Much has been made of two photographs that define George Bush’s presidency. After Sept. 11, he stood in the smoldering ruins of Ground Zero and rallied the nation’s resolve. After Katrina, he flew over the storm’s wreckage in Air Force One, days late, distracted and detached.
The contrast between those images helps explain the president’s plunging popularity. In the latest New York Times/CBS poll, only 36 percent approve of the job he’s doing, and barely 1-in-4 express great confidence in his ability to handle a crisis. Only 29 percent say the country is headed in the right direction.
A year later it’s worth asking exactly why Katrina caused such devastating political fallout. The answer goes far beyond those two photos to the very nature of the presidency itself.
Any American president really holds two jobs at once. One is chief executive, or head of government, the provider of federal goods and services. The second role, chief chaplain or head of state, is charged with embodying and elevating the nation’s spirit.
After Katrina, Bush failed to fulfill both responsibilities.
Start with the head of government role. Natural disasters are always high-stakes events for any executive – mayors and governors, as well as presidents. Ordinary citizens who seldom intersect with government suddenly need help. And that help must be delivered quickly and efficiently, under difficult circumstances, in the full glare of media attention.
The mayor who clears the streets after a blizzard is a hero, the one who doesn’t is a bum. Everybody knows the difference, the signs of incompetence are unavoidable, and the streets that Bush walked through this week in Mississippi and New Orleans (to stretch the metaphor) still haven’t been plowed.
Even Republicans agree that the president’s post-Katrina performance left him severely wounded. Rep. Patrick McHenry of North Carolina told The Washington Post that Bush’s “ability to lead” has always been his greatest asset, “and Katrina undermined it badly.”
Andrew Kohut of the Pew Research Center said: “This is an event that calcified the criticism people were having about Bush, made it more personal and had a big impact on how people look at him.” Added presidential historian Robert Dallek: “It triggered Bush’s downturn.”
Of course, the demoralizing news from Iraq contributed heavily to that downturn, but now the two issues are starting to overlap. Congress has appropriated a lot of money for storm relief, $110 billion. But the exploding costs of the Iraqi mission, and the expanding budget deficit, place limits on Washington’s generosity, and a lot of voters now believe that for every bridge rebuilt in Baghdad, one is not getting repaired in Biloxi.
