No amount of retrospective scrubbing can erase the image of that week or the remaining empty stretches of cityscape. It would be helpful – to them and to the nation – if the Republican Party acknowledged the reality around them in New Orleans, a city that is both coming alive five years after Katrina but still in great peril from hurricanes. The combination of bottom-up civic activity (in the face of fumbling bureaucracies) is something both parties can learn from and put to use. And the challenge of protecting the city – a partnership between government at all levels and private industry – is ongoing, and a good template for future challenges in a time of unpleasant environmental surprises.
April 9, 2010 at 4:24 pm
The city is always going to be in “great peril from hurricanes”…it’s built below sea level! That’s not the fault of the Republicans!
The gist of your article, complete with baseless accusations such as the one above, is that George Bush is to blame for Katrina…your accusation is as tired as it is inaccurate, and your regurgitation of disproven allegations is proof of your complete lack of objectivity or any sense of truth. People were stranded in New Orleans because 1.) they didn’t leave when they were told to 2.) the city-the city, mind you, left hundreds of buses unfilled and in parking lots as the mayor ran for cover from the storm and the citizens who elected him DECIDED to stay 3.) the city and state were not prepared to react to the storm.
Individual decisions and failure of the primary sources of disaster response, which is state and local government, are to blame for the New Orleans disaster. And building a major city below sea level on the coast. But you won’t say that, because it doesn’t fit your idealogical agenda. You would have been a good Pravda reporter working in the grand ole’ USSR.
April 9, 2010 at 6:01 pm
I disagree strongly, as do the reports put out by Republican-controlled House and Senate committees that studied the response to the storm.
The failure to have an evacuation plan in place was the fault of the New Orleans government, successive mayoral administrations culminating with that of Ray Nagin. That was undeniably a catastrophic failure that resulted in many deaths.
But the notion that state and local government are primarily at fault for the failure to rescue people post-storm is off-base. With the city under water, there was, in effect, no local government at all. The state government was, effectively blind. And large-scale disasters invariably involve the mobilization of significant human and material resources on a regional, multistate basis. This was the biggest disaster in U.S. history. The only entity capable of coordinating the response to such a disaster is the federal government. This is not in dispute; it is built into emergency plans at the federal, state and local levels and is the reason FEMA was created.
So yes, Bush is ultimately responsible for the giant SNAFU that occurred post-storm. He is responsible in the immediate, hands-on sense of not acting decisively, and in a broader sense for shaping the political-bureaucratic culture that that placed politics above performance (as indicated by the repeated attempts to shift blame away from the top).
On the “great peril” issue, the federal government built hurricane levees and told people they were safe and reliable, which was not true. It is possible to minimize the risk of storm surges with a well-designed protection system. This is what I’m referring to.
April 11, 2010 at 8:36 pm
“Republican-controlled House and Senate”? Who cares who controlled them? That’s not the point…unless the point you’re trying to make is all anti-Republican/pro-Democrat, which it appears IS your point. The point is…wait for it, because it’s poison to liberal progressives…PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY! When a hurricane is boring down on your city, you leave! When people can’t leave due to medical reasons, lack of their own transportation, etc. the local government has the moral responsibility to take care of such an issue. If local government can’t handle it, it falls to the state. Lastly, it is the Feds. Did Ray Naguin ever ask for help? No he didn’t, he hightailed it out with the rest of the New Orleans city council and abandoned his constituents. But he’s a Democrat (and his “chocolate city” comments make him apperar to be a racist one) so he escapes blame by the liberal press.
You try to make it Republican vs. Democrat instead of placing the responsibility with the people the voters on New Orleans put in power. Put down the Democrat party talking points and do some real investigative journalism.
April 11, 2010 at 9:54 pm
Hey, diveboy, I think somebody been inhalin’ too much helium. Read my other comment to see why New Orleans was such a goatrape.
Your a typical Angry Republican, when somebody points out how your team, as they always do, finds an opportunity to enrich themselves or their political situation, they do it, regardless of the consequences to Americas people, fortune or standing.
Just like the rebuilding of Iraq, they pulled the old “Lets put total incompetents in charge so our main donors can rob the treasury” trick, only instead of putting young Republican frat boys in charge of disbursing the money, they allowed the Pat Robertsons and Family Research Councils to pocket millions in contracts and then send in church volunteers to actually do the work.
It would be as if your company hired their idiot son-in-law to run your surface ops to save a few bucks, and when you got in trouble, say “Well, he shouldn’t have been down forty fathoms, everybody knows that’s dangerous”.
Sure enough, when you complain you were endangered, some other wingnut will be braying about your lack of “personal responsibility”for your situation.
Te only thing I agree with is it’s way past time to put down tje talking points and do some real investigative journalism.
April 9, 2010 at 5:54 pm
Have these people thanked the americans who actually pay taxes….for helping them out?
April 11, 2010 at 9:58 pm
Yea, Thanks a lot for all of the budget cuts on levee maintenance.
April 9, 2010 at 6:12 pm
Republicans didn’t seem to know where they were when they went to Hawaii to complain about government-mandated healthcare, either.
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-february-11-2010/the-apparent-trap (begins at 3:00)
April 9, 2010 at 6:43 pm
I read some of your other work on dysfunctional governments and found them informative. But you’ve omitted or missed some critical facts in the city where you once lived. Or you omit them to bend facts about President Bush.
