"All that is old and already formed can continue to live only if it allows within itself the conditions of a new beginning."
Katrina: Bush Takes Responsibility, Sort Of
Posted 2:30 p.m., Sept. 13, 2005
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President Bush today did something that, to my knowledge, he has never done before. He took responsibility for a mistake, the blunder in this case being the federal government's incredibly inept response to Hurricane Katrina.
Would that he had done so within days, rather waiting for two weeks after the moment the nature of said blunder had become agonizingly clear to the entire world.
I give credit to the president for making this move. It's overdue, but it's welcome. But like so much of what the president has done--up to and including his now overzealous jaunts to an empty New Orleans after having failed to put the Crescent City on his itinerary when his presence truly was needed--this looks like just so much damage control.
No doubt, a White House that never before felt a need to take the full citizenry into account to get its way now desperately needs damage control--or it risks losing any chance of getting its way ever again. That may, in fact, already be a lost cause, and this may already be a lame-duck president with three and a half years to go in his term.
It may actually be true, as so many have said, that this president simply does not get it. Or maybe, as of today, he finally does get it. But it's just too late to matter.
View it from the president's perspective. Before it was enough to scare the bejeezus out of people by waving terrorism in their faces to get them to tag along voluntarily, while the president and his cronies continued to treat the government like their own private Princeton University eating club, placing buddies and the buddies of buddies in positions of authority where they obviously did not belong. Michael Brown is only one example.
Not so, anymore. The polls are showing the president's standing now is seriously eroded, not just among liberals and independents, but also even among the stalwarts in his conservative base. A new Washington Post-ABC News poll out today shows clearly that Bush's standing is greatly damaged.
A clear 54 percent majority of Americans now disapproves of the president's performance. Given the president's tendency to push on with or without popular support--a trait that is not necessarily a bad thing--those numbers probably don't matter that much to him.
But this certainly does: His approval among Republicans has fallen to 78 percent--still quite high, but way lower than the 91 percent approval among the GOP faithful that he rated in January.
Perhaps worst of all from the White House perspective is that only 50 percent of the country now views Bush as a "strong leader," down from 62 percent in May of '04. And the percentage of Americans who view Bush as someone who can be "trusted in a crisis" has fallen from 60 percent to 49 percent.
The president has clearly lost his trump card--national security. The question that will linger above any other after the horror of the hurricane is this one: Are we really not safer in the post-9/11 world?
Unfortunately for the president, by waiting so long to issue his mea culpa--waiting even until after FEMA chief Michael Brown had to be forced to slink off the stage--today's statement of responsibility bears the tinge of spin control. It's unlikely to boost his popularity significantly.
Compare Bush's tardy approach to the famous incident on April 21, 1961, when President Kennedy went before the nation to accept full personal responsibility for the Bay of Pigs fiasco--something that he indeed was largely to blame for, but that also was the result of stupidity and perhaps even conspiracy on the part of the CIA and military commanders, eager as they were to force the greenhorn president into a full-scale Cuban invasion.
Kennedy, who as a new and untested president had a great deal more to lose than Bush has by taking personal responsibility, nonetheless didn't wait two weeks to clear it with his message minders. He did it the day after it became clear that the April 17 Bay of Pigs operation was beyond hope of success. He waited exactly one day.
That aside, is Bush's statement even a full message of acceptance? Read the president's words carefully. Do you catch the faint whiff of Clintonian equivocation?
"To the extent the federal government didn't fully do its job right, I take responsibility."
-- President George W. Bush,
Sept. 13, 2005Isn't that a little like, "If you somehow felt offended by something I said, then I'm sorry"? Kind of a provisional, non-apology apology?
Sorry to parse, but this is a White House so clamped down on message that--except on rare unprotected moments on campaign buses and such--nothing gets uttered by this administration without every word having been passed through the Karl Rove spin machine. And this admission includes two phrases, "to the extent" and "fully do its job right" that leave lots of wiggle room.
Plenty of wiggle room, for example, for sustained finger-pointing.
Too bad. The president had an opportunity to really refocus the nation's energy on recovery and repair. Even though the full scale of the disaster does not rest on his shoulders or the federal government's--nature, state government and to a lesser extent incapacitated local authorities share responsibility also--this was a case where the president could have ended most of the remaining arguments instantly by just saying, "I take full responsibility." Even if the blame isn't all his.
For such a manly man, you'd think that would have been the manly thing to do.
He didn't.
What Bush did today helps. But unfortunately, his choice of wording probably means the nastiness will continue.
-- Kevin Featherly
