ROGER SIMON COLUMN
SEPTEMBER 5, 2005
WASHINGTON - - First fix the problem and then fix the blame. Or so the old saying goes.
But the Bush administration's initial response to Hurricane Katrina was such a debacle that the blame-fixing has started early.
At the top of the blame list is, of course, President Bush. His laggardly, confused and inadequate response will have political repercussions that will outlast his presidency.
Gone, at least for awhile, will be the presidential model that both he and Ronald Reagan symbolized: The likeable, somewhat disengaged, CEO-style president who (allegedly) surrounds himself with good people and then lets them work pretty much without direction.
In the past, this worked. If you look at recent presidential elections you can make a case that voters always picked the most likeable candidate, not necessarily the brightest one:
George Bush was more likeable than John Kerry or policy wonk Al Gore (though Gore did win the popular vote). George H.W. Bush was more likeable than wonky Michael Dukakis, but not more likeable than Bill Clinton. And Ronald Reagan was more likeable than both Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale.
President Bush's political team has always depended on his likeability. When I went down to Austin in 2000 to interview his top political aides, one told me that the whole purpose of the campaign was to show that Bush could clear the minimal "bar of competency" and after that the voters would be won over by his affability, his pledge to be a uniter and not a divider, etc.
After Sept. 11, the nation rallied around its president and only relatively recently, in the midst of our prolonged and continuing occupation of Iraq, has Bush's popularity begun to slip.
Now, after Katrina, the policy wonks are beginning to look a lot better than the grip-and-grinners. A policy wonk might have actually had a plan for dealing with a major flood in a city largely below sea level, and he might have executed that plan with reasonable swiftness.
A policy wonk might, for example, have immediately sent in our resident experts in amphibious operations: the U.S. Marines. A policy wonk might have done something right away instead of staying on vacation.
Just how bad is the political fall-out for Bush? Ask his fellow Republicans.
The first U.S. senator I know of who called for a congressional investigation of the Katrina shambles was John Kyl, Republican of Arizona, who chairs a subcommittee on homeland security.
"There has to be a plan in place - - along with adequate resources - - to be able to evacuate people, or at least provide relief supplies before panic sets in," Kyl said. "None of this appears to have been done in Louisiana."
Republican Mark Foley, a congressman from Florida, unsuccessfully called upon Bush to bring back from Iraq National Guard units whose states were devastated by Katrina.
Former Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich said: "If we can't respond faster than this to an event we saw coming across the gulf for days, then why do we think we're prepared to respond to a nuclear or biological attack?"
Republican Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, who is eyeing a run for president in 2008, called the federal rescue effort "an embarrassment."
Bush seemed at first to join the critics. On Friday morning, he called the Katrina response "not acceptable."
But later in the day, confronted by reporters, Bush amended his statement, saying that only the lack of National Guard troops in the area was "not acceptable."
Then, still later in the day, the president said he wasn't criticizing anybody.
However befuddled Bush seemed on Friday, his spin team settled down to a strategy it has used before with considerable success: Blame somebody else.
There are going to be congressional hearings? Fine, just make sure the hearings end up blaming the State of Louisiana, which has a Democratic governor, and the City of New Orleans, which has a Democratic mayor.
Slowed down by local incompetents, the spin will go, the president did his very best to straighten out the mess.
And, if the president needs to throw somebody from the sled to slow down the wolf pack, he can always throw out Michael Brown, the head of FEMA.
Brown, a political hack, was the college roommate of Joe Albaugh, Bush's political crony. That, apparently, was qualification enough to head the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Bush could help redeem himself with one grand gesture that would help many Americans: Bush could do to rapacious oil companies what John Kennedy did to greedy steel companies in 1962: Tell them they do not deserve enormous windfall profits and force them to lower prices.
I would not count on Bush doing this, however. Bush knows the pressure on him will lessen. After all, aid is finally flowing to the stricken area and eventually attention will turn to a new story.
Bush, a man of considerable personal charm, has been underestimated before, and he wants to leave a positive legacy.
So all he has to do in the next couple of years is rebuild the Gulf Coast, win the war in Iraq and save Social Security.
Otherwise, he might give likeability a bad name.