Have your hurricane in a swing state in an election year

The politics of hurricane relief

In 2004, swing-state Florida voters slammed by hurricanes received lots
of help and close personal attention from President Bush. But there's
no election this year.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Eric Boehlert

Sept. 5, 2005 | As they look back on the wreckage wrought by
Hurricane Katrina, the bewildered survivors of the life-changing storm
must be mulling over all sorts of hypothetical scenarios. What if the
levees had held? What if more people had been evacuated? What if
search-and-rescue missions had started earlier?
A less obvious what-might-have-been worth considering is, what
if Katrina had struck during an election year? Would the Bush
administration have swooped in with a more muscular, proactive response
to the catastrophe? After all, the administration's previous track
record on hurricane relief might lead one to believe its performance
this time could have been far superior. FEMA's often invisible and
incompetent reaction to the devastation in New Orleans stands in sharp
contrast to the way the relief agency and the entire Bush
administration sprang into action last summer as a series of deadly
hurricanes -- Charley, Frances, Ivan and Jeanne -- battered the crucial
swing state of Florida just weeks before Election Day.
There's no question that the scale of the New Orleans disaster
far surpasses what Florida faced. But even so, a look back at the
administration's relief efforts in 2004 indicates that a quick response
to a potentially politically damaging situation commanded a higher
priority from the top levels of government back then than did the
flooding of New Orleans in 2005.
That's not to say FEMA performed flawlessly during 2004. Some
Florida emergency officials criticized FEMA's slow response rate last
year. But overall, FEMA, and more importantly Bush, scored high ratings
for their handling of the election-year hurricanes. No expense was
spared bringing relief to storm victims who just happened to live in
the most important swing state in the country. While Democratic nominee
Sen. John Kerry, citing respect for the loss of life and devastation,
stayed out of Florida for weeks during the crucial months of August and
September, Bush surveyed hurricane-wracked communities on Aug. 15, Aug.
27, Sept. 8, Sept. 19 and Sept. 29.
Some FEMA insiders were so happy with how they handled
Florida's flurry of election-year hurricanes that they made a serious
pitch within the administration to get FEMA director Mike Brown, now a
target of sustained criticism, promoted to homeland security chief.
"Homeland Security sources said after the hurricanes," reported a May
19 Washington Post article, "that Brown and his allies promoted him as
a successor to Tom Ridge as Homeland Security secretary because of
their contention that he helped deliver Florida to President Bush by
efficiently responding to the Florida hurricanes." A FEMA spokeswoman
denied the report at the time.
Floridians had good reason to be grateful. In the summer of
2004, FEMA handed out hurricane relief checks with wild abandon, doling
out nearly $30 million to residents of Miami-Dade County to replace
TVs, computers and microwaves, even though that county suffered little
or no hurricane damage. Writing last November for GovExec.com, which
touts itself as "the independent business magazine of government,"
Charles Mahtesian noted, "Now that President Bush has won Florida in
his 2004 reelection bid, he may want to draft a letter of appreciation
to Michael Brown, chief of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Seldom has any federal agency had the opportunity to so directly and
uniquely alter the course of a presidential election, and seldom has
any agency delivered for a president as FEMA did in Florida this fall."

