Okay, now this is about how other Republicans are reacting to Hurricane Katrina:
Katrina may be Bush's Monica
September 05, 2005
BILL Clinton had Monica Lewinsky. For Ronald Reagan it was the Iran-Contra affair.
Richard Nixon, of course, had Watergate.
Each of them was in his second and, under the American constitution, final four-year term as president when they became mired in scandal.
Is Hurricane Katrina going to be the crisis that derails President George W. Bush's second-term presidency?
If you have an eye on the odds informed by history you would probably say yes.
Second-term presidents do not have a good track record.
There have been 15 two-term presidents before Bush and it's widely accepted none of them had second terms better than the first.
And seven of them ended terribly: assassination, scandal or illness.
The "lame duck" second-term president is thanks in part to a loss of political support.
Various fixers and spruikers start to think about who is going to be the party's next presidential candidate and begin aligning their careers accordingly.
And key allies within cabinet or Congress also start thinking about putting some distance between themselves and the president for a bit of product differentiation.
Witness comments by Bill Frist, likely 2008 presidential contender and current Republican leader of the Senate.
As a champion of the religious Right and once in lock-step with Bush on cultural issues, Frist has started shifting his stance.
A couple of months ago it was splitting with Bush on issues of stem cell research - Bush is opposed to it while Frist, a heart surgeon, has suddenly started to come around to the idea.
But at the weekend Frist really set about breaking ranks. He called for a congressional inquiry into what went wrong with the federal response to the Hurricane Katrina disaster.
He then whizzed down to New Orleans to work as a medical volunteer for the weekend.
With Frist and other Republicans implicitly or explicitly lining up to criticise the administration, Bush could soon lose momentum.
In his first term, Bush had September 11 to unite a country to his cause.
It's too early to be definitive, but not too early to speculate that in political terms, Hurricane Katrina could be the antithesis of September 11, helping to sink a presidency.
theaustralian.news.com.au |
