White House Enacts a Plan to Ease Political Damage

I don't think the political damage control is what has people upset. It's more because it APPEARS the only reason the president is reacting at all is because voter confidence is at stake. If no one asked the president to, would he even send help?

 

The local officials certainly deserve some blame but considering the size of the storm and uncertainties about where it was going to hit the hardest FEMA and other Fed agencies should've been playing a much larger role in preparing for it since it was pretty much a given it would cause damage across state lines.

 

As usual, Max, a very well written post.

Exactly. When it was known that tens of thousands couldn't get out any other way, someone should have been talking to the airlines to see about evacuating from the airport. If the NOLA runways are long enough, a few C130s would have been enough to take a whole lot of those people to safety AND could have been used to ferry supplies back into the city in the hours immediately after the storm.

No kidding. There were millions of dollars being collected in relief efforts all over the world and yet people may have died of dehydration because they didn't have potable water. Sickening.

What a wonderful idea. It would have been nice if the cruise companies had simply offered rather than having to be comandeered, but comandeering sounds like a good idea to me under those circumstances.

And before the storm, there were many, many routes out of the city, but that will be explored further in a moment.

Even before FEMA had an opportunity to drop the ball, the city and state officials dropped their own by not properly planning for the event that FEMA had determined (years ago) was the third most likely disaster that could strike this country. They needed to have buses for those without vehicles, choppers and airplanes for the sick, and a comprehensive plan for supporting the aftermath.

The only place where the blame rightly goes to the Federal level is after the hurricane hit. The one part of the article the struck home for me was this:

The "political operation" should never have had to get started, much less fall short. In the Information Age, with the incredible array of communications abilities the President has, he should not have been out of contact with his aides or the people in charge of FEMA. He was in Texas, not Australia, and should have been focused on the Americans who were suffering.

There is plenty of blame to go around in what I think of as the worst handled disaster that I can remember.