Staying On-Message and Anti-Bush

In 1992 Hurricane Andrew swept over Florida. Not long after the governor (Jeb Bush's Democrat predecessor) complained to the media that the federal government was being slow to respond. This got the headlines. The fact that the governor was slow to request aid was relegated to the bottom of an inside page. This added to the perception that G. W. H. Bush was aloof and out-of-touch and contributed to his defeat that November.

I doubt that any Democratic operatives have forgotten this. They have been working overtime, with some success, to create the same impression about G. W. Bush and Katrina. Even before the floodwaters started rising in New Orleans, the far left was blaming Bush. At that point, the best that they could come up with was global warming. If Bush had only joined Kyoto a few months earlier then the oceans would have cooled and the storm would have been a gentle breeze.

Next they started insisting that Iraq had drained so many troops from the National Guard that they were unable to respond to a domestic crisis. This had as much basis as the global warming theory - none.

Then they struck paydirt. Bush had cut funds for levee work. It didn't matter that this would have been a 20-40 year plan that could not possibly have made a difference so soon or that the levee that failed was upgraded just this Summer. They had something that they could pin on Bush.

Things got even better when the Mayor of New Orleans started complaining about the slowness of relief workers. It didn't matter that his police force had lost control of the city and that relief workers had turned back in the face of gunfire. It also didn't matter that the Governor of Louisiana had been reluctant to authorize federal control. She worried (with cause) that once the feds took over they would blame the current mess on the state and local authorities (the ones in charge to that point).

So far most of the MSM has taken the lazy route and followed the Democrat's pre-written storyline. There has been a lot of coverage that Bush cut levee funds. Much less covered is that presidents have been cutting levee funds since Jimmy Carter. Also not reported is that there was a floodgate project proposed in 1977 that would have made the levees proof against a Category 5 storm. This was stopped by environmentalists.

Here is one timeline supporting the left's storyline. While much of it is accurate, it has some significant omissions. Bush declared a state of emergency on Saturday, August 27 and was urging residents to evacuate on Sunday, August 28.

Democrats are also playing "gotcha", trying to find quotes that prove people knew that the levees would fail. This is an example: the Think Progress timeline has this headline, "LOUISIANA NEWSPAPER SIGNALS LEVEES MAY GIVE". If you read the linked story you find that what it really says is:

Forecasters feared Sunday afternoon that storm driven waters will lap over the New Orleans levees when monster Hurricane Katrina pushes past the Crescent City tomorrow.

“Some levees in the Greater New Orleans area could be overtopped,” he said.

The model showed a storm surge of as much as 16 feet moving up the Mississippi River and topping levees in Chalmette and New Orleans. High water flowing from Lake Pontchartrain through St. Charles Parish would also flood over levees into Kenner.

I hope I don't have to explain the difference between a storm surge coming over the top of a levee and a levee collapsing.

The Sep. 6 Daily Show had a similar "gotcha". They showed a levee engineer talking about flooding and told us that she was predicting levee collapse.

This sums up the problem with the Democrats' storyline. It just isn't true.

Similarly, the MSM has spent most of its efforts reporting on New Orleans. This is understandable. It is the largest city affected and it continues to be a developing story. The rest of Katrina's devistation consists of flattened communities, just like any other major hurricane.

The focus on New Orleans allows activists to insist that Bush is moving slowly because the victims are poor and black. while this is true of the thousands of people left in New Orleans, it ignores the areas hit hardest by Katrina. This includes the whitest counties in Mississippi. In this case, the Democrats don't even have to write the storyline. They can just react to the newscasts.