NO has a long history of city mismanagement and corruption. Katrina had passed over the city before the trouble started. The buses were stowed on low ground. It was custom before a storm to move the buses to high ground. That wasn’t done. People were stuck in the convention center because the mayor failed to perform to move the buses that were to be used to move people without private transportation out of town. NO has a history of people staying home, but not in the low land areas. NO has heavy duty water pumps that can remove a lot of water. Except the industrial canal levee broke first and several pumps in the flooded area were then under water. Back then if NO needed help, they called the state. The state calls the feds. That’s where the delay happened. The city was slow to call the state and the state was even slower to call the feds or to do much of anything for that matter. If the fed don’t get a running start, they will always be late. It’s their nature.
April 9, 2010 at 6:51 pm
Shades of their 9/11 NYC convention, except they at least pretended to care about that city.
April 9, 2010 at 8:25 pm
I’m definitely no fan of George Bush, but the Katrina criticism has always struck me as off base. The idea that the government can magically come in and save everyone during an unprecedented disaster just strikes me as unrealistic.
Its the same with the response to Haiti. There was simply no infrastructure in place that would allow immediate and effective distribution of supplies and aid. Well, in New Orleans, a good portion of the city was under water. In both cases government and aid agencies wanted to help and were trying to help, but there was a limit to what they could do.
I will say that Bush’s public expressions of concern during the Katrina disaster were slow and not nearly emphatic enough and for this he has rightly been chastised, but the idea that the government was not using all possible resources and acting in good faith to help the people caught in the disaster seems to ring false to me.
April 10, 2010 at 3:22 pm
now to be fair, Bush doesn’t represent the entire will of the GOP, he was just the driver for a few years. Unfortunately he took my Bently and drove it into a telephone pole.
April 11, 2010 at 3:15 am
John, I’ve read and heard many stories for years now about how the Bush admin. totally mismanaged the response to Katrina in the days after the disaster. Most of them are incredulous at the incompetence of the response and shake their heads and cluck about how the FEMA and bush team were so over their heads and sadly, people died. This is where they stop, placing the blame on simple incompetence.
I’ve waited for years for somebody to ask if there could be an identifiable a reason for the worst failure of a federal response to a crisis in this nations history. After all, this wasn’t FEMA’s first hurricane, why was this one different? Was there a difference strategically that was to blame for these errors?
I’ve known the answer since the cleanup got underway, and it is not simple stupidity. It can only be described as downright evil. I will tell you how I know this to be fact, and hopefully you will be able to get the word out.
It was so simple and obvious to the actual workers on the scene that I can’t believe after all these years, the media has not said a word about it. I can only blame it on the disconnect between the press and the people. I hope you can change that, and change the history of this sad episode.
Let me tell you my story.
I work construction. Many trades from HVAC to manual labor if it pays well. The only time it ever pays well is after a disaster. Flood, hurricane, whatever, the combination of the need for a rapid response and federal and insurance dollars flooding into a recovery zone means that a hardworking, reliable and competent workforce can make some good money for a change. And an experienced labor pool that can be mobilized quickly is essential to any rebuilding effort.
I worked in Miami after Andrew and Daytona Beach after the ’04 storms. I have friends who do this every year. How it usually works is after the storm, qualified contractors contact FEMA or the state agencies in charge, give them their Bona Fides and their labor rate and per diem requirements. They are then wired an advance to cover travel expenses for their men and equipment and sometimes they will make arrangements for a hotel paid by FEMA.
After Katrina, several of us started packing tools and chainsaws to make the trip. We would be working under a friends company, with his track record, license and insurance.
We were ready to leave the next morning, but we couldn’t work out the details with the people in New Orleans. Instead of dealing directly with FEMA or state emergency agencies, we were given a list of “Faith Based” NGO’s that were contracted to run the recovery operations.
We called several, some we got through to, many didn’t even answer the phone for days. When we did talk to them, they obviously were unfamiliar with the process we were accustomed to. Hell, they weren’t even familiar with construction period!
We talked to several organizations and it was the same story. We were told there was plenty of work, rebuilding New Orleans, and if we wanted some of it we should get there any way we could, bring our tools and when we got there, in a few weeks, they would be able to pay us when they got the paperwork straight. Pays good, too for laborers. $10 per hour! Come ‘n get it!
Needless to say we never left.
I’d be willing to bet that all of the fiasco’s we heard about, from collecting the dead bodies to supplying food and water to the Superdome, were contracted yo the same types of organization.
So here’s the punchline: Brownie got all the credit, but the real person running the reconstruction of N.O., in all his glory, was Carl Rove.
Where the world saw heartbreaking death, destruction and sadness, ol’ Carl had the sense to recognize an opportunity to pump money to his political base! And you wonder why they call Turdblossom a genius! Who is going to notice a few mistakes, nobody of importance will be inconvenienced, nobody I know anyhow.
So, who knows how many died needlessly, how much of that great city could have been salvaged, what could have been. We might have been spared the sight of sun-bloated bodies that made America look like a suburb of Mogadishu.
And not from simple, forgivable incompetence, but by an opportunity that was too good to pass up. After all, it’s for a good cause. We’ll be able to build a thousand year Republican Reich, where nothing like this can happen again.
If that’s not pure evil, it’ll do until the real thing comes along.
Why hasn’t this been reported?