September 18, 2005
Message: I Care About the Black Folks
By FRANK RICH
ONCE Toto parts the curtain, the Wizard of Oz can never be the wizard
again. He is forever Professor Marvel, blowhard and snake-oil
salesman. Hurricane Katrina, which is likely to endure in the
American psyche as long as L. Frank Baum's mythic tornado, has
similarly unmasked George W. Bush.
The worst storm in our history proved perfect for exposing this
president because in one big blast it illuminated all his failings:
the rampant cronyism, the empty sloganeering of "compassionate
conservatism," the lack of concern for the "underprivileged" his
mother condescended to at the Astrodome, the reckless lack of
planning for all government operations except tax cuts, the use of
spin and photo-ops to camouflage failure and to substitute for action.
In the chaos unleashed by Katrina, these plot strands coalesced into
a single tragic epic played out in real time on television. The
narrative is just too powerful to be undone now by the
administration's desperate recycling of its greatest hits: a return
Sunshine Boys tour by the surrogate empathizers Clinton and Bush I,
another round of prayers at the Washington National Cathedral,
another ludicrously overhyped prime-time address flecked with
speechwriters' "poetry" and framed by a picturesque backdrop. Reruns
never eclipse a riveting new show.
Nor can the president's acceptance of "responsibility" for the
disaster dislodge what came before. Mr. Bush didn't cough up his
modified-limited mea culpa until he'd seen his whole administration
flash before his eyes. His admission that some of the buck may stop
with him (about a dime's worth, in Truman dollars) came two weeks
after the levees burst and five years after he promised to usher in a
new post-Clinton "culture of responsibility." It came only after the
plan to heap all the blame on the indeed blameworthy local Democrats
failed to lift Mr. Bush's own record-low poll numbers. It came only
after America's highest-rated TV news anchor, Brian Williams, started
talking about Katrina the way Walter Cronkite once did about Vietnam.
Taking responsibility, as opposed to paying lip service to doing so,
is not in this administration's gene pool. It was particularly
shameful that Laura Bush was sent among the storm's dispossessed to
try to scapegoat the news media for her husband's ineptitude. When
she complained of seeing "a lot of the same footage over and over
that isn't necessarily representative of what really happened," the
first lady sounded just like Donald Rumsfeld shirking responsibility
for the looting of Baghdad. The defense secretary, too, griped about
seeing the same picture "over and over" on television (a looter with
a vase) to hide the reality that the Pentagon had no plan to secure
Iraq, a catastrophic failure being paid for in Iraqi and American
blood to this day.
This White House doesn't hate all pictures, of course. It loves those
by Karl Rove's Imagineers, from the spectacularly lighted Statue of
Liberty backdrop of Mr. Bush's first 9/11 anniversary speech to his
"Top Gun" stunt to Thursday's laughably stagy stride across the lawn
to his lectern in Jackson Square. (Message: I am a leader, not that
vacationing slacker who first surveyed the hurricane damage from my
presidential jet.)
The most odious image-mongering, however, has been Mr. Bush's
repeated deployment of African-Americans as dress extras to advertise
his "compassion." In 2000, the Republican convention filled the stage
with break dancers and gospel singers, trying to dispel the memory of
Mr. Bush's craven appearance at Bob Jones University when it forbade
interracial dating. (The few blacks in the convention hall itself
were positioned near celebrities so they'd show up in TV shots.) In
2004, the Bush-Cheney campaign Web site had a page titled
"Compassion" devoted mainly to photos of the president with black
people, Colin Powell included.
Some of these poses are re-enacted in the "Hurricane Relief" photo
gallery currently on display on the White House Web site. But this
time the old magic isn't working. The "compassion" photos are
outweighed by the cinéma vérité of poor people screaming for their
lives. The government effort to keep body recovery efforts in New
Orleans as invisible as the coffins from Iraq was abandoned when
challenged in court by CNN.
