Quote:Behind the scenes, a power struggle emerged, as federal officials tried to wrest authority from Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (D). Shortly before midnight Friday, the Bush administration sent her a proposed legal memorandum asking her to request a federal takeover of the evacuation of New Orleans, a source within the state's emergency operations center said Saturday.

The administration sought unified control over all local police and state National Guard units reporting to the governor. Louisiana officials rejected the request after talks throughout the night, concerned that such a move would be comparable to a federal declaration of martial law. Some officials in the state suspected a political motive behind the request. "Quite frankly, if they'd been able to pull off taking it away from the locals, they then could have blamed everything on the locals," said the source, who does not have the authority to speak publicly.

A senior administration official said that Bush has clear legal authority to federalize National Guard units to quell civil disturbances under the Insurrection Act and will continue to try to unify the chains of command that are split among the president, the Louisiana governor and the New Orleans mayor.

Louisiana did not reach out to a multi-state mutual aid compact for assistance until Wednesday, three state and federal officials said. As of Saturday, Blanco still had not declared a state of emergency, the senior Bush official said.

Quote:Newsview: Rhetoric Not Matching in Relief


Sep 2, 6:43 PM (ET)

By RON FOURNIER

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Iraqi insurgency is in its last throes. The economy is booming. Anybody who leaks a CIA agent's identity will be fired. Add another piece of White House rhetoric that doesn't match the public's view of reality: Help is on the way, Gulf Coast.

As New Orleans descended into anarchy, top Bush administration officials congratulated each other for jobs well done and spoke of water, food and troops pouring into the ravaged city. Television pictures told a different story.

"What it reminded me of the other day is 'Baghdad Bob' saying there are no Americans at the airport," said Rich Galen, a Republican consultant in Washington. He was referring to Saddam Hussein's reality-challenged minister of information who denied the existence of U.S. troops in the Iraqi capital.

To some critics, President Bush seemed to deny the existence of problems with hurricane relief this week. He waited until Friday to acknowledged that "the results are not acceptable," and even then the president parsed his words

Republicans worry that he looks out of touch defending the chaotic emergency response.

"It's impossible to defend something like this happening in America," said former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

"No one can be happy with the kind of response which we've seen in New Orleans," said Republican Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts.

Bush got himself in trouble by trying to put the best face on a horrible situation. The strategy is so common in Washington that operatives have a name for it, "spin," and the Bush White House has perfected the shady art.

This is what the president had to say about the relief effort earlier in the week:

_"There's a lot of food on its way, a lot of water on the way, and there's a lot of boats and choppers headed that way."

_"Thousands have been rescued. There's thousands more to be rescued. And there's a lot of people focusing their efforts on that."

_"As we speak, people are moving into New Orleans area to maintain law and order."

Technically, the president may have been right. Help was on the way, if not fast enough to handle one of the largest emergency response efforts in U.S. history. But the words were jarring to Americans who saw images of looters, abandoned corpses and angry, desperate storm victims.

It was worse when he was wrong. In one interview, Bush said, "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees." In fact, many experts predicted a major storm would bust New Orleans' flood-control barriers.

One reason the public relations effort backfired on Bush is that Americans have seen it before.

On Iraq alone, the rhetoric has repeatedly fallen far short of reality. Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction. The mission wasn't accomplished in May 2003. Most allies avoided the hard work of his "coalition of the willing." And dozens of U.S. soldiers have died since Vice President Dick Cheney declared that insurgents were in their "last throes."

Bush often touts the health of the U.S. economy, which is fair game because many indicators point in that direction. But the public doesn't share his rosy view. The global economy had most Americans worried about job and pension security even before rising gas added to their anxieties.

Bush's spokesman said anybody involved in leaking the identity of a CIA agent would be fired, but no action has been taken against officials accused of doing so.

The president himself promised to fully pay for his school reform plan and strip pork-barrel spending from a major highway bill. The school money fell short. The pork thrived.

The list goes on. But this didn't start with Bush. Former President Clinton certainly had his rhetoric vs. reality problems. Indeed, most politicians do. At some point, however, the spin can take a toll.

Bush crafted a reputation as a blunt-speaking, can-do leader from his response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Five months later, about three-fourths of Americans viewed him as honest.

But his trust rating dropped gradually to a slim majority by the 2004 election year and remained at the mid-50s through the early part of 2005. In August, an AP-Ipsos poll showed 48 percent of respondents considered Bush honest, the lowest level of his presidency.

