Republican presidential candidate John McCain was sharply critical yesterday of what he called the Bush administration's disgraceful handling of Hurricane Katrina and vowed, "Never again."
McCain, putting some distance between himself and President Bush, said if he had been president during the 2005 catastrophe he would have immediately visited New Orleans after the killer storm.
While he said he was not being critical of Bush for not visiting New Orleans, "I'm just saying I would've landed my airplane at the nearest Air Force base and come over personally."
Two days after the hurricane made landfall in August 2005, when immediate recovery efforts were chaotic, Bush surveyed the damage during a fly-over in Air Force One while returning from a trip to the West Coast.
Well, isn't that special? That's the entire coverage of it there, by the way. Ordinarily you'd think it would be worthwhile to mention McCain's own small role in Bush's pre-Katrina itinerary. It's not vital but it seems at least relevant. That whole weekend was for Bush to make PR stops; first at McCain's birthday party in Arizona, then to San Diego to give the usual tendentious speech equating Iraq with WW2, and then back to the tumbleweed farm after the highly-anticipated storm had hit.
The fact is that Katrina interfered with Bush's vacation plans and politicking, and the lack of preparedness and initiative in dealing with the problem (until, of course, the camera crews were kicked out and the PMCs were brought in to clean things up) couldn't be ignored.
Here's some unsolicitied advice for what is nominally the "other side" (though I am certainly not a registered Democrat, and grow increasingly disenchanted not so much with the ridiculous infighting so much as the indiscipline, incoherence, and lack of backbone): Straight Talk's campaign shows the usual lack of imagination exhibited by most garden-variety Republicans. It's Reagan this, Reagan that, oh if only we could dig Reagan up and give him a third term, blah blah blah. Christ, it's pathetic, this abject idolatry, bordering on the gayest of man-crushes.
I think McCain, who occasionally stabs at notional idealism, might be better suited to position himself as more aligned with an earlier Republican president -- Eisenhower. Think about it: the military man, nearing the end of a storied career, able to say what he thinks at the end because there is nothing to lose. (Of course it's a show; it's easy to talk tough in front of cameras and shrug your shoulders backstage. They all do it at some point, some obviously more than others.) If Obama wins the Dem nomination, I would count on McCain giving such a strategy a shot, to poach slivers of grumbling codgers who may not remember what they had for breakfast, but still know that they liked Ike, and are probably not going to get behind Obama for whatever reason.
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