I dislike George Bush intensely, and watching him suffer and be pilloried is one of the few plus points of the horrible disaster in the US. However, most commentators doing so seem to be doing so without much of an understanding of How The US Works.
It’s not a country like the UK or France, where central agencies take primary responsibility for everything government does and where the PM can legitimately be blamed for things that go wrong. Rather, it’s a country where the President is generally responsible (although not solely so) for international and interstate matters, and where the states are generally responsible for local issues.
Now, it’s possible that GWB’s actions as President have genuinely impaired the states’ ability to cope with natural disasters – in particular, rolling up flood relief into the Department of Homeland Security and then diverting the money from flood programmes to fund nebulous ‘antiterrorist’ measures. This will take a while to prove, but is legitimate to raise.
However, the mere fact that the flood relief effort in New Orleans massively fucked up is not an indictment of the President. The fault lies partly, and perhaps primarily, with New Orleans’ (Democratic) mayor and Louisiana’s (Democratic) governor.
Side note: some hilariously nasty and gloaty press reactions from around the world are collected here. My favourite is the Frenchman saying "Arrogance is never a good adviser". Meanwhile, the Guardian has some excellent, non-gloaty reporting (indeed, some of the best reporting I’ve seen this year on any subject) on Katrina and its causes, human impact and consequences.
the UK or France[…] where the PM can legitimately be blamed for things that go wrong.
Well, there’s degrees to it: in France, the PM gets abuse for all and everything that is wrong, and in the UK there’s some tuts and oblique looks but not many raise a fuss…
I’m not sure how true this is. A lot of Americans seem to pin a fair chunk of the blame on the President, from the Right and Left. Wasn’t part of post 9/11 legislation designed to ensure more central control of disaster fighting?
The funniest response, though of course it’s not really funny at all, is sometime friend of prominent right-wing British bloggers, Steve Sailer. The link is to Vdare, so only if Udare.
http://www.vdare.com/sailer/050903_new_orleans.htm
My understanding is that your interpretation of US politics and history is, in fact, massively contested within the US. FDR and Lyndon Johnson, to name but two, didn’t shy away from using the Presidency to effect massive social change within states and against local resistance. Nor, under the Bush administration have states been allowed to do what they like re drugs, Terry Schiavo etc.
And anyway, contrary to briefings, the crisis was federalised as far back as the 28th..
On a metablogging point, has anyone else noticed how the pro-torture left find it necessary to defend Bush on this too? First Hitchens, then Aaronovitch. It’s fucking weird – they’ve gone from a position that said "Well, he’s a bastard and we don’t agree with him, BUT he’s going to intervene to spread democracy and therefore we support him on this specifically" to "We support the bastard on Iraq so we’ll defend him on all the things we originally said we didn’t agree with."
Like Bush is addictive or something.
Not at all sure you’re right here John. The agency which has been most criticised was FEMA, and the "F" would imply that it was indeed under Presidential control. To fail to evacuate New Orleans completely is something that could in principle be laid at the Mayor’s door but this was a small error if it was an error at all (it’s not obvious where you would put all the people evacuated), but the real and horrible mistake was the failure to provide any humanitarian relief for the next five days, which was a federal responsibility.
In defense of John B’s point…
One of my commenters has been pointing to the difference between the way in which Mississippi has dealt with it and Louisiana. While NO is a special case, the coasts of both states got hit equally badly (actually, M perhaps worse). The relief efforts have been wildly different in the two states. Yes, FEMA is federal but the state and local levels also have a lot to do with it.
Surely the reason to have a centralised agency is that after a massive hurricane, the local agencies are going to be too degraded to cope. They have, after all, just gone been hit by a hurricane. This surely absolves the NO government from some blame for cocking it up after the hurricane hit (though not before) and to some extent gives Louisiana an alibi.
Possibly the Louisiana coast outside NO got a far worse recovery programme than did Mississippi because Mississippi doesn’t have a metropolic underwater soaking up all the resources.
Lenin has documented the sleaze and incompetence of state and city authorities, but the White House spin about the fedralised system is so much bollocks. As other commenters have pointed out, the whole point of a Federal agency is to walk in and run things – like the FBI are supposed to do in a crime situation.
As for hitchens and aaronovitch, why is anyone surprised what these cunts do any more? They have simply moved to the lunatic right. Their putative leftness is ancient history. File under Melanie Phillips and forget about ’em.
As for your general point John, just compare the recent response with what happened in Florida. When there’s a swing state involved…
Hitchens is being pretty rude about GWB here.
Has he been sticking up for him somewhere else?
Alex + HIOP, Yeah, you can see the same effect with Mark Steyn. He might be an unpleasant right-winger, but he surprised many people when he came out as a creationist: Link to Deltoid.
