pantom was wrong; <user site="livejournal.com" user="jackwalker

[mmcirvin]

In the short term, Katrina isn't going to hurt Bush at all. Approval of his handling of the situation runs 46%-47%, strongly divided by party. Given that this is better than his job ratings just prior to the hurricane, and the way crises focus public attention, I expect his job-approval numbers to go up a little. Expensive gasoline, though, that might cause him some trouble.

Comments

[glitter-ninja.livejournal.com]

I suspect it will drop after the Labor Day weekend. When Bush did the photo ops on Thursday, it was just in time for all those who really wanted to believe that everything was okey-dokey so they could go enjoy a three-day weekend. I have hope that many will return to work on Tuesday and within a few days of water-cooler talk and news reports will change their minds.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

The jaw-dropping thing to me is that he's lost the media. Maybe it's just the inherent sensationalism of it all, but those helmet-haired robots all seem to really hate him at the moment.

[paracelsvs.livejournal.com]

One other thing that springs to mind is the fact that no casualty figures of any kind have been announced yet. Once that happens, we'll see how complacent people feel about the situation.

I wonder if that has anything to do with the slow response. No numbers of dead bodies means things aren't all that bad, right?

[pantom.livejournal.com]

Expensive gas would cost him more than his handling of this disaster, you're right about that.
Conservatives and libertarians figure that the locals are more to blame for the tardiness of the response than the Feds. I would say they're correct before, say, Tuesday night, but by Wednesday morning, and certainly by the Bush press conference on Wednesday, the reasonable expectation was that the Feds would move in in force to drop-kick the gathering chaos before it got totally out of hand, especially since the Coast Guard got in almost immediately to start rescuing people once the flooding really got underway. Real help from the rest of the Feds didn't arrive in force until Thursday evening, 36 hours after his press conference, which itself was a day after the flooding started.
But that's too fine an analysis for politics. In my NYC example, Lindsay was clearly the man at the top; for the President, it's not so clear since it's pretty obvious the governor fell flat on her face too, as did the mayor. His choice of two obvious shitheads - Brown and Chertoff - for FEMA is certainly going to be questioned, but that really doesn't put blame on him directly.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I think your analysis of proper blame is right on, as is the problem that this is "too fine an analysis for politics". The big question is how a two- or three-day delay in response can be pinned on the people responsible, when that response can (as it should) now be dialed as high as humanly possible.

Personally I think the problem in the federal government is not so much a lack of caring, in some abstract sense, as it is a general inattentiveness to reality. It's frightening, but I'm starting to think that maybe Bush, Chertoff and Brown honestly did not know until Tuesday that New Orleans could become completely flooded by Katrina, even though many scientists knew it, popular science magazines knew it, NOAA knew it, FEMA used to know it and I personally knew it. We all thought maybe it wasn't going to happen on Monday (which is Bush's preferred out), but that was after considering it likely on Sunday.

The alternative, sympathetic scenario is that they did start doing all they possibly could on Saturday and Sunday, and that these efforts simply could not possibly ramp up to maximum effectiveness until when they did. But this is inconsistent with the public statements of everyone involved, which keep stressing the unpredictable and unimaginable nature of the floodwall breaks, as well as the known fact that Bush was sticking to his war campaign schedule.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...But, on the other hand, there's the "Hurricane Pam" exercise from 2004, which suggests that FEMA was still aware of this kind of scenario. How does this square with all those "nobody could have predicted this" remarks? It doesn't add up. Maybe it was just panic and denial.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Michael Brown: (http://www.journalstar.com/articles/2005/09/04/top_story/extras/doc431a6b2507392351709831.txt)

“I was here on Saturday and Sunday, it was my belief, I’m trying to think of a better word than typical — that minimizes, any hurricane is bad — but we had the standard hurricane coming in here, that we could move in immediately on Monday and start doing our kind of response-recovery effort,” he said. “Then the levees broke, and the levees went, you’ve seen it by the television coverage. That hampered our ability, made it even more complex.”

It just doesn't add up. How could he have had this belief? It goes beyond the outrageous into the baffling.

new poll results

[(Anonymous)]

SurveyUSA and at least one other poll (Rasmussen, I think), with larger samples, show much poorer numbers for Bush.

http://www.surveyusa.com/client/PollTrack.aspx?g=2675ae86-5320-4923-bd03-adb3dfe54f6e&x=0,0