Times Picayune, LA
08-26-06
Katrina's impact reaches nation's political parties
They've put out spin for midterm voting
By Bruce Alpert
WASHINGTON -- After former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich
watched the news coverage of desperate people stranded on rooftops and
trapped in the Superdome after Hurricane Katrina, he told Time magazine that
Democrats had been handed their campaign theme for 2006: "Had enough."
A year later, with newspapers, TV news programs and even an HBO
documentary replaying the terrifying images from flooded New Orleans, there's
little doubt that Katrina is having an impact on the body politic.
For starters, the inept response, at least initially, was responsible for reducing
President Bush's poll numbers and causing some voters, particularly
independents, to question the competence of the administration. On Capitol Hill,
Republicans who conducted little oversight of the Bush administration during its
first 4 1⁄2 years, reversed course in a big way. Sometimes holding three or four
Katrina hearings on the same day Congress issued two comprehensive reports
that spared few words in lambasting the administration's handling of the
emergency in the days after the hurricane hit landfall.
Both parties have been busy trying to spin Katrina to their advantage in the days
before the Tuesday anniversary. Bush met with Meraux resident Rockey
Vaccarella in the Oval Office this week and promised to continue to support
recovery efforts. He also dispatched several members of his Cabinet throughout
the Gulf Coast with a unified message: Yes, the administration made some
serious mistakes in its initial response to Katrina, but it has learned from those
miscues and mobilized an unprecedented response to an unprecedented
disaster.
Midterm referendum
Democrats, who are hoping to regain control of Congress, issued reports to mark
the one-year anniversary highlighting not only failures with the initial response to
Katrina, but also with the recovery efforts, saying that assistance promised by the
president hasn't materialized and that too many contracts went to big out-of-state
contractors.
The party's message is that the nation needs a Democratic majority in Congress
to make sure that the administration not only puts the necessary resources into
emergency response operations, but provides the proper oversight of the Army
Corps of Engineers, Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Small
Business Administration. They are, according to the Democrats, the most critical
agencies when it comes to hurricanes and all were handcuffed by inadequate
staffing and poor management.
David Crockett, a political scientist at Trinity University in San Antonio, said
midterm congressional elections often turn into a referendum on the president.
And while Iraq will be the major issue, the response to Katrina also will weigh on
voters' minds.
"The anniversary is providing a potent reminder of the problems the
administration had managing the bureaucracy in a crisis situation, and
Democrats are hoping that the issue will resonate with voters," Crockett said.
Steffen Schmidt, an Iowa State University political scientist, said while
Democrats may see Katrina as big advantage to its candidates, Republicans also
are using the hurricane to show that the party is capable of meaningful oversight
of a GOP administration, and, in some cases, to distance themselves from the
president. Some Republican candidates also are using Katrina to espouse their
conservative philosophy that the role of the federal government should be limited.