After Katrina ...

oldstyleliberal is surely not the only one wondering if Hurricane Katrina has turned the tide of American politics. Can it have taken us past a tipping point such that the erstwhile hegemony of the right, as represented by President Bush, turns into a resurgence of the left?

Consider columnist Trudy Rubin's op-ed piece in today's papers, "Katrina debacle flattens America's image abroad". This analyst of America's foreign policy, particularly that vis-à-vis the Middle east, has never been a Bush booster ... but that's not what's important now. What's important is that, like so many other of her fellow anti-conservative pundits today, she clearly smells presidential blood.

Rubin tells of a plenitude of voices abroad, both friendly and antagonistic to the U.S., who fear America has lost its mojo. Why? Because we couldn't step in quickly enough and strongly enough in our own homeland to keep Katrina's body blows from morphing into chaos. Then she adverts to all the U.S. troops that couldn't be sent to New Orleans because they were trying (with questionable success) to quell chaos in Baghdad. Finally, she wraps her indictment up in a pretty bow of indignation at the Bush tax cuts which have so "shrunk his [Bush's] monetary options" that a choice between alternative military deployments became inevitable.

It's a tri-cornered charge of gross incompetence, stone-faced insensitivity, and ideological stubbornness ... and, for once, it all sticks.

Before Katrina came along to complete the triangle, the anti-Bush types could rail against the Iraq war and its faux justifications. Or they could lambaste Bush for his tax cuts and other compassionless domestic policies. But until now, they couldn't tie the two modes of complaint together into one overarching indictment that made ineluctable good sense.

That was then, this is now.


The images of devastation on our TV screens for the last couple of weeks guarantee that America has experienced one of those "I'll never forget" moments ... the JFK assassination, the Challenger disaster, and 9/11 being others. This time, unlike most of the others, we can blame Washington — not for the natural disaster, clearly, but for the lack of preparation and the tardy response that surely caused hundreds of unnecessary deaths.

This time, unlike most of the others, the situation just happened to be one in which average white folks sitting aghast in their living rooms could identify with poor, black, inner-city residents waiting vainly for rescue on rooftops above a stinking, toxic flood.

This time, unlike most of the others, there was linkage. Try as conspiracy theorists might, they could prove no linkage of the JFK assassination to anything beyond the paranoid fantasies of one Lee Harvey Oswald. Challenger was the fault of bureaucratic stupidity in NASA and its contractors, but the blame ended there. This time, we can paint New Orleans after Katrina into a portrait of American haplessness which includes Iraq, al-Qaeda, record gasoline prices, and the massive budget deficit caused by the huge Bush tax cuts.

This is one woeful president that we have. Or at least, so it inevitably seems, after Katrina. (More to come on this topic in ... Reclaiming Public Responsibility.)