The Volokh Conspiracy

Todd,

Isn't the difficulty that Rudy isn't familiar with the Gulf Coast region? What made Rudy so effective post 9/11 was in part his deep knowledge and familiarity with NYC and its various leaders and needs. I'm not sure that this leadership automatically translates to another crisis in another part of the country.

I think the other thing that makes this different is the scale of the devestation. Rudy had to deal with a few dozen square blocks of destruction (Washington and the Pennsylvania countryside not being under his purview), where the fallout from Katrina is spread over hundreds or thousands of square miles.

If you can explain how Rudy would do something different from what is already being done, I'd like to hear it.

I take a back seat to no one in my admiration for Rudy, but in addition to Orin's point NYC also had an impressive disaster preparedness infrastructure and organization in place. Much of the credit for that goes to Rudy, who saw the 1993 WTC bombing for what it was, but neither he nor anybody else can obviously replicate that in New Orleans now.

As a symbolic gesture, it would show that the President appreciates the gravity of what's going on and is insisting on extraordinary efforts and measures. But symbolism would be particularly empty after days of no progress. The people there and the people and resources that can be spared elsewhere just need to go get it done.

There is a real economic contribution Rudy himself made on 9/11 -- not anything he did or decided, but the confident resolve he projected. Confident leadership matters, in a very real sense, since it will encourage average people to cooperate with authorities and with each other. Rudy, FDR, and Churchill all understood this; Ray Nagin either does not or is not capable of pulling it off.

In economic terms, this is an iterated prisoner's dilemma. People in cities face routine choices to cooperate (sharing, maintaining order, waiting in line) or to defect (looting, panicking, shooting at helicopters). In 9/11, Rudy sent a powerful message that the authorities would continue to cooperate and that the iterated game would continue, with defectors being punished in future rounds. OTH, Ray Nagin and the NO Police sent an equally powerful message that the authorities might defect and were not capable of punishing defectors in future iterations. Thus, their actions influenced the behavior of people on the ground, making the situation worse.

At this point, I think it is too late to appoint Rudy -- the moment for confident leadership to influence the cooperation/defection decision has already passed, and he lacks the community ties to influence people's evaluation of future iterations. 40,000 National Guard troops with tough rules of engagement would be more appropriate.

I wonder also if the situation has been worsened by Bush's declining popularity/credibility -- after 9/11 he did project confidence and resolve, but after all the "mission accomplished" statements people will ignore his confidence. He is the opposite of the boy who cried wolf.

Strength plays to strength much faster than strength fills the vacuum left by weakness. President Bush had the nearly perfect allies upon whom he could rely in NYC and NY State and, very importantly, the reverse was equally true. The strong local leaders made strong calls for exactly what they needed in the way of assistance. With that guidance, Pres. Bush was put in a position where he could both respond effectively and then exercise his own initiatives. In NO and LA that local stregth doesn't exist, both the governor and the mayor are absolute wimps, leaving the adminstration to invent its own responses without good information and without local leadership. The most effective way for Pres. Bush to respond in NO was to ignore the local guys. Unfortunately, for cultural and political reasons, that approach is much easier to take in a foreign country than in our own.