Newsweek Says Bush Blew It

Let me join the avalanche of bloggers jumping in to talk about the new Newsweek story, "How Bush Blew It." Newsweek has had a mixed record in reporting about Katrina and its aftermath, but this article appears to be a fairly thorough examination of the larger picture. It doesn't gang up and take one side over another but presents shortcomings on the local, state, and federal levels. But you can't argue that the title isn't an eyecatcher, and that's what's going to get most discussion.

Just a couple of days after Judith Bumiller reported that, despite having been briefed Thursday morning by Michael Chertoff, the President learned of the dire conditions in the convention center later that afternoon from an aide with a news report, the White House still needed to wait for more TV reports for the gravity of the crisis to sink in.

The reality, say several aides who did not wish to be quoted because it might displease the president, did not really sink in until Thursday night. Some White House staffers were watching the evening news and thought the president needed to see the horrific reports coming out of New Orleans. Counselor Bartlett made up a DVD of the newscasts so Bush could see them in their entirety as he flew down to the Gulf Coast the next morning on Air Force One.

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When Hurricane Katrina struck, it appears there was no one to tell President Bush the plain truth: that the state and local governments had been overwhelmed, that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was not up to the job and that the military, the only institution with the resources to cope, couldn't act without a declaration from the president overriding all other authority.

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The failure of the government's response to Hurricane Katrina worked like a power blackout. Problems cascaded and compounded; each mistake made the next mistake worse.

The article goes on to spell out a series of miscommunications, missteps, and general foul-ups that just made an already horrible situation worse. No one on the federal level appears to have taken the devastation seriously until they absolutely had to. (Does Bush need to appoint a Secretary of CNN to monitor news reports and make sure the administration gets its necessary heads-ups as soon as possible?) That same statement is probably true of state and local officials, but being right in the middle of the action, the point when they absolutely had to take it seriously came far more quickly.