Americans like straight-shooters, especially in an era that has seen vast failures by government and social institutions. People are witnessing another institutional failure in the Gulf Coast, and Bush reluctantly acknowledged it Friday.

"This is a storm that's going to require immediate action now," he said. Few would disagree.

Quote:This is not typically a newscast of commentary. I can recall only twice previously offering such perspectives, but something that Homeland Security Chertoff said at his news conference Saturday made this necessary.

Chertoff: "Louisiana is a city that is largely underwater."

Well, there's you're problem right there. If ever a slip of the tongue defined a government's response to a crisis. Forget the history of slashed federal budgets that might have saved the levees. Drop the imagery of the government watching Monty Python's Flying Circus while New Orleans drowned. Ignore the symbol of beaurocrats like Mr. Chertoff using only the future tense in terms of relief that they could have supplied last Monday and Tuesday.

We no longer need the PResident sounding like he's on some sort of fiv day tape delay to summarize this debacle. We now have Mr. Chertoff's indelible announcement that Louisiana is a city.

Politician after politician, Republican and Democrat alike has paraded before us unwilling or unable to shut of the 'I, me' switch in their heads, condescendingly telling us how moved they wereor or how devastated they were, congentially incapable of telling the difference between te destruction of a ctiy and the opening of a new supermarket somewhere.

And as that sorry recital of self-absorption drags on, I have resisted editorial comment. The effort needd to be on the effort to save the stranded. Even televisions meager were correctly devoted to telling the stories of the twin disasters, natural and government made.

But now, at last, it has stopped getting exponetially worse in Missipssippi and Alabama and New Orleans and Louisiana, the state, not the city. And having given our leaders the week or so they needed to get their acts together, that period of editorial silence I mentioned should come to an end.

No one is suggesting that mayors or governors in the afflicted areas nor the federal government should be able to stop hurricans. Lord knows that no one is suggesting that we should ever prioritize levee improvement for a below sea level city ahead of 450 million dollar worth of trophy bridges for the politicans in Alaska. But nationally, these are leaders who won re-election lat year largely by protraying their opponents as incapable of keeping this country safe. These are leaders who regularly pressured the news media in this country to report the re-opening of a school or a powerstation in Iraqand which regularly defies it's citizens not to stand up and cheer when something like that is accomplished.

Yet they couldn't even keep one school or power-station from being devastated by infrastruture collapse in New Orleans, even though the government had heard all the chatter from the scientists and city pallners and hurrican centers and some group who's purpose the government couldn't quite discern; a group called the ah, U.S. Army Corp of Engineers.

Most chillingly of all, this is the law and order and terror government. It promised protection, or at least amelioration against all threats, conventional, radiological or biological. It has just proved that it cannot save it's citizens from a biological weapon called 'standing water.'

Mr. Bush has now twice insited that "we are not satisfied" with the response to the manifold tragedies along the Gulf Coast. I wonder which we he thinks he's speaking for on this point. Perhaps it's the Administration, although we still don't know where some of them are. Anybody seen the Vice President lately? The man whose message at this time last year was 'I'll protect you, the other guy might let you die.' I don't know which we Mr. Bush meant.

For many of this countries citizens, the mantra has been, as we were taught in social studies, it should always be: whether or not I voted for this President, he is still my President. I suspect that anybody who had to give him that benefit of the doubt stopped doing so last week. I suspect also a lot of his supporters, looking ahead to '08, are wondering how they can distance themselves from the two words which will define his government, our government: New Orleans.

For him it is a shame, in all senses of the word. A few changes of pronouns in there and he might not have looked so much like a 21st century Marie Antoinette. All that was needed was a quick, 'I'm not satisfied with my government's response,' instead of hiding behind phrases like no one could have forseen. Had he only remembered Churchill's quote from the 1930's: "The responsibility of government for the public safety," Churchill said, "is absolute and requires no mandate. It is in fact the prime object for which governments come into existence." In forgetting that the current Administration did not merely damage itself, it damaged our confidence in our ability to rely on whoever is in the White House.

As we emphasized to you all last week, the realities of the region are such that New Orleans is going to be largely uninhabitable for a lot longer than anybody is yet able to recognize. Lord knows when the last body will be found or the last artifact of the levee break dug up. Could be next March, could be the year 2100. By then, in the muck and toxic mire of New Orleans they may even find our governments credibility. Somewhere in the 'city' of Louisiana.

Quote:"They've got people here who are search-and-rescue certified, paramedics, haz-mat certified," said a Texas firefighter. "We're sitting in here having a sexual-harassment class while there are still [victims] in Louisiana who haven't been contacted yet."