Seeking a cure for the hurricane hangover

Sep 16th 2005
From The Economist Global Agenda

In a contrite address to the nation, President George Bush has promised to spend “unprecedented” amounts of federal money on housing, education and job creation for victims of Hurricane Katrina. With the president’s poll ratings lower than ever and his political capital depleted, his second-term priorities are in peril

GEORGE BUSH gave up the booze the morning after his 40th birthday party. But he could be forgiven a few morning headaches lately. Hurricane Katrina not only pounded America’s Gulf coast and disastrously flooded New Orleans. It has put his administration on the defensive, criticised for being too slow and haphazard in responding to the devastation of one of America’s best-loved cities. The president returned to New Orleans on Thursday September 15th, giving a speech that he hoped would be a tonic to his hurricane hangover.

The televised address mixed contrition with optimism and included a long list of efforts that have already begun and proposals for long-term recovery. Perhaps most notably, much of what Mr Bush said implied a bigger federal government. He declared that the federal ability to take charge of the situation on the ground in a disaster should be expanded. Moreover, he proposes to spend a pile of money on reconstruction, and to give tax breaks for job creation, home ownership and other worthy goals. He did say that locals would have as much say as possible in the rebuilding of the Gulf coast. But over $60 billion has already been allocated from the federal treasury, and tax breaks and the like will cost more still. “I as president am responsible for the problem and the solution,” he said.

The speech follows a week in which the president began to show that he had got America’s frustrated and angry message. Michael Brown, the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, resigned last week, perhaps pushed by his bosses, after a storm of criticism about the old-boy connections that got him the job and the lack of experience he brought to it. And Mr Bush’s contrite tone on Thursday echoed an acceptance or responsibility earlier in the week (though both times he suggested that the state and local governments share the blame for poor preparation).

A number of polls have shown Mr Bush’s level of support at the lowest of his presidency; on Thursday, the New York Times put those who think he is doing a good job at just 41%, against 53% who don’t. And the hurricane has hit him in specific ways, with the Thursday poll and others giving him lower marks than before on his traditional strong suits, such as tough leadership and ability to handle a crisis. Perhaps surprisingly, only half of those polled by the New York Times thought he had handled the hurricane badly (though nearly three-quarters of blacks do, which is unsurprising given the flood’s heavy impact on New Orleans’s blacks). The storm nonetheless seems to have pushed down Mr Bush’s ratings across the board.

It also seems to have turned him into something resembling a big-government Democrat. In his speech he mentioned “deep, persistent poverty” with “roots in a history of racial discrimination”, and said that money will go to encourage minority-owned businesses. There will also be “worker recovery accounts” for training and education. None of these programmes will come cheap.

The domestic issues on which Mr Bush had wanted to focus in his second term have been put in peril by Katrina. Early this year he began to pour his political capital into a plan to reform Social Security (pensions) by letting workers save some of their nest-eggs in personal accounts, rather than paying as they work for current pensioners. The plan faced much resistance, but the president nonetheless continued to travel the country promoting it. Now it seems all but dead. Katrina laid bare America’s class divide, as better-off residents escaped New Orleans while poor blacks suffered in the city’s stinking Superdome. In this context, Social Security reform can be easily caricatured as a rich president’s plan to dismantle a venerable social programme and put its money in the hands of greedy fund managers. Mr Bush’s other main second-term goal on the home front, to simplify America’s bewildering tax code, seems an even more distant hope.

Mr Bush is also taking some flak over high fuel prices. Katrina has also hit Americans’ wallets by helping to send already steep oil prices steeper still, and pushing petrol prices up with them. This week the average price per gallon in America dropped back below the painfully symbolic level of $3. But the number of voters who approve of the president’s handling of oil prices is even lower than it is in other areas. The cost of fuel is also connected to the war in Iraq, of which Americans seem to be taking an ever dimmer view. Insurgents killed nearly 200 Iraqis in a series of attacks on Wednesday and Thursday in response to a joint American-Iraqi attack on a militant stronghold in Tal Afar. It is getting harder to make the case that America is winning.

So with Roll Call, a congressional newspaper (and a sister publication of The Economist), saying that America in 2006 is looking like America in 1994, Mr Bush’s Republican party should take notice. In 1994, House Republicans surprised the country by taking control of the chamber from the corrupt and complacent Democrats. However, it is unlikely that the Democrats will be able to pull off the same thing in next year’s mid-term elections. Partisans of both parties have gerrymandered districts to their liking, so few seats are likely to change hands.

And Mr Bush still has a few arrows in his quiver. He has nominated a reasonably moderate character, John Roberts, as chief justice on the Supreme Court, despite all the fevered expectations on the left that he would plump for a hardline conservative. His next choice, to replace the centrist Sandra Day O’Connor, may be trickier. He may yet feed a ferociously conservative justice to the court in order to shore up his right-wing base. Whoever he chooses, he is likely to move sooner rather than later. Though many Americans, black and white, greeted Mr Bush’s address from New Orleans warmly, if he wants to avoid becoming a lame duck in his second term he will need to claw back the conservative support that won him two elections.

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