David Brooks had an outstanding column reflecting on the miserable performance of the rescue operation in New Orleans here. As he puts it, “Each institutional failure and sign of helplessness is another blow to national morale. The sour mood builds on itself, the outraged and defensive reaction to one event serving as the emotional groundwork for the next.” It reminds me of the fiasco with the botched rescue operation in Iraq in 1979 (or was it 1980?); Americans do not like looking like bumbling and incompetent fools, which is what the rescue operation made us look like. There would have been misery aplenty in and around New Orleans no matter who was in charge of the rescue operation; but Bush has to take responsibility for making that a lot worse than it otherwise would have been (for, among other things, converting FEMA into a feeding trough for the politically connected). It was by any measure a disgraceful performance, and Bush’s inability to admit that and take responsibility for it is a pathological failure of leadership. He’s lucky he can’t run for a third time, because he would be punished for it.
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