White House Week
Spinning Faster Than a Category 5 Hurricane
At the White House last week, the term damage control took on a meaning unrelated to the havoc wreaked by Hurricane Katrina. After President Bush hit the Gulf Coast for the second time in four days, Dick Cheney followed a few days later because, as White House insiders put it, the veep is the very image of a can-do guy. Which was not exactly the case with Michael Brown, the embattled director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency who was yanked off the Katrina relief project and dispatched back to Washington.
The White House spin machine, meanwhile, was twirling at hurricane force, battering Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco. A senior administration official told U.S. News that once Bush finally came to understand how bad things looked in Louisiana he tried to persuade Blanco, a Democrat, to allow him to send in U.S. troops--but she refused. The next day, in the White House Situation Room, Bush asked aides why he couldn't simply order the U.S. military to air-drop food and water near the New Orleans Convention Center. But he was told he lacked authority without the governor's approval. (Blanco's supporters note that she had sent Bush a state-of-emergency letter on August 27, stating, "I request direct federal assistance for work and services to save lives and protect property.")
White House insiders now say privately that President Bush's flyover of the hurricane zone after Katrina struck sent the wrong message. "The notion that the president wasn't in control was very bad," says one. "It looked like he didn't know what was going on." Bush advisers say he should have come to ground, commiserating with victims and encouraging relief workers a lot earlier.
Maybe $200 Billion Won't Hurt That Much
Judd Gregg, the Republican chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, has suggested that Hurricane Katrina could end up costing the federal government as much as $200 billion. Would that wreck the federal budget? Probably not, predicts Richard Kogan, a budget analyst at the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. If the cost hits $200 billion, he says, "it doesn't change the midterm or long-term budget picture substantially." Just a few short weeks ago, the president's budget chief, Josh Bolten, was crowing to anyone who would listen about the suddenly plummeting federal deficit. Now those numbers are moving massively in the other direction, and no one can say for sure, with the enormous Katrina aid packages already approved and under consideration, just where things will finally end up. At a "burn rate" of some 2 billion dollars a day, though, one thing seems certain--the numbers have nowhere to go but up.
Stormy Weather and a Blown State Visit
Call it the summit that wasn't. Last week, President Bush was supposed to host Hu Jintao, the president of China, at the White House. But Hu canceled his trip--portrayed by Beijing as a "state visit" --in light of the administration's preoccupation with Katrina and the twin openings on the Supreme Court. Now, the two will meet only briefly on the sidelines of a large gathering of world leaders next week at the United Nations.
With Kenneth T. Walsh, Paul Bedard, Matthew Benjamin and Thomas Omestad Kenneth T. Walsh, Paul Bedard, Matthew Benjamin and Thomas Omestad Kenneth T. Walsh, Paul Bedard, Matthew Benjamin and Thomas Omestad
This story appears in the September 19, 2005 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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