President Bush undoubtedly benefited from the series of
heartwarming photo-ops that followed in the wake of the storms, but
according to Mahtesian, "The story on the ground was not Bush's
hand-holding. Rather, it was FEMA's performance. By the end of
September, three hurricanes later, the agency had processed 646,984
registrations for assistance with the help of phone lines operating 24
hours a day, seven days a week. Fifty-five shelters, 31 disaster
recovery centers and six medical teams were in operation across the
state."
In other words, FEMA was in overdrive.
Standing alongside Florida's Gov. Jeb Bush at a press
conference on Sept. 3 as Hurricane Frances approached, Brown bragged,
"FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security are bringing in literally
thousands of assets to respond to Hurricane Frances. Two of the most
important things that we're doing are to focus on life-sustaining and
lifesaving efforts." In a press release issued just one week before the
election, FEMA crowed, "Florida Disaster Aid Tops $2 Billion." The
public proclamation was part of a torrent of FEMA press releases
trumpeting its Florida relief efforts.
Brown, who spent the 1990s as the commissioner of the
International Arabian Horse Association, came to his FEMA job with a
clear political background. By all indications Brown's only
qualification for running the agency FEMA was that he was a college
buddy of Joe Allbaugh, Bush's chief of staff while governor of Texas.
Allbaugh handpicked Brown for a job as general counsel at FEMA, and he
quickly ascended the promotion ladder.
But Brown's current performance is a far cry from those halcyon
days in 2004. Surprisingly energized press coverage has eviscerated him
for a series of embarrassing gaffes. Last week, he is on record as
having first said he thought Katrina was going to be a "standard
hurricane," blaming victims for not heeding evacuation warnings, and
insisting the relief effort was "going relatively well." Worst of all,
he confessed on live television that he had not even realized that more
than 10,000 people had been trapped inside the New Orleans Convention
Center for days.
The administration's confusion, compared to 2004, was not
confined to Brown. On "Meet the Press," Brown's boss, Homeland Security
Department Secretary Michael Chertoff, said the crucial 17th Street
levee broke on Monday night or Tuesday morning; it broke on Monday
morning.
The White House has received sharp criticism for its slow
response to the New Orleans catastrophe. But last year Bush and his
inner circle were remarkably proactive during storm season. Just two
days after Hurricane Charley hit the state's Gulf Coast, Bush took a
helicopter ride over the region. Joining him to survey the damage were
his brother Jeb Bush, FEMA director Brown, White House chief-of-staff
Andrew Card and White House spokesman Scott McClellan. Then one month
before the election, Bush took the unusual measure of ordering FEMA to
pay 90 percent of the costs local Florida agencies accrued in the wake
of the hurricanes. Traditionally, FEMA only covers 75 percent of the
costs not covered by insurance. The directive covered infrastructure
repairs as well as police and fire department overtime.
Partisan politics were certainly in the air during the busy
hurricane season. Specifically, one FEMA consultant, in an e-mail dated
Sept. 3, 2004, recommended that "top-level people from FEMA and the
White House need to develop a communication strategy and an agreed-upon
set of themes and communications objectives." He stressed,
"Communication consultants from the President's re-election campaign
should be brought in." FEMA officials insisted they did not follow the
consultant's advice.
Regardless, the hands-on strategy worked. One Gallup Poll from
August 2004 found 71 percent of Florida voters approved the way Bush
had handled the hurricane onslaughts. In October, a Mason-Dixon Florida
Poll found that 13 percent of undecided voters said Bush's performances
during the hurricanes would make them "more likely" to vote for him.
In the immediate wake of the president's reelection, USA Today
noted that in Florida, "Bush also was helped by his brother Jeb, a
popular two-term governor. The president got credit from voters for
bringing the state federal aid after Florida was battered by four
hurricanes in August and September." Bush's brother Jeb shared that
analysis, telling a local Jacksonville, Fla., television station on
Nov. 3, 2004, that the president deserved Florida's electoral support
because he'd been "darn good" to the state, specifically mentioning his
role in garnering generous relief for storm victims.
President Bush clearly wanted to avoid a repeat of the August
1992 FEMA fiasco, which many observers say contributed to his father's
reelection defeat. That Florida hurricane was named Andrew and its
170-mph winds killed 23 people and leveled parts of South Florida.
FEMA's slow-footed response morphed into a political defeat for Bush,
Sr. -- already criticized for being out of touch with everyday
Americans -- when one county's emergency manager famously pleaded,
"Where the hell is the cavalry?"
In 2004, Scripps Howard News Service, noting the political
defeat Hurricane Andrew delivered 12 years earlier, reported, "While
there are similarities between Andrew and Charley in their devastating
impacts, early signs indicate a major difference: The response by the
federal and state governments is quicker and better this time. Gov. Jeb
Bush sought federal help Friday while Charley was still in the Gulf of
Mexico. President Bush approved the aid about an hour after the
hurricane made landfall. By Monday afternoon, the cavalry seemed to be
in place."
On Sunday's "Meet the Press," an emotional Aaron Broussard,
president of Louisiana's badly flooded Jefferson Parish, complained
that federal officials had told him, "'The cavalry's coming, the
cavalry's coming, the cavalry's coming.' I have just begun to hear the
hoofs of the cavalry."
By comparison, in 2004 the FEMA cavalry was roaming all over
Florida, including parts almost completely untouched by the hurricanes,
such as Miami-Dade County. Within weeks of Hurricane Frances hitting
the Florida coast, 19,500 residents of Miami-Dade applied for disaster
relief. FEMA quickly approved 9,000 of the claims and set aside $28.9
million in tax-free grants to help them rebuild. But rebuild from what?
Frances never hit Miami-Dade. Locally, top sustained winds the day the
storm struck only reached 47 mph and did minimal damage to just a
handful of buildings. Just 5 percent of county residents even lost
power, according to the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, which uncovered
FEMA's unusual largess. The newspaper reported that within two days of
Frances' arrival FEMA officials knew Miami-Dade had been unscathed, and
yet the checks soon flowed into the county. "They were just doling out
this money like it was Christmas," a spokeswoman for Rep. Robert
Wexler, D-Fla., told the Sun-Sentinel. (Eventually, 14 Miami-Dade
residents who received assistance were indicted on fraud charges.) The
irony was that when he took over the relief agency in 2001, Allbaugh
testified before Congress that he was worried FEMA had evolved into "an
oversized entitlement program." But with an election looming in 2004,
there appeared to be little concern about Bush's FEMA being too
generous with relief funds.
The Miami-Dade financial windfall came courtesy of President
Bush who, following the request of his brother, declared the county a
disaster area as the hurricane began to strike the coast. But
Miami-Dade officials never even asked for disaster designation, for a
very simple reason: Frances came ashore 120 miles to the north.
The federal government's extreme generosity wasn't restricted
to Miami-Dade. In 2004 an aide to Gov. Bush reported back to him that
FEMA was handing out housing assistance "to everyone who needs it
without asking for much information of any kind." As the Sun-Sentinel
reported, "Even state officials were surprised at how quickly money
flowed to Florida. The day after Hurricane Charley hit the west coast,
the state's labor chief, Susan Pareigis, asked for a federal grant for
unemployment assistance for storm victims. Four days later, U.S.
Secretary of Labor Elaine L. Chao 'was down personally' to award the
money, Pareigis wrote in an Aug. 24 e-mail to the governor. 'Please
express our sincere thank you for such an instantaneous response.'"
The paper reported the governor quickly forwarded the e-mail to
White House Chief of Staff Card. "Please tell the President and your
team how grateful we are," Gov. Bush wrote. "The response has been
awesome from FEMA and other departments."
One has to wonder: How many appreciative e-mails from New
Orleans do you suppose the White House has received in the last week?

