Craig Crawford‘s 1600: Wreckage and Responsibility

[Pirate Smile]

Craig Crawford‘s 1600: Wreckage and Responsibility

By Craig Crawford, CQ Columnist

George W. Bush and his team like to deride the critics of their hurricane handling for playing the “blame game” when, in their view, the focus should be on the future. But if anyone is playing that game, it is the White House itself. And the administration doesn’t seem to be winning.

Firing one senior official and having the president issue a somewhat technical acceptance of responsibility seemingly undercuts the intense White House effort to blame Louisiana’s Democratic politicians for the flawed handling of Hurricane Katrina’s deadly impact.

And while the blame game among local, state and federal officials plays out in public, an even more intense search for responsibility goes on behind the scenes in the White House. The most obvious target was Michael D. Brown, ousted last week as the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. But the president’s inner circle, while escaping blame in the public debate, should get low marks for a critical decision to keep Bush on the road talking about Iraq and Medicare as Katrina hit. At the time, White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. and Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove — also, of course, the president’s senior political adviser — were more concerned about fallout from anti-war protesters than they were about the still-unclear impact of the approaching hurricane.

Sending the president to California for a war speech as Katrina crushed the Gulf Coast is perhaps the single biggest reason that Bush seemed out of sync with the disaster at that early stage. As the levees gave way in New Orleans, the president was way off message.

http://www.cq.com/public/crawford_current.html

[KoKo]

1. Crawford is good at looking at the "politics" of this situation.

That there really IS blame isn't what he's getting at...but how they manipulated the blame. It's an interesting read about "strategy." And, he's the best at interpreting this.

Sadly...how have our Democrats countered their strategy? They showed up just this week to "view the situation." They hung back from criticizing Bush even when he was caught lying once again (who could have realized how powerful this storm was going to be) which is like (who would have ever thought people would take a plane and fly it into buildings).

Al Gore rescued hospital patients much sooner and with little media attention than any of our other Dems got on the ground and did something.

Even John Kerry managed to send a plane there before Harry Reid and his bi-partisan delegation showed up to "survey the damage."

Shouldn't our Democrats have been down there as soon as Bush "surveying the damage" and commenting. After all there are Democratic voters in LA, MISS and ALA and it shouldn't have been up to Bush and the Repugs to be the only folks there showing concern.

Maybe I missed some Dem presense outside of Nagin and Blanco in the first week of this Katrina Disaster...but I don't think so...:shrug:

We blew it again...by hanging back and waiting to see what the Repugs would do first.