But even now the administration's priority of image over substance is
embedded like a cancer in the Katrina relief process. Brazenly
enough, Mr. Rove has been officially put in charge of the
reconstruction effort. The two top deputies at FEMA remaining after
Michael Brown's departure, one of them a former local TV newsman, are
not disaster relief specialists but experts in P.R., which they'd
practiced as advance men for various Bush campaigns. Thus The Salt
Lake Tribune discovered a week after the hurricane that some 1,000
firefighters from Utah and elsewhere were sent not to the Gulf Coast
but to Atlanta, to be trained as "community relations officers for
FEMA" rather than used as emergency workers to rescue the dying in
New Orleans. When 50 of them were finally dispatched to Louisiana,
the paper reported, their first assignment was "to stand beside
President Bush" as he toured devastated areas.
The cashiering of "Brownie," whom Mr. Bush now purports to know as
little as he did "Kenny Boy," changes nothing. The Knight Ridder
newspapers found last week that it was the homeland security
secretary, Michael Chertoff, not Mr. Brown, who had the greater
authority to order federal agencies into service without any request
from state or local officials. Mr. Chertoff waited a crucial,
unexplained 36 hours before declaring Katrina an "incident of
national significance," the trigger needed for federal action. Like
Mr. Brown, he was oblivious to the humanitarian disaster unfolding in
the convention center, confessing his ignorance of conditions there
to NPR on the same day that the FEMA chief famously did so to Ted
Koppel. Yet Mr. Bush's "culture of responsibility" does not hold Mr.
Chertoff accountable. Quite the contrary: on Thursday the president
charged Homeland Security with reviewing "emergency plans in every
major city in America." Mr. Chertoff will surely do a heck of a job.
WHEN there's money on the line, cronies always come first in this
White House, no matter how great the human suffering. After Katrina,
the FEMA Web site directing charitable contributions prominently
listed Operation Blessing, a Pat Robertson kitty that, according to
I.R.S. documents obtained by ABC News, has given more than half of
its yearly cash donations to Mr. Robertson's Christian Broadcasting
Network. If FEMA is that cavalier about charitable donations, imagine
what it's doing with the $62 billion (so far) of taxpayers' money
sent its way for Katrina relief. Actually, you don't have to imagine:
we already know some of it was immediately siphoned into no-bid
contracts with a major Republican donor, the Fluor Corporation, as
well as with a client of the consultant Joe Allbaugh, the Bush 2000
campaign manager who ran FEMA for this White House until Brownie, Mr.
Allbaugh's college roommate, was installed in his place.
It was back in 2000 that Mr. Bush, in a debate with Al Gore, bragged
about his gubernatorial prowess "on the front line of catastrophic
situations," specifically citing a Texas flood, and paid the Clinton
administration a rare compliment for putting a professional as
effective as James Lee Witt in charge of FEMA. Exactly why Mr. Bush
would staff that same agency months later with political hacks is one
of many questions that must be answered by the independent
investigation he and the Congressional majority are trying every
which way to avoid. With or without a 9/11-style commission, the
answers will come out. There are too many Americans who are angry and
too many reporters who are on the case. (NBC and CNN are both opening
full-time bureaus in New Orleans.) You know the world has changed
when the widely despised news media have a far higher approval rating
(77 percent) than the president (46 percent), as measured last week
in a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll.
Like his father before him, Mr. Bush has squandered the huge store of
political capital he won in a war. His Thursday-night invocation of
"armies of compassion" will prove as worthless as the "thousand
points of light" that the first President Bush bestowed upon the poor
from on high in New Orleans (at the Superdome, during the 1988 G.O.P.
convention). It will be up to other Republicans in Washington to cut
through the empty words and image-mongering to demand effective
action from Mr. Bush on the Gulf Coast and in Iraq, if only because
their own political lives are at stake. It's up to Democrats, though
they show scant signs of realizing it, to step into the vacuum and
propose an alternative to a fiscally disastrous conservatism that
prizes pork over compassion. If the era of Great Society big
government is over, the era of big government for special interests
is proving a fiasco. Especially when it's presided over by a self-
styled C.E.O. with a consistent three-decade record of running
private and public enterprises alike into a ditch.
What comes next? Having turned the page on Mr. Bush, the country
hungers for a vision that is something other than either liberal
boilerplate or Rovian stagecraft. At this point, merely plain old
competence, integrity and heart might do.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
