Bush and the storm of criticism

There's been an all-out effort to tar and feather President George Bush for delays in meeting the needs of Hurricane Katrina victims in New Orleans.

But the public isn't buying it, and rightly so.

A CNN-USA Today poll on Wednesday found that just 13 percent of the public believes Bush is "most responsible for problems in New Orleans after the hurricane." And more telling, the poll found that only 29 percent believe that top officials in the federal agencies responsible should be fired, while 68 percent said they should not.

The public, it seems, recognizes the scale of the devastation and the roll of the federal government in responding to disasters. People know that Katrina's wreckage extends well beyond New Orleans, and they know that the federal government cannot be everywhere instantly.

But still, there is an ever-present "blame-it-on-Bush" crowd that has been swamping the media with silly statements. Some allege that Bush is responsible because he didn't sign the Kyoto Treaty, thereby contributing to global warming that fueled Hurricane Katrina. Never mind that huge hurricanes have been slamming the Gulf Coast for centuries. Some say that the latest transportation bill siphoned money away from New Orleans dike reinforcement to pay for a bridge to an uninhabited island in Alaska. Never mind that Bush signed the bill just a couple months ago and that it could not have had any impact on the current disaster. Some say outrageously that President Bush doesn't care about the poor, and mostly black, population that was hurt the worst by Katrina in New Orleans.

"What the American people have seen is this incredible disparity in which those people who had cars and money got out and those people who were impoverished died," said Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, the Democrat from Massachussets.

Kennedy is right, of course, about who suffered, but it's not the president's fault. And it's ironic that those who could not leave were the ones who are most dependent on the very government services that Kennedy has long championed. Those who relied on government to move them, to feed them, to bring them water were the ones who were most vulnerable.

Kennedy and others will surely continue to rail for more of the same - further subsidizing government dependence, as if that will somehow be empowering.

Not so. Poor people in New Orleans were failed by the government that was supposed to be there at an extreme time of need. But this time - as opposed to 9/11, when New York firefighters and police officers were the country's redeeming government responders - the worst failures were at the local and state level.

Since when has any community ever relied on the federal government, specifically the Federal Emergency Management Agency, as a "first responder"? The answer is, never. FEMA has always been the bulky backup agency, falling in behind local and state first responders, as requested by local and state officials.

For certain, shortcomings in the FEMA response will be revealed in the months to come. Most notable are questions about the agency's effectiveness after being realligned under the larger and even more cumbersome Department of Homeland Security. There will be valid questions about the effectiveness of this new super bureaucracy.

But still, it is not surprising that it took several days for FEMA help to arrive in a city that was swamped and largely inaccessible. FEMA is a sprawling agency that was also responding to dozens of communities in Mississipi, Alabama and elsewhere in Louisiana. For perspective, one needs to remember that Katrina delivered destruction on a truly huge scale, an area roughly the size of many larger European countries.

So criticism toward FEMA seems a bit misplaced when it's coming from a local leader like New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin.

One Louisiana state legislator declared emphatically on Friday that there were only two urgent needs in New Orleans: "Buses! And gas!"

Really? One of the most striking images from the calamity is an aerial shot of 255 school buses neatly parked at a city lot, with fuel tanks leaking gasoline into the urban swamp. The city had enough transportation on hand to clear the Superdome quickly, and the decision to do so did not rest with President Bush or FEMA.

Despite detailed city plans that prescribe public transit for evacuation purposes, the mayor didn't give the order to use those buses, or city transit buses, and neither did the superintendent of schools or the school board or anybody else at the local level. By law, federal assistance must be requested by states and local governments. It was only after the extent of the damage became clear that Nagin and Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco made panicked requests for federal assistance.

The help finally came, in massive fashion, but total blame should not come with it.