Staff AP News Dec 29, 2008 21:41 ESTWilkerson's comment on Cheney confirms what was written about Cheney in Barton Gellman's excellent book Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency.
Hurricane Katrina not only pulverized the Gulf Coast in 2005, it knocked the bully pulpit out from under President George W. Bush, according to two former advisers who spoke candidly about the political impact of the government's poor handling of the natural disaster.
"Katrina to me was the tipping point," said Matthew Dowd, Bush's pollster and chief strategist for the 2004 presidential campaign. "The president broke his bond with the public. Once that bond was broken, he no longer had the capacity to talk to the American public. State of the Union addresses? It didn't matter. Legislative initiatives? It didn't matter. P.R.? It didn't matter. Travel? It didn't matter."
Dan Bartlett, former White House communications director and later counselor to the president, said: "Politically, it was the final nail in the coffin." [Snip]
Lawrence Wilkerson, top aide and later chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, said that as a new president, Bush was like Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the 2008 GOP vice presidential nominee whom critics said lacked knowledge about foreign affairs. When Bush first came into office, he was surrounded by experienced advisers like Vice President Dick Cheney and Powell, who Wilkerson said ended up playing damage control for the president.
"It allowed everybody to believe that this Sarah Palin-like president — because, let's face it, that's what he was — was going to be protected by this national-security elite, tested in the cauldrons of fire," Wilkerson said, adding that he considered Cheney probably the "most astute, bureaucratic entrepreneur" he'd ever met.
"He became vice president well before George Bush picked him," Wilkerson said of Cheney. "And he began to manipulate things from that point on, knowing that he was going to be able to convince this guy to pick him, knowing that he was then going to be able to wade into the vacuums that existed around George Bush — personality vacuum, character vacuum, details vacuum, experience vacuum."
But it was the Bush administration's blundered reaction to the Katrina disaster that exposed its incompetence and passiveness in the similarly passive media. Once it became clear in the media that the government handling of Katrina was incompetent, it reflected back on their failure to prevent 9/11 as well as their failed occupation of Iraq and the unacknowledged rise of the Iraqi insurgency. The Bush administration's current passiveness and failed reactions to the economic crisis simply demonstrate that the problem is inherent in the Bush administration and not a one time screw up.
Addendum 10:57 am CST
Kevin Drum thinks that Matthew Dowd and Dan Bartlett missed part of the story about the public reaction the Bush's handling of Katrina.
I think this is only half right. I've long believed that what really killed Bush was the contrast between his handling of Katrina and his handling of the Terri Schiavo case, which had come only a few months earlier. It was just too stark. What the American public saw was that when the religious right was up in arms, the president and the Republican Party acted. Bill Frist performed his famous long-distance diagnosis; Tom DeLay fulminated on the floor of the House; Republicans tried to subpoena both Terri and Michael Schiavo; and President Bush interrupted his vacation and made his famous midnight flight to Washington DC to sign a bill transferring the case to federal court. It was both a whirlwind and a political circus.So it wasn't just Bush's clearly bad handling of Katrina. It was also the fact that Katrina made it very clear the Bush was ready to support the religious right, but not the American people. So the American people turned on him.
And it showed that Bush could be moved to action if the right constituency was at risk. It wasn't just that Bush was mostly MIA during the early stages of Katrina, but that he was plainly capable of being engaged in an emergency if it was the right kind of emergency. But apparently New Orleans wasn't it. And that was the final nail in the coffin of his presidency.
That makes sense. Bush was able to conceal his failure to prevent 9/11 by good public relations and by acting like he was doing stuff about it afterwards. Maybe he really couldn't have prevented 9/11. But he really could have done a lot more about Katrina, and he could have at least acted like he cared. He did neither.
But I think there is yet another element to be considered. The media has operated on a stampede effect since about 1990, possibly starting with the Persian Gulf War. When 9/11 occurred, America was attacked in the biggest surprise attack since Pearl Harbor, and the media was ready to rally around the President no matter what. Bush was good at keeping the media on the subjects he wanted covered and was an expert at painting anyone who objected to his actions as being supporters of the 9/11 attackers. The problem with Katrina is that it was a well-anticipated problem with no enemy attacker behind it, and the 9/11 - terrorist - War on Terror media narrative did not work. Then the Bush administration so very clearly did nothing right during Katrina (after being handed the best FEMA ever by Bill Clinton) and also simply did nothing at all afterwards. Katrina created its own media narrative, and that narrative was far from kind to the Bush administration. For once the members of the media got out and actually reported, and a large part of the news was Bush's lackadaisical lethargic actions and frequent missteps.
Even Bush's loss of control of the media narrative showed clearly that Bush, as President, had no interest in the welfare of the American people in general. This is where Kevin's contrast to the earlier Terry Schiavo events comes in. Bush and the Republican clearly did not lose control of the media narrative during the Terry Schiavo mess. Why? Because they cared about what the religious right wanted. so the contrast between Schiavo and Katrina very heavily influenced American public opinion.
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