San Diego Union Tribune

September 16, 2005

ANALYSIS
Speech offers hope to evacuees, not to presidential image

By George E. Condon Jr.
COPLEY NEWS SERVICE

WASHINGTON – After two weeks of unrelenting focus on the sluggish government response to Hurricane Katrina, the White House fervently hoped that President Bush's unusual and dramatic address to the nation last night from New Orleans would shift the nation's attention from the failures of the recent past to the promises of a booming Gulf Coast future.

The address, powered by lights and generators brought from Washington, featured a coatless, tieless president offering fresh hope and a vision of rebirth to residents who have had little hope in the long days since Katrina destroyed their homes and ways of life.

For those evacuees, scattered across the country in the homes of strangers, shelters and unused athletic arenas, that hope is important. Even in an age of great skepticism and political polarization, it alone made the speech one of Bush's more important.

But there is scant reason to believe that White House image mavens will soon get what they want in terms of rebuilding the administration's image and the president's political standing. There were too many questions left unanswered, too few explanations of what went wrong and too little reassurance that the problems have been fixed.

The White House would argue it is premature to demand any of that. And the president used his speech to promise to get those answers, find out what went wrong and fix it.

For Bush, the speech was a start at shedding light on his thinking about how to quickly rebuild a part of the country as big as Great Britain. Particularly welcome were his promises to make sure local officials will make the important decisions and local residents – particularly the poor – will share in the economic benefits.

Also welcome was his belated recognition that poverty and racial discrimination played roles in New Orleans. "We have a duty to confront this poverty with bold action," he pledged.

But he stopped far short of truly reaching out to the millions of black people bitter over the slowness of the response.

"As a group, they are tremendously alienated by this," said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics. "He needs to say much more than was in this speech."

As he faced the lone camera used for the address, the president had two important tasks.

One was to explain to a country how billions of dollars of relief will be disbursed and what it will get for the money. The reconstruction will be the largest domestic spending project in U.S. history.

It will define Bush's second term just as terrorism and the war in Iraq defined his first four years.

While general, the speech provides a good way to gauge progress in coming months. "He'll be measured by this speech over the next few months and even years," Sabato said. "This speech will be excerpted over and over again. And if he falls short of the standards he set, then he will pay a further political price."

That ties into the speech's second important task, which was more personal and political for the president. It was to persuade Americans to view him as a strong leader as they had after Sept. 11, 2001.

That image had carried him through all his political battles after the terrorist attacks. But, polls show that the image was shaken badly by the faltering federal response to Katrina and the flooding of New Orleans.

"The public impression that was left put a dent in his leadership quotient. No doubt about that," said veteran Republican strategist Charles Black. "He can get back the respect and confidence in his leadership that he lost."

Black, the veteran strategist, and other Republicans see last night's address as a critical chance "to show that he is leading on the cleanup and rebuilding after the disaster, that he's taking a hands-on approach."

But, Black said, "It's just one part of a long, sustained effort he'll be putting in for months to make sure the federal government is on top of this."

Marshall Wittmann, a former Republican strategist now working for the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, said the speech was not what most Americans were looking for.

"At this point," he said, "they don't want rhetoric. They want concrete results. This is a situation where all the flowery rhetoric in the world could not erase the memory of the two disastrous weeks of the aftermath of Katrina."

Presidential scholar Thomas E. Mann said Bush faces too many challenges for a single speech to bail him out. "He's a biker now, and he's pedaling against a very strong head wind."

"We're going to have a flurry of activity, lots of money spent; it will be a huge effort," he said. "But whether it can lead to political rehabilitation for the president is doubtful, partly because his low standing is being driven by high gas prices and the carnage in Iraq and not just Katrina."

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