Bush May Not Be Able To Escape Storm: Political Careers Can Be Broken On The Shoals Of A Natural Disaster

Hurricane Katrina began as a natural disaster, unleashed a human tragedy, and is rapidly boiling into a political brawl.

The worst natural disaster in American history has become an ideological storm, with accusations and counter-accusations flying even before the flooding can be plugged and the dead counted.

On the left, Katrina has become an opportunity to reamplify a half decade's worth of accusations against the Bush administration.

The storm, it's alleged, is the President's fault for not signing Kyoto. (Never mind that hurricanes have become less frequent over the past 70 years.)

The flood, it's alleged next, is the President's fault for cutting back flood control budgets (even though the levee that was breached had only just been rebuilt).

The disorder, it's alleged again, is the President's fault for sending the Louisiana National Guard to Iraq (regardless of the fact that 8,000 of the state's 11,700 Guardsmen -- including four of the state's five engineering battalions -- remained ready at home).

So long as the message is consistently anti-Bush, it does not have to be consistent in any other way. Environmentalists who detest dams, canals and all other works of man now rage at the Bush administration for failing to give the Army Corps of Engineers everything it ever asked for -- forgetting already that, as the blogger Michelle Malkin has reported, only five years ago environmentalists succeeded in halting hurricane protection work in St. Charles parish because a great egret nesting area was discovered in the levee's path.

The Mayor of New Orleans has now joined the litany. "We authorized US$8-billion to go to Iraq, lickety split," he said yesterday. "After 9/11 we gave the President unauthorized powers, lickety split, to help New York and other places. You mean to tell me that a place where most of your oil is coming through ... that we can't figure out a way to authorize the resources that we need?"

And again never mind that Congress had authorized US$10.5-billion worth of aid the day before.

But so what? In politics, innocence is seldom much of an excuse.

And it has to be confessed on the other side that the Bush administration -- in the past always so resolute in a crisis -- has unaccountably faltered on the job. That mysterious ability to speak to the mood of the moment so crucial to politicians has abruptly failed the President.

Quite suddenly, Mr. Bush is looking at his own storm of political trouble.

Katrina knocked out nine of the 14 refineries on America's Gulf Coast at a time when North America has not an hour of refining capacity to spare. High gasoline prices, already one of the administration's gravest political vulnerabilities, abruptly spiked as much as 20 cents per gallon higher.

John Makin of the American Enterprise Institute calculated in August that the gasoline price rise of the previous year drained as much from the U.S. economy as a 1% national sales tax -- and higher prices seem likely to persist through the coming year.

Shortages are predicted now in natural gas and electricity markets as well.

The human suffering in the wake of the hurricane has reopened racial wounds that seemed to have healed in the unifying aftermath of 9/11. The elderly expiring in the heat of the Superdome; the young girls harassed and raped; the bloated corpses floating in the diseased waters -- all are disproportionately black, and many black Americans suspect that more would have been done, and faster, to rescue them had they been white. The suspicion may be unjust. It almost certainly is unjust. And yet it will linger.

Chaos and disorder in the streets of New Orleans inevitably remind Americans of chaos and disorder in Iraq, and raise questions about whether the hand on America's tiller is as skilled and capable as it ought to be.

Why did it take four days for the Guard to arrive?

The old Federal Emergency Management Agency was a notorious dumping ground for political hacks. Nobody much misses it, except of course for the congressmen who remember how FEMA used to sprinkle no-questions-asked money on towns and villages whenever a disaster struck close to an election. ("Since we're replacing the road anyway, why not add a bike path? And a playground? And maybe an ice rink?")

But the new Department of Homeland Security is failing its first big test, in full view of a watching world. Again never mind that the Bush administration originally opposed the creation of the department -- rightly fearing that it would take a decade to put the new bureaucratic assemblage together. In the end, the administration succumbed, accepted the idea, and then claimed the undeserved credit for it. Now it will reap the undeserved blame.

Natural disasters can upend a country's politics. German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, a sure loser going into the 2002 elections, recouped his popularity much more by his seemingly successful management of flooding in eastern Germany than by his opposition to the Iraq war. The elder George Bush lost in 1992 in part because he was perceived to have mishandled 1991's Hurricane Andrew. Katrina is bigger than either catastrophe -- and its impact may be correspondingly bigger as well.