Bush criticized over storm response

NY Times
Sep. 02, 2005

A political storm gathered force on Thursday over President George W. Bush's handling of Hurricane Katrina, as Democrats accused him of a sluggish response to the catastrophic flood that submerged New Orleans, and Bush, in a rare morning television interview, fought back.

"I hope people don't play politics during this period of time," Bush told Diane Sawyer of ABC's "Good Morning America" in an interview in the Roosevelt Room of the White House. "This is a natural disaster, the likes of which our country may have never seen before."

But the politics of natural disaster were close to the surface as Democrats, seizing on a president weakened by the war in Iraq and approval ratings at an all-time low, intensified their criticism of Bush's management of the crisis. Democrats said that Bush, in not returning to Washington from his Texas vacation until Wednesday afternoon, was days late for the Monday hurricane.

They also cast his first survey of the damage from Air Force One as it headed toward Washington as an imperial act removed from the suffering of the people below.

"It was not enough for the president to bank his plane and look at the window and say, 'Oh, what a devastating sight,"' said Senator Frank Lautenberg, Democrat of New Jersey, in a statement on Thursday. "Instead of looking out the window of an airplane, he should have been on the ground giving the people devastated by this hurricane hope."

On Thursday, the White House moved swiftly on many fronts to respond. Scott McClellan, Bush's press secretary, announced that the president would spend Friday touring - in the air and on the ground - the devastated areas of the Gulf Coast, including New Orleans.

McClellan also announced that former presidents Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush would lead a private fund-raising effort for the hurricane victims, similar to what they have done for the victims of the Asian tsunami in December.

Bush had scheduled a full day of meetings at the White House on the hurricane, including a session with his economic advisers to assess the storm's financial impact and a lunch with Alan Greenspan, the Fed chairman.

But Democrats continued their criticism throughout the day. Representative Harold Ford, Democrat of Tennessee, said in a statement that Bush's speech on the hurricane from the Rose Garden on Wednesday was "uninspiring and uninstructive" and added that he was struck by Bush's "cavalier attitude toward the plight of poor people across Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama."

Ford added that "now is not the time in the face of pain, anguish, and death to be weak and uncertain."

The Democratic response to Bush was in striking contrast to the party's reaction to the president after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when there were months of bipartisan cooperation before politics resumed.