Decision ‘08

Sorry, Frank, MoDo, Fineman - Better Luck Next Time

Howard Fineman led the charge with the claim the Democrats were so emboldened by Katrina (I’m not making this up) that they would come after John Roberts in retribution (???). MoDo and Frank Rich did what they do best and piled on any excuse to ridicule Bush. And, just like with Mother Sheehan, the public isn’t buying.

An ABC News poll shows that more people don’t blame Bush for the Katrina response than do, and the approval/disapproval ratings on his response are split down the middle. As the article points out, this matches his approval ratings nearly spot on:Forty-six percent of Americans approve of Bush’s handling of the crisis, while 47 percent disapprove.

That compares poorly with Bush’s 91 percent approval rating for his performance in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but it’s far from the broad discontent expressed by critics of the initial days of the hurricane response. (It also almost exactly matches Bush’s overall job approval rating, 45 percent, in an ABC/Post poll a week ago.)

In other words, if you hated Bush before you still hate him, and if you loved him before, you still love him. The worst crisis of Bush’s presidency? No, a horrible national crisis that saddens us all…not a political referendum…

7 Responses to “Sorry, Frank, MoDo, Fineman - Better Luck Next Time”

1 Fred Says:
September 4th, 2005 at 11:47 am
Can we all assume that the reason the Mayor of New Orleans has escaped even the slightest hint of criticism is that his name is not George Bush?
2 Mark Says:
September 4th, 2005 at 12:16 pm
A wise assumption, that…
3 Greg Bullock Says:
September 4th, 2005 at 12:33 pm
The more I think about, or brood over, the situation, the more I realize that Americans seem to have very little understanding of how their government works or, at least, was set up to work.

What I mean is: the United States, thank God, is not the Soviet Union; the government is not comprised of one, gigantic Office of Central Planning. The immediate rush to blame the president and his administration seems to indicate that, for whatever reason, people do, in fact, think our government works like the old Soviet Union. This to me is bizarre.

The mayor of New Orleans certainly set the national tone by immediately becoming hysterical and attempting to shift blame away from himself and his governance, beyond the state government, and up to the federal level. One has to wonder what it was about this man that earned him the vote of the people of New Orleans.

I have read many times over the last few days that “this is not like 9/11; this is worse.” I think that’s nonsense. On September 11 in New York City there was no immediate sense of the scale of the attack. Were there a dozen more planes heading our way to crash all over the city, into the Empire State Building, the various bridges, or into Times Square? No one knew. How many downtown buildings — where the buildings are huge and packed tightly together — how many might topple like dominos? No one knew. There were shortages; there were service disruptions; there was a lot of fear. The scene could quickly and easily have collapsed into a panic and hysteria. But anarchy did not errupt, primarily because of the quality and strength of our local leadership.

This is why it matters very much who we elect locally. Again, I have to note that, for reasons not entirely clear to me, the people of New Orleans chose very poorly.
4 AcademicElephant Says:
September 4th, 2005 at 12:51 pm
This begs the question of what the polls will say after a week of the sustained, effective activity that we’ve seen since Friday. If Bush hasn’t tanked yet he’s not likely to without some bizarre gaff, and with Frank Rich as our (contrarian) guide, this may yet turn in the President’s favor. It is nice that a positive outcome for the President goes hand-in-hand with a positive outcome for New Orleans–in other words, his poll numbers will go up the better the response is, which is a positive incentive. Is the left hoping for the administration to bungle the recovery and so to prolong the victim’s misery in order to improve their political fortunes? What a terrible question to ask, but I fear it is so.

As for the culpabilty of the local authorities, I am in complete accord with Greg–I wrote on this yesterday and it seems clear that is where the true fault lay.
5 Mark Says:
September 4th, 2005 at 12:51 pm
Greg, indeed, it appears that the Mayor of New Orleans, a victim of his own poor planning, immediately had a nervous breakdown of sorts, as witnessed by his hysterical ranting, cursing, and crying…the contrast with Rudy G. could not be more stark…now, I don’t want to kick a man when he’s down, but to say his performance was uninspiring would be the understatement of the year…
6 ordi Says:
September 4th, 2005 at 2:07 pm
For the Left to win America and Louisiana needs to lose!
7 Martha Says:
September 4th, 2005 at 9:33 pm
New Orleans did a poor job of evacuating. The 18 year old boy that stole a school bus and got the first people to the Houston Astrodome (as per the media), was smarter than a lot of us would have been under the circumstances. As Mark has said before, there is plenty of blame to go around.