There must be an awful lot of "media bias" (or just
maybe media bias is in the eye of the beholder) to get an
admittedly Republican newspaper (The Chicago Tribune) to say:
WASHINGTON -- President Bush, who often refers to "that crowd in Washington" with near derision, found himself performing an act of political contortion Thursday night.
Government was no longer the problem. Government was now the solution. Federal spending was not to be curtailed. Record federal spending would have his full backing. Deferring to the judgment of governors and states simply would not do. The job of rebuilding after Hurricane Katrina was one that only the federal government could properly oversee.
Throughout his nationally broadcast address from a shattered New Orleans, it was as though the disaster of Hurricane Katrina had transformed the president from the logical heir to Ronald Reagan to some curious amalgam of Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson.
He offered up a relief program that seemed to draw reconstruction inspiration from the Marshall Plan, the Works Progress Administration, the Tennessee Valley Authority and social policy animated by the Great Society.
It was in many ways a masterly speech, filled with empathy, poetry and a clearly articulated plan to address the costliest natural disaster in the nation's history. But the words were late in coming and delivered by a president who delivers calls for cuts in government as applause lines.
"History is sometimes the moment a bell rings," said Douglas Brinkley, a historian and professor at the University of New Orleans. "He had a historic opportunity to seize this and become a great leader and he bobbled it not just once but four or five times. This is a speech that needed to have been delivered within days of the hurricane."
Tardy perhaps, and freighted with potential problems even within his own Republican Party, the president's recovery plan called for a new alphabet soup of government initiatives (Gulf Opportunity Zones, Worker Recovery Accounts, an Urban Homesteading Act) that sounded like pages taken from the New Deal. Stung by charges that the government might have been slow to respond because of racism, Bush used language uncharacteristic both for him and his party about the legacy of past racial discrimination. He went on to emphasize the need for, in effect, minority set-aside programs to be a major part of the rebuilding.
His tone was atonement.
Now, Bush said, government largess is needed far more than government restraint.
chicagotribune.com |