- - - - - - - - - - - -
About the writer
Eric Boehlert, a former senior writer for Salon, is working on
"Lapdogs: How Bush Got the Press to Heel." The book will be published
by the Free Press in 2006.
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41 wrote:
The politics of hurricane relief

Jobst Brandt (of Stanford Alumni fame) is supposed to post these things to
tech; get with it, man.

"41" wrote:

The politics of hurricane relief

Snip!

Translation: The Florida governor actually had his act together, and
had plans in place for dealing with a weather-related emergency, and
didn't wait to ask for help.

Hmmmm. He might make a good POTUS some day, huh?

;-)

Mark Hickey
Habanero Cycles
http://www.habcycles.com
Home of the $795 ti frame

"Mark Hickey" wrote: (clip)The Florida governor actually had his act
together, (clip)
^^^^^^^^^^^^^
"Had his act together"==translation: was the President's brother.

Mark wrote:
Translation: The Florida governor actually had his act together, and
had plans in place for dealing with a weather-related emergency, and
didn't wait to ask for help.

The Louisiana governor declared a State of Emergency on the Friday
before Katrina made landfall and issued a request to Bush for federal
assistance that Sunday in anticipation that state resources would not
be sufficient:
http://gov.louisiana.gov/Disaster%20...%20Request.pdf
That request was in place before the storm hit.

