"After the flood"

The New Yorker turns its "Talk of the Town" attentions to New Orleans. All of the pieces are brief and put the destruction of New Orleans in high relief. Particularly good is David Remnick on the president's performance.

And Nicholas Lemann, who grew up in the city, draws a scathing bead on the city and state officials, who, it must be admitted were unusually helpless.

The wetlands that protected the city on the south and west have been deteriorating from commercial exploitation for years, thanks to inaction by Louisiana as well as by the United States. It isn’t Washington that decided it’s O.K. to let retail establishments in New Orleans sell firearms—which are now being extensively stolen and turned to the service of increasing the chaos in the city. It seems like a million years ago that President Bush had admirers who saw in him a Churchillian ability to rally a nation in crisis; last week, as both the President and Michael Brown, the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, offered bland, undignified, and ill-timed restatements of the obvious about the direness of the situation, you could practically see them thinking, I’m not getting blamed for this! But they were positively helpful next to Louisiana’s governor, who cried and said that we should all pray, and New Orleans’ mayor, who told citizens they should evacuate but didn’t say how, predicted a second major flood, which didn’t materialize, sniped at the federal authorities, and kept reminding everyone that the situation was desperate.

Because the feeling of a crisis fades so quickly, it’s worth recalling that for the whole week of the hurricane most people in the city had no access to official help. The emergency numbers didn’t work. There was no obvious person in charge, and no obvious plan being carried out. If you were lucky enough to have Internet access, you were more likely to find useful information—about, for example, which parts of the city were dry, or where drinking water was available—on blogs than on any government site. People who could find their way to institutional protection seemed almost worse off than people individually trapped, subjected as they were to violence, disease, starvation, overcrowding, and lies. It was unbelievable that it could take so long to get supplies in and people out, and to restore public safety, and to fix the levees. Even to have a person who could project calm and hope, and who could offer useful, reliable counsel would have been a gift from above—but that the emergence of such a person seemed so completely out of the question demonstrates an unimaginable failure at all levels. If national officials are incapable of rising to the occasion, the responsibility and duty of local officials goes beyond simply pointing that out.

I've defended the mayor against unfair comparisons to Giuliani, but it is true that he was closest to the ground and should have best understood that they had sketchy plans, at best, to evacuate tens of thousands of people, and made no real effort to make any.

And it is also true that he is another of that breed of "MBA politicians," a former vice-president and general manager of Cox Communications, the cable conglomerate. And a contributor to the campaigns of George W. Bush and Billy Tauzin. He became a Democrat only to increase his chances of winning the mayoral election. It worked, and early in his administration he had some success in cleaning up a very dirty city. But he was a Democrat in name only, and most of his grandiose plans, like another party switcher, New York's Mike Bloomberg, have fallen by the wayside. And now he's been abandoned by the party from which he switched.