Katrina belts Bush’s image

In American politics, race issues typically simmer just below the surface. The flooding of the city of New Orleans, whose populace is both black and the ninth poorest of all large US cities, has brought all these issues to the fore. While many factors have come together to create the political storm, three are most pertinent. First, New Orleans had applied two years ago to the federal government to get the US Army to improve the levees that kept the sea out of the city.

The federal authorities didn’t accede, and it has been suggested that this was because the Army’s engineering corps were simply not available — instead, they were busy occupying Iraq.

The second factor was Mr Bush’s response. Instead of cutting his vacation short and going on the ground in New Orleans, he preferred to fly overhead in Airforce One to view the disaster — a typical public relations response, also used here in Trinidad and Tobago, which always arouses the ire of ordinary citizens on the flooded ground.

The third factor was the tardy response of relief agencies and the National Guard. Basic supplies were long in coming, resulting in more deaths than there need have been. The breakdown in security led to widespread looting, killings, and even rapes.

This also has been blamed on President Bush, who critics feel could have been more proactive. In this regard, disaster and politics collide — many people feel that, if New Orleans were not mainly a black city, the responses by the federal government and Mr Bush would have been much more effective.

Whether this is actually so or not is irrelevant. It is a rising tide of political perception which Mr Bush’s handlers and speech-writers have been unable to stem. Nor is it coincidental that Mr Bush’s most egregious error, the occupation of Iraq, has been linked to the New Orleans disaster — the argument being that, were the US Army and the National Guard’s forces not depleted by that exercise, the magnitude of the New Orleans disaster would not have been so great.

Katrina could not have come at a worse time for Mr Bush. His political ratings have been declining steadily within the past few months, and they will surely plummet over the coming weeks. But what this will mean to his presidency is a different question. He does not have to face another election, nor does the British tradition of resignation apply to US politics in the same manner. But what US presidents in their second and final term are always concerned about is the legacy they leave behind, both for history and, more immediately, for their political party’s next candidate to get off to a running start.

The disaster in New Orleans may mean that the Republicans will have a harder fight on their hands when President Bush’s term comes to an end. And that is important for other countries, since a Republican victory is more likely to mean the continuation of an American foreign policy that may not be in the world’s best interests.