Now I come down on it a little differently. Katrina wasn't "preemptive disaster management". We were hit by an act of God, and everything from the local networks to the federal backup and support system failed to work as expected, AND there was a failure of the levees which took the complacency and incompetence of many years- and many administrations. So for Katrina you can lay some blame at Bush's door, but there was plenty to go around. For Iraq it's pretty much Bush (and Cheney too, of course). And Iraq was preventable, while Katrina was not.
I don't know how all the folks in the polls come down on it, but I try to imagine how my opinion of Clinton would have suffered had he done what Bush is doing- and I would have been very annoyed by Iraq (as I was annoyed by the Balkan escapade) and the spending and the deficit, but not as annoyed by a natural disaster snafu, and the Dubai ports thing is also something that I don't think we can politicize. There are all kinds of people, on both sides of the aisle, lining up together on each side of that one, so I wouldn't count it- though I grant you many other people blame him for it. The only really stupid judgment on that one, for Bush, was in his handling of it- PRwise. |
