Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice stopped by "The View" on ABC the other day.
One of the things Rice did was defend the Bush administration's actions following Hurricane Katrina.
"I don't think that anybody at any level of government was really prepared for something of Katrina's size and scope," Rice told the panel. Maybe so. It's hard to argue against the fact that Katrina was clearly the costliest hurricane to strike the United States. It was also one of the five deadliest hurricanes in American history.
But one of the things that people expect from the federal government is to be prepared for emergencies. If the administration wasn't prepared for Hurricane Katrina, I don't believe — as some have suggested — that it was due to racial prejudice. I'm inclined to believe that it was incompetence — combined with the shortage of National Guardsmen. Far too many had been pressed into duty in Iraq, leaving far too few to respond to domestic emergencies.
Everyone had several days' advance warning that Katrina was on the way. There was plenty of lead time.
And, if the government wasn't prepared for Katrina, the criticism that came its way in the days that followed seemed to prompt a determination not to be caught with its pants down the next time. The feds didn't have to wait long. Less than a month later, Hurricane Rita — a Category 5 storm — caused $11.3 billion in damage (compared to more than $80 billion caused by Katrina) and far fewer casualties.
Rita's toll may have been less because it didn't strike a metropolitan area like New Orleans. Those in the Bush administration might argue that they were better prepared for it. We may never know for sure. Attention was soon diverted to Bush's ill-advised — and ultimately unsuccessful — nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court.
In years to come, historians may regard Hurricane Katrina, which made landfall as a Category 3 hurricane in the Louisiana-Mississippi region in the early morning hours of Monday, Aug. 29, 2005, as the event that permanently turned the majority of Americans against George W. Bush — and indefinitely turned the Republican Party into a minority party.
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