John, yeah, I sort of agree. However, Bush has kind of staked his presidency on dealing with Terrorism, and presumably that should include the emergency handling of, say, a dirty bomb. It was Bush would merged FEMA into the Department of Homeland Security, and appointed someone who’d only ever run the Arabian Horseracing Society (and apprently been "let go" because he was incompetant) to head FEMA. It was also Bush who reduced budget after budget for flood defenses (at least, that’s how I read it: Bush reduced the budget, Congress upped it a bit, and the end result was a significant reduction in Levee maintainance). I see your point, however, that it is partially a state issue.
Brooke: On Newsnight. See my remarks here
There’s an interesting bit here at Crooked Timber. Read the comments as well.
The more I think about this, the more I think you’re wrong John. Yes, technically the US is a federation of states. However, many states are poor, and have few resources. A massive natural disaster is *exactly* where the federal government is best placed to help. IMHO, FEMA should have been all over NO, helping them plan a decent evacuation plan, and/or helping them deal with lots of people being left behind. Instead, we hear that FEMA didn’t even *know* there were people in the superbowl needing assistance until the media got hold of the story.
For example, people have pointed at e.g. "empty school buses". But where exactly would you have taken 10000s of very poor people? You’d basically need a shanty town somewhere: perhaps one could argue that a hurrican-prone state should have such facilities, but you can bet it would cost a shit-load, and that the federal government would have said "no". That said, I do think that the lack of decent policing in the superbowl is a complete disgrace: the chief of police needs to go.
Your argument sounds like a hard-core states’ rights Republican. But where does that leave the federal government? If they shouldn’t have their nose in large-scale emergency planning and relief, that would seem to suggest that they shouldn’t really be doing much at all. However, that flies in the face of much of US history, despite what the current admin may want (and, as others have pointed out, this admin seems to have no problem going over States’ heads when it comes to keeping brain-dead women alive, for example).
You’d basically need a shanty town somewhere
Not only that, but it would have had to have been hurricane proof (or at least 150 miles inland). The more I think about this, the more I think that the "evacuation" thing is a red herring.
Alex: On a metablogging point, has anyone else noticed how the pro-torture left find it necessary to defend Bush on this too? First Hitchens, then Aaronovitch. It’s fucking weird …
Like Bush is addictive or something.
It’s just human nature. In fairness to Aaro, at least (I don’t really read Hitchens), a lot of the non-Iraq attacks on the Bush administration tend to end up mentioning Iraq at some point in the course of the argument (e.g. the shouldn’t we have spent the Iraq war money on building really good levees argument, or the shouldn’t the National guard be at home pulling people out of the water instead of in Iraq argument, or the Social Security wouldn’t be going bankrupt if we hadn’t spent all that money on Iraq argument – disclaimer: I made the last one up, but I bet I could find it after 30 minutes with Google…), so it must become easier to defend Bush knowing that the proxy-Iraq argument is coming along at some point.
When your opponents start from the position that if anything bad happens involving America, it automatically involves deliberate, calculated Machiavellian scheming by the President, it isn’t really illogical to simply assume that they’re going to be wrong more often than right.
Shorter version: He might be a crappy President, but he isn’t the devil incarnate.
Andrew,
When your opponents start from the position that if anything bad happens involving America, it automatically involves deliberate, calculated Machiavellian scheming by the President, it isn’t really illogical to simply assume that they’re going to be wrong more often than right.
Unless, you know, the facts actually do suggest a calculated Machiavellian scheme by the President. Or maybe it wasn’t GWB who appointed a complete incompetant to FEMA? The Hitchens comments which Alex links to are just horrible. And Aaro comes across as plainly weird here.
I guess that is a defense of Bush (he’s wrong about the levees though: it would have been possible to defend against even a cat-5 if the money had been there). However, that last paragraph is a pretty straight "left-wing" attack on poverty; and it’s exactly the sort of comment which GWB would have absolutely no sympathy for!
He might be a crappy President, but he isn’t the devil incarnate.
Yes, but that would be because the Vice-President happens to be the devil incarnate.
Unless, you know, the facts actually do suggest a calculated Machiavellian scheme by the President.
Yes, but the facts tend to emerge several days after newspaper opinion columns are being used to wrap fish and chips.
As another example, take a look at some of the nuttier ends of the left-wing feminist parts of the blogosphere, where the rumours about rapes were being used as ammo against Bush. Rumours that are now turning out to be, in all probability, not actually true. And yet there is commentary out there in the ether which would lead you to think that the President himself had been personally raping children in the Superdome (Note to literalists: the last sentence is hyperbole, although again, I bet that Google would come up trumps once more*).
Unless, you know, the facts actually do suggest a calculated Machiavellian scheme by the President. Or maybe it wasn’t GWB who appointed a complete incompetant to FEMA?
