Will the Bush Presidency be a Katrina Fatality

[AChimp]

This was in today's Winnipg Free Press. I thought it was pretty interesting and hits the nail on the head.

Duff's vision lacking in U.S.
Americans deserve much better leadership than they are receiving

Fri Sep 9 2005

William Neville



UNDER the single headline We've lost our city, the front page of the Free Press on Aug. 31 consisted of a single picture. It showed a city in which freeways, overpasses and underpasses snaked in and out of the water, appearing here, disappearing there, reappearing farther on.

Everywhere were broad, water-filled canals -- which once were streets. Everywhere -- in yards, around houses, around massive commercial buildings -- was water. Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink.

Despite the newspaper's name and domicile, the city depicted was not, of course, Winnipeg. But it could have been. Indeed, picking up the paper that morning, my first thought was: this could have been Winnipeg in 1997.

In 1997 it was estimated that, without the Red River Floodway, 60 per cent of Winnipeg would have been flooded. Residents of Winnipeg, now comparing their situation with that of the devastated New Orleans, might well reflect that there, but for the grace of God, go we.

If it is true, however, that God helps those that help themselves, there are some significant differences in the human-made circumstances of Winnipeg prior to 1997 and those of New Orleans prior to hurricane Katrina. Broadly speaking, the 1997 Winnipeg experience represented a triumph of political leadership, notably that of Duff Roblin, while New Orleans reflects a near-complete failure of leadership which has, no less remarkably, carried forward into the relief effort. Though the built fabric of New Orleans was spared the absolute worst of Katrina's destructiveness, the city was subsequently lost to breaches in the levees which had hitherto kept the ocean at bay. What the wind did not destroy directly it achieved by leaving New Orleans open to the sea. The part most difficult to bear, however, is the realization that the city's vulnerability to hurricane-induced high seas was long recognized and the strengthening of the levees long a subject of political debate.

On that front, one of the most arresting news stories to appear in the last 10 days was in an Associated Press story published in this paper last week. The writer, Ron Fournier, offers an unhappy chronicle of political failure in the face of a disaster just waiting to happen. According to Fournier, the administrations of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush both "lowballed" the costs when presenting budgets to strengthen the levees.

In 2004, a request was made by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for $105 million for hurricane and flood programs in New Orleans. The Bush White House slashed the request to $40 million, just slightly less than the $42.2 million ultimately approved by Congress. When one reflects that the Red River Floodway cost roughly $63 million in 1962, $42.2 million more than 40 years later, with its vastly reduced purchasing power, is absolutely picayune.

But it gets worse. As Fournier writes: "Yet the legislators and Bush agreed to a $286.4-billion pork-laden highway bill that included more than 6,000 pet projects for legislators. Congress spent money on dust control for Arkansas roads, a warehouse on the Erie canal and a $231-million bridge to a small, uninhabited Alaskan island."

If the division of powers in American government is, as some claim, a hedge against too much concentrated power in any one institution, this sorry episode weighs on the other side of the scale. So far as the executive and the legislature acting in consort, it was more in the evasion of responsibility than in its discharge: this, at the apex of power, in the world's greatest power.

That pattern has carried over into acrimonious debates over the inadequacies of the relief effort. It is now clear, for example, that evacuation plans failed utterly to take account of the fact that the poorest residents of New Orleans had neither the means to evacuate nor a safe haven to which they might go if they had possessed the means. Bush's jocular pledge that he would yet have a drink at a rebuilt home of Republican Senator Trent Lott, or his praise for Michael Brown, the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency ("Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."), when the agency's director was clearly floundering, have reinforced a perception that Bush's Washington just doesn't get it. In this crisis, Bush has consistently failed to rise to the occasion or to the public's reasonable expectations. That he realizes this is suggested by his deriding those who want to play the "blame game," a tactic which might, to use Bush language, be regarded as a kind of personal pre-emptive war.

In commenting on these things, one should not minimize the fact that in liberal democratic societies it is often very difficult to animate public and political opinion to deal with a crisis that is more readily described or imagined than actually imminent or experienced. Yet, if it is difficult, it is not necessarily impossible. Manitoba, having experienced a serious, if not devastating flood in 1950, had in the 1960s, a determined premier and government with solid legislative support, who were able to advocate, negotiate and, ultimately, celebrate the building of a floodway which has repaid many times over both the financial and political costs incurred in achieving it.

Winnipeg -- and Manitobans -- were very fortunate in the quality and vision of that leadership in the 1960s. Americans, and particularly those in the flood-stricken south, deserve much better than they are receiving. And because the human costs are so high and will be so enduring, the financial and political costs are likely to be high and enduring as well. So much for omnipotence.