Schizo America

Nobel Prize Winner Paul Krugman provides the following photos of George Bush, sitting in Air Force One, right after 9/11 and after Katrina:

So everyone is talking about the Vanity Fair article in which Bush aides say that Katrina is what did him in. I don’t think that’s entirely true, but what I’d like to focus on is why Katrina was such a problem for Bush.

Above are two photos. The second one shows Bush flying over New Orleans; it was widely regarded as a PR disaster, because he seemed so disconnected. But it looks an awful lot like the first photo, of Bush on Air Force One on 9/11. And that photo was considered a wonderful picture of leadership in action — so much so that there was a mini-scandal when the GOP started selling copies of that photo for political fundraising.

In fact, my guess it that the infamous Katrina photo was released precisely because the White House thought everyone would see the parallel, and rally around Bush’s wondrous leadership qualities. Hey, it worked on David Broder.

So why didn’t it work? I think the answer is simple: in the case of Katrina people could actually see the results of Bush policy. The truth is that Bush did as terrible a job fighting terrorism as he did responding to Katrina — who would have thought that Osama would still be out there, making videos, 7 years later? But on the terrorism front, and even in Iraq, the administration could invent a reality that impressed the public.

When Katrina struck, however, everyone could see the reality on their TVs.  So what happened with Katrina wasn’t that the administration started to fail; what happened was that for the first time its failures were visible to all.

I agree with Krugman, but I’ll show you the photo that made me lose faith in Bush:

It is singer Harry Connick, Jr. praying over the dead body of a grandmother in the devastation of the New Orleans Superdome.  TEN THOUSAND AMERICANS were stranded in the Superdome, for days, without plumbing, trash disposal, even fresh air.

Our President was up in the air, looking weak and impotent, while a singer was down below with his hand on the dead body of someone’s mother and grandmother, giving her a blessing.

With a mother like Barbara Bush, who famously chuckled that ‘the underprivileged’ evacuated to the Houston Astrodome were discovering that ‘things were working well for them’!   I guess its no surprise that George Bush stayed in the air.

Oh yes, he did arrive on land soon after Connick’s picture was released.  He eventually prematurely ended his FIVE WEEK VACATION,

clowned around with a guitar at speaking engagements in San Diego and Phoenix, and seemed only to feel the trauma of homelessness when talking about his buddy, millionaire politician Trent Lott, who lose ONE OF his homes, a waterfront mansion.  For him, George could muster hope that he’d like to rock in a rocking chair on Lott’s remodeled front porch.  Way to go, George, really standing with your people!

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