Tilting at windmills

Washington Monthly, Oct-Nov, 2005 by Charles Peters

In the days after Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, the country watched with a collective sense of growing horror as bodies floated by on our television screens and the government seemed adrift. Despite the reassuring statements at press briefings, no one seemed to be in charge on the ground, the chain of command in Washington seemed to go in a circle. Each day brought more rookie mistakes by an administration that is entering its sixth year of governing. Even more maddening, we learned that many of the problems that followed the hurricane strike had been--or else should have been--anticipated by officials in and outside of government. A lot of people have been trying to figure out why things went so terribly wrong. Here are some of their better guesses with a few thoughts of our own thrown in.

From its earliest days--actually, beginning in our first year--the Monthly has warned of the twin dangers of leaders who don't want to hear bad news and the subordinates who fear telling them about it. Both Newsweek and Time, in their issues of Sept. 19, do a superb job capturing the isolation of the White House that results. It wasn't until the morning of Aug. 30, a full day after Katrina had hit New Orleans and the first reports of flooding had reached the Emergency Operations Center in Baton Rouge, that Bush's aides met to decide "who gets to deliver the bad news" to the president--whose anger at the bearer of bad tidings they had good reason to fear--that he should cut short his vacation and return to Washington from San Diego.

Even after he got the news, writes Newsweek's Evan Thomas, "Bush blithely proceeded with the rest of his schedule for the day, accepting a gift guitar and pretending to riff like Tom Cruise in Risky Business" while television was reporting chaos at the Superdome, along with widespread looting, and while the only federal presence was a handful of brave Coast Guard helicopter crews rescuing survivors from rooftops peeking above flooded streets.

But if he is ill-served by his handlers, it is how Bush would have it. "[Bush's] inner circle," Time's Mike Allen explains, "takes pride in being able to tell him 'everything is under control'.... The result is a kind of echo chamber in which good news prevails over bad, even when there's a surfeit of evidence to the contrary." It's not just an echo chamber, but a parallel universe in which what the president believes to be true in no way resembles facts on the ground. "Four days after Katrina struck, Bush himself briefed his father and former President Clinton in a way that left too rosy an impression of the progress made," Allen writes.

One of the most disturbing things about the mistakes made with Katrina is that they echo the mistakes made with Iraq. A refusal to heed warnings stands out in each case. Just as it ignored Gen. Shinseki's prediction that many more troops would be needed than were being committed for the occupation of Iraq, the Bush administration also failed to act on warnings of the damage that was likely to result from Katrina, right up to a videoconference involving National Hurricane Center Director Max Mayfield and Bush on the day before the hurricane struck. How could Bush not have been alarmed if Mayfield told the president the same things he was saying in television interviews, where he warned of massive damage and flooding? After hearing the same warnings, the mayor of New Orleans said, "Max Mayfield has scared me to death"

The White House's tendency towards willful ignorance found itself replicated in other bureaucracies. On the Thursday after Katrina, with New Orleans in total disarray and with no evidence of any federal presence on the ground, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said, "It's a source of tremendous pride to work with people who have pulled off this really exceptional response" The next day, FEMA's deputy director Patrick Rhode boasted, "I am actually very impressed with the mobilization of man and machine to help our friends in this unfortunate area"

One characteristic of the Republican mind played, I suspect, a considerable role in the administration's slow response. Watching television during the weekend before Katrina hit, they saw all those cars leaving New Orleans and probably figured that everyone was getting out, sublimely unaware that a large number of people simply don't have cars. As Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) put it, "[W]hoever was in charge appeared to assume that every American has the capacity to load up their family in an SUM fill it with $100 worth of gasoline, stick some bottled water in the trunk, and use a credit card to check into a hotel on safe ground."

A similar blind spot revealed itself when, having abandoned the issuance of debit cards to survivors, the administration said it would make deposits in their bank accounts, apparently unaware that a large number of the survivors do not have bank accounts.

Having failed to take the poor into account during pre-disaster planning, the administration hasn't forgotten about the rich during post-disaster politicking. Deep in the DNA of wealthy Republicans, there is an aversion to doing their part, not only avoiding service in the military, but also trying to avoid every tax they can. Now, it's capped off by Bush's proposal for a massive program of Katrina recovery without any increase in taxes. The Wall Street Journal reports that Republicans in Congress even want to cut taxes by inserting into any Katrina recovery program a localized suspension of the estate tax--which, by the way, now only applies to people with estates worth over $1.5 million.