White House Shifts Blame

"White House Shifts Blame to State and Local Officials" - that was the page 1 headline in Sunday's Washington Post, and it was a classic example of headline that is not supported by the body of the article. I kept waiting to read the line where Bush is quoted as saying - "Don't look at me, the local guys screwed up." I didn't find it.

"Bush administration officials blamed state and local authorities for what leaders at all levels have called a failure of the country's emergency management."

"Behind the scenes, a power struggle emerged, as federal officials tried to wrest authority from Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco (D). Shortly before midnight Friday, the Bush administration sent her a proposed legal memorandum asking her to request a federal takeover of the evacuation of New Orleans, a source within the state's emergency operations center said Saturday. The administration sought unified control over all local police and state National Guard units reporting to the governor. Louisiana officials rejected the request after talks throughout the night, concerned that such a move would be comparable to a federal declaration of martial law. Some officials in the state suspected a political motive behind the request. "Quite frankly, if they'd been able to pull of taking it away from the locals, they then could have blamed everything on the locals," said the source, who does not have the authority to speak publicly."

So what do we learn from this paragraph? That the locals were afraid that if they did not maintain responsibility for certain aspects of the evacuation that are within its jurisdictional control, and the administration took over all aspects, everything could be blamed on the locals. My guess is that the source of that last quote does not have authority to speak publicly for very good reason. Now clearly by this point - Friday - there have been many screw-ups, the most egregious of which occurred at the state and local level (i.e. a thousand school buses sitting in a parking lot, no call for evacuation until Sunday even after the White House was pushing for it on Saturday, disallowing the Red Cross from supplying food and water to the Superdome due to concerns about incentivizing too many people to go there, etc.). So so far we have the speculation on the part of some Louisiana politician or political underling (and none of them have ever been on the take) that the White House was trying to get some control over the situation, not so that things might run more smoothly, but instead only because they want to blame the locals for prior screw ups.

"Louisiana did not reach out to a multi-state mutual aid compact for assistance until Wednesday, three state and federal officials said. As of Saturday, Blanco still had not declared a state of emergency, the senior Bush official said."

Shouldn't this be the headline? Louisiana politicians have been sitting on their asses. Instead we get a headline, never fully supported, that Bush has been blaming them with the implicit inference, again not supported by anything within the article, that the blame truly lies with Bush.

"Blanco made two moves Saturday that protected her independence from the federal government: She created a philanthropic fund for the state's victims and hired James Lee Witt, FEMA director in the Clinton administration, to advise her on the relief effort."

Shouldn't the intrepid team of reporters be asking why it is such a priority on Saturday to be spending time making moves to "protect" her independence from the federal government? Does James Lee Witt command the resources that the feds command to get the job done? By Saturday, probably 50 percent of the people in this country had given money to philanthropic organizations for the relief effort; is it necessary for the governor to be spending her time setting up a redundant philanthropic fund while people are still trapped in the city?

"Bush, who has been criticized, even by supporters, for the delayed response to the disaster, used his weekly radio address to put responsibility for the failure on lower levels of government. The magnitude of the crisis "has created tremendous problems that have strained state and local capabilities," he said. "The result is that many of our citizens simply are not getting the help they need, especially in New Orleans. And that is unacceptable."

Now I ask you, how can the Bush quote be so determinitively interpreted as putting responsibility for the failure on lower levels of government? To say that the lower levels do not have the capacity to achieve the objective, it would seem to me, is an admission that federal help is absolutely required; and by essentially admitting that, it becomes an issue whether such help was offered in time. He did not say that the locals have the capabilities but mismanaged them. So a more reasonable interpretation would be that he has partially exonerated the locals - even if you had made all the right calls (which they didn't by a long shot), there'd still be a crisis and the feds would still be needed.

If the Feds screwed up, and I believe they did, the screw-up came in not recognizing soon enough that the governor and the mayor of New Orleans were incompetent hacks. The President was probably overly sensitive in letting these guys exercise the authority over the situation that the law permits them; not an unreasonable position for a former governor who believes in federalism, nor for a guy who had Rudy on the ground in the last major national crisis. If they had been competent, it seems to me that the issue of when Bush moved (probably a day late) would not have mattered, because Bush would have been asked by them to move much sooner, and many more people would have been evacuated if the city had followed its own evacuation plans.