Well, that’s really my point. Isn’t that more likely to be cock-up rather than conspiracy? I’ll freely admit that Bush seems more prone than the average US President to making cock-ups, but that’s hardly evidence of actual malice, just incompetence.
* Aside: There’s probably another meta-blogging internet Law here about the growth in blogs and the capabilities of Google meaning that you can find a suitable quote to demonise virtually anyone.
I’ve been listening to the excellent NPR (Via KCRW) over the last few days. I don’t know if Bush stands to blame for a lot of what happened, but many of the problems seemed to seep from a distinct lack of organisation from any one central authority. FEMA was too small an organisation to evidentaly work on its own, and it didnt know that survivors were using the NO convention centre until Thursday. FEMA seemed to be unable to independently lead the rescue effort swiftly and take advantage of the many resources which were being voluntarily offered to NO by doctors, concerned citizens etc.
The "Shoot-To-Kill" style of rescue also fucked up a lot over the first few days. Many reports suggested that forces that were in NO concentrated on the looters – waving their guns at anyone who asked for help. Internationals who were in the Superdome were told to sit in a circle, with females in the middle, in case the wild savages broke through and did… something. The obsession with looting and order took resources which could have been used to save lives and used them to protect property and threaten people instead. In this situation I would of guessed that lives should matter more than 40" TVs.
Is Bush responsible for all this? Directly, he is Commander in Chief, and the actions of the armed forces are his responsibility. If his apparatchiks told them to be suspicious and unhelpful towards the locals, then ultimatly thats his problem.
The point I would raise is, if the Americans can’t keep law and order in their own heartlands, how in gods name did they think they could do it in Iraq?
The common thread running through both the war in Iraq and the New Orleans disaster is breathtaking, mind-boggling incompetence. If they knew that the levees would not withstand more than a Cat 3 Hurricane, and they knew that the Hurricane was Cat 4/5 they should have had those relief convoys moving and organising before it even hit. How on earth can it have taken 5 or 6 DAYS for them to get moving? If they’d got there within a day or so, there wouldn’t have been the utter collapse of law and order.
The most startling thing was the story shown on C4 news last night, Jon Snow was tagging along on a search boat, the first thing I noticed was that that the rescuers were pointing guns at clearly unarmed people in their own homes and generally going about it as though these people were criminals. Secondly they mention at one point that the family they were filming got separated, and that the only people who seemed to be trying to keep them together were the children. That’s what the voiceover said, the pictures showed Jon Snow, a journalist, herding the children with the rest of the family in order to keep them together. That is completely unacceptable, you know that there is a significant failure when a supposedly neutral observer is forced to intervene to do what is meant to be the job of the emergency services.
I don’t think I’ve ever accused George W Bush of having had a deliberate, calculated scheme. It’s almost always the opposite problem.
Andrew, well there does seem to be a pattern of Bush appointing his mates to the top jobs, rather than appointing anyone who’s actually qualified. Now, whether that’s malice or incompetance, I don’t know. As d^2 suggests, we’re rather left with the dicotomy of Bush either being a blithering idiot, or a heartless bastard. Neither is very appealing…
Andrew, further to this, I’m not sure what your point is by posting lots of silly "left-wing" views from the web? After all, do These examples represent your brand of conservatism? We can all play at pointing out the logical inconsistences and outright hatred on both of the extremes of the debate (you might also like to check out the hateful spew of Bruce Anderson in the Indi, which was also too soon after the event to be informed by fact) but it doesn’t exactly engage with John’s question of wether GWB is to blame. Also, I’d rather be chanting "Down with Bush" than "Down with The Blacks", which seems to be the rallying cry of the hard-right…
Everyone seems to be discussing whether blame lies with the state (in this case Lousiana) or the federal government. But, AFAIK, no one has discussed how credible government warnings (from any branch) are. If you read of an approaching disaster, what would you do? Both John B and I are doubters when it comes to our own government’s warnings on terrorism. And it seems to me that if Mark Steyn had been in New Orleans nine days ago, he’d have been snorting about how often the government is wrong. (As he pretty much did in his Telegraph article last week.) As it turned out the warnings were correct, but how was anyone to know they would be? If there had been a 100% evacuation, would things have been better? Fewer deaths, of course, but where would they go? And whose responsibility would they be?
Dave, Yes, very good point. I indeed had an old resident of NO tell me yesterday that he wouldn’t have left: it would have been "good to see a hurricane, and how much damage could it cause?" However, you would have hoped that the authorities might have planned for this eventuality? Namely, "what do we do if people do not leave their homes, but then the levees do break and we have to recuse them?"