Mark Hickey wrote:

Translation: The Florida governor actually had his act together, and
had plans in place for dealing with a weather-related emergency, and
didn't wait to ask for help.

Although the governor of Louisiana didn't wait to ask for help either,
your line is indeed the line that the ground troops of the Bush-Rove
public relations machine are frantically spinning, even while the
top-level officials claim to not want to point fingers. Regardless,
Federal officials have their own responsibilities to undertake on their
own initiative. One of these is for the director of FEMA and the
director of Homeland Security and for the President of the United
States to actually have a clue what is going on. As their absurd and
shameful public comments during the long days before they bothered to
do anything showed, they couldn't even be bothered to flip on the TV or
read a newspaper and take a look at what was going on. Of course this
is typical for Bush, who proudly says he does not do such things, since
he gets all the information he needs from his PDB.

The moral is clear: as long as Karl Rove is president, have your
hurricanes in a swing state in an election year. [

"Leo Lichtman" wrote:

"Mark Hickey" wrote: (clip)The Florida governor actually had his act
together, (clip)
^^^^^^^^^^^^^
"Had his act together"==translation: was the President's brother.

You're probably right - he couldn't screw up because of his superior
genes... ;-)

Mark Hickey
Habanero Cycles
http://www.habcycles.com
Home of the $795 ti frame

"peter" wrote:

Mark wrote:
Translation: The Florida governor actually had his act together, and
had plans in place for dealing with a weather-related emergency, and
didn't wait to ask for help.

The Louisiana governor declared a State of Emergency on the Friday
before Katrina made landfall and issued a request to Bush for federal
assistance that Sunday in anticipation that state resources would not
be sufficient:
http://gov.louisiana.gov/Disaster%20...%20Request.pdf
That request was in place before the storm hit.

And then after the storm hit she told the feds not to come.

Mark Hickey
Habanero Cycles
http://www.habcycles.com
Home of the $795 ti frame

"Mark Hickey" wrote in message
...
"peter" wrote:

Mark wrote:
Translation: The Florida governor actually had his act
together, and
had plans in place for dealing with a weather-related
emergency, and
didn't wait to ask for help.

The Louisiana governor declared a State of Emergency on the
Friday
before Katrina made landfall and issued a request to Bush for
federal
assistance that Sunday in anticipation that state resources
would not
be sufficient:
http://gov.louisiana.gov/Disaster%20...%20Request.pdf
That request was in place before the storm hit.

And then after the storm hit she told the feds not to come.

I believe she objected to the federalization of local law
enforcement and state National Guard -- and federalization of the
whole evacuation process. Nonetheless, it always strikes me as
odd when these historically states'-rights-states whine at the
federal government for not taking care of them. They want to be
independent and mothered at the same time. -- Jay Beattie.

peter wrote:
Mark wrote:
Translation: The Florida governor actually had his act together, and
had plans in place for dealing with a weather-related emergency, and
didn't wait to ask for help.

The Louisiana governor declared a State of Emergency on the Friday
before Katrina made landfall and issued a request to Bush for federal
assistance that Sunday in anticipation that state resources would not
be sufficient:
http://gov.louisiana.gov/Disaster%20...%20Request.pdf
That request was in place before the storm hit.

How inconvenient for Hickey to point out that he was repeating a lie
straight from GOP talking points. But he shouldn't feel bad- that
liberal rag Washington Post was caught in the same lie, repeated from
an "unanmed source in the Bush administration" (which usually
translates to Karl Rove) that they didn't even bother to try to
confirm, because it could have been shown to be false with just the
slightest amount of effort. The WP at least had the guts to print a
correction, but what does Hickey do? He comes up with another lie, that
the governor of Louisiana rejected federal help.

Outrageous. Nauseating. The performance of Bush and his band of hacks
at FEMA and DHS has been disgusting and the results heartbreaking, so
these guys got nuthin' left but to lie, lie, lie. Do you believe in
God, Mark? What, 20,000 people dead? Where do you think your lies put
you in the karma of things?