Matt: Fair point, but I’d say the ‘Down-with-Bush’ type of anti-Americanism is far more prevalent amongst the non-extreme left than the ‘Down-with-Blacks’ tendency is amongst the non-extreme right. Of course, as a sensible (I hope) right-winger, I would say that.
it doesn’t exactly engage with John’s question of whether GWB is to blame.
No, it doesn’t. It engages with Alex’s comment about the Decent Left assuming a default ‘support Bush’ position on many issues.
As d^2 suggests, we’re rather left with the dichotomy of Bush either being a blithering idiot, or a heartless bastard.
True, but the tendency seems to be to assume the latter, when the former is much more likely to be true. And d^2 may have suggested it, but I stated it pretty explicitly previously when I said this:
Well, that’s really my point. Isn’t that more likely to be cock-up rather than conspiracy? I’ll freely admit that Bush seems more prone than the average US President to making cock-ups, but that’s hardly evidence of actual malice, just incompetence.
Andrew, I think you’re right, re the sensible right-wing. But note that Bush is in power, and quite a few of the sensible right were "down with Clinton." I think Bush’s platform is against almost everything I believe in.
Also blacks as a group are not in power. Down-with-blacks, one might say, is the status quo, and requires political inertia rather than political activism. What I’m trying to say is, if you did think "Down-with-blacks" the best program would be: do nothing. I don’t know what would be a good program for "Up-with-blacks." I’m in two minds on positive discrimination, for instance.
Why are you "in two minds" about positive discrimination? Racism is not simply a negative phenomenon that makes some people worse off; it makes them worse off both BECAUSE and THEREFORE it makes others better off, ie whites benefit from racism – whether they themselves are racist as individuals.
A lot of what I would say has already been said.
But, from a US historian, your notion of how the federal (read central) government relates to the states is over a 100 years out of date. Especially in a disaster of this magnitude, the Feds are frankly expected to step in, an expectation they have largely created for themselves over a 100 years of precedent and action (perhaps even 150 years, if you go back to the Civil War and Lincoln’s massive expansion of the federal government). I would argue that in a disaster of this scale, FEMA, the National Guard, as well as the US military (not to mention the fairly dysfunctional Dep’t of Homeland security) all have vital, central roles to play. Others, including the Dept of Transportation, the Dept of Energy, the Dept of the Interior, and the Bureau of Reclamation all have vital roles to play considering the disruption of interstate commerce (vis a vis Mississippi shipping, as well as the damage taken by the Gulf energy fields) and the environmental destruction the hurricane has caused (underreproted, but very significant), not to mention the simple disruption of interstate travel, and the massive refugee crisis (a million plus people now without homes for a long time to come)
But this is just is just talking about pure logistical and bureaucratic questioons. The President – again, established through precedent more than law, but it has nevertheless has come to be vital function expected of the President by the American people – has a vital role as moral and emotional leader in a time of crisis like this. Bush clearly fell down in this regard for much of last week, too.
So while I think it is clear that Bush is not solely responsible for the crisis (its really a broader federal gov’t failure, not the failure of the President or the Presidency), and while it is also true that state and local authorities deserve blame, the scale and nature of this disaster demands the federal govenernment’s role be paramount. And since Bush is the nation’s figurehead as well as the de jure manager of the federal apparatus, he only should be the focus of the blame.
Ben P
However, the mere fact that the flood relief effort in New Orleans massively fucked up is not an indictment of the President. The fault lies partly, and perhaps primarily, with New Orleans’ (Democratic) mayor and Louisiana’s (Democratic) governor
Actually, no. The failure to evacuate the city before the hurricane hit, and to properly police shelters within the city, lies with the Governor and the Mayor, though there are signs that the President contributed to that (by refusing to approve the transfer of National Guard units from other states to Louisiana before the hurricane hit). You could also argue that they and their predecessors, over the course of many years, failed to adequately prepare for a natural disaster like this, and other things may have complicated the situation (emergency mangement in New Orleans was privatised last year, though I’ve not yet seen a clear report of what this involved or how it impacted on preparing for emergencies such as this). But the refusal to answer calls to help the state authorities before the hurricane hit, and the failure in the relief and evacuation efforts after the hurricane and flooding, is the President’s fault (because those derilictions were either his own doing or down to people in his administration, people he appointed and apparently appointed on an entirely partisan basis). Not only did federal authorities fail to answer requests for help until three days after the flooding (requests that started two days before the hurricane hit New Orleans), they actually prevented other agencies (local and state auhtorities, charities and private organisations) providing relief.
(Incidentally, the Mayor of New Orleans was a Republican until he decided to run for Mayor, and was both a contributor to and campaigner for George W. Bush. I guess if he wasn’t sincere in abandoning the Republicans for the Democrats before, he certainly must be now.)
Now that’s intriguing (the Mayor’s defection). One of the positive things about the horribleness of all this is that it’s utterly fucked any Repugnican effort to nick the black vote…