The President holds a seance

The President delivered his speech to an empty city last night, I guess figuring that if he spoke only to ghosts he wouldn't hear the jeers and catcalls he deserved.

I know.  I know.  It was symbolic.  The President was leading the way back into the ruined the city, the first one there to begin the rebuilding.  Over on Bourbon Street people with degrees in semiotics put down their drinks and nodded approvingly at Karl Rove's brilliance.

I didn't watch.  The Heretik did.  Yesterday morning.  In his mind's eye.  He described the speech perfectly hours before the Bush had even cleared his throat.  The Heretik isn't a clairvoyant anymore than Bush is a medium.  The charade was just so darn predictable.

But the Heretik watched the speech again, on TV and in real time, to see how much he'd gotten right, which was all of it, although Bush surprised him with one thing.  Surprised is the wrong word.  Appalled?

Bush's call for the military to intervene in future disasters was the most surreal and nightmarish moment of the entire dark drama writ in words black and blue last night.  Bush here would once again take advantage of a wounded country to advance a most backward agenda of more control.  And this from a man who campaigns against government?

In the first few days after the leeves broke, and New Orleans began to sink into water, chaos, and misery, a lot of people wondered why the President didn't order the regular Army into action.  (Steve Gilliard had several posts about the specific units Bush could have called in.)  The National Guard units from the stricken states were spread too thin over the whole Gulf Coast---the units that weren't in Iraq---and Guard units from other states that wanted to help couldn't mobilize fast enough---in at least one case, New Mexico's, because the Pentagon didn't do the paperwork---so why didn't Bush send in the regular Army right away instead of waiting until almost the end of the week?

But he brought up the idea of calling in the troops next time as if he hadn't been able to do it this time.  What was that?  Another pretense?  Was he pretending he hadn't done what he'd done and that he didn't have the power to do what he was pretending not to have done in hopes that we would all forget that he'd done it too late?

The Heretik thinks that he's looking for more military powers than he already has, more direct control of the troops.

The coverage of the speech, before and after, is what dismayed me.   (Make sure you follow the Heretik's linkages.)  The coverage treated the speech as something apart from the disaster Bush was supposed to be doing something about at last, as if it was not a policy statement or a plan of action but a campaign appearance.

As if it was possible and actually important to see if the speech did what Karl Rove wanted it to do, not as if it committed Bush to any real measures to rebuild the Gulf Coast.

A piece of performance art.

Would he, could he, regain his mojo with this speech?  Did he or didn't he get back his game?

Something that drives me nuts about The West Wing is that the show presents speeches as mattering most as performances, both rhetorical and theatrical, and a knock-out performance is as good as completing the actions a speech promises.  Well, it's a TV show, and all problems must be wrapped up neatly within the course of a story arc, and it's a writers' show with the President's speechwriters as its heroes.  But that's not how it's supposed to work in real life.  A well-performed speech doesn't do anything.

Performance is a part of leadership.  A President who doesn't look and act like a President pesuasively can't be President because no one will pay attention.  But I thought that one of the things Katrina showed was that looking and acting like a President can't be something the President does only during scripted moments on TV.  Acting like a President means taking action as the President.  Bush hasn't looked like a President since Katrina made landfall not because he didn't act the part, but because he didn't act.

The whole world saw him fail.

The measure of the speech should have been how far it went towards committing Bush to specific actions that would make up for his previous inaction.  How far did it go towards making him act as President?

But it was previewed and it's been reviewed as if Bush's failure was only an image problem: would it restore his image as a can-do President, how far did it go towards making him look like a President again, as if looking the part was separate from acting not like but as the President.

The thrust of the speech was a foregone conclusion.  Bush had to promise to help rebuild.  New Orleans, Biloxi, and the other broken towns and cities in the region had already begun to put themselves back together.  Nobody needed Bush to come in and get the job underway.  The first question that the speech should have been addressing was what specifically he was going to do to help.

The answer, knowing Bush, was also a foregone conclusion: appropriate a lot of money that will end up in the pockets of his pals and financial backers.

But the second question was and still is, Even if Bush had committed himself to anything substantial and actually designed to help rather than designed to make a bunch of already rich people richer (and by the way the two things aren't mutually exclusive.  Corruption and competence can cooperate to build bridges and roads and even whole cities) why should we believe that he could deliver?

What has he done in the past that shows that he knows how to do anything right?

Why should we believe in him?

We've got Iraq.

We've got Katrina.

What's he got?

A speech full of nothing delivered to an audience of ghosts in front of a church turned into a cheesy set on a studio backlot where the lights weren't even aimed right.

_________________________________________

Update:  Via Gilliard:  On September 8, the New York Times reported on why Bush was slow to deploy regular Army troops in New Olreans.  Apparently the President can send combat troops in for relief missions, but he can't order them to do police work without invoking the Insurrection Act, and any early relief missions would have been also de facto policing because the troops would have had to establish law and order in order to do their jobs.  Bush's advisors told him that Governor Blanco would have objected to the President invoking the Insurrection Act which would have forced her to surrender state control to the President for the duration---why they thought she would object when she pretty clearly had lost control and was begging for federal troops, the Times doesn't say.

So the Heretik may be on to something.  Bush may be looking for permission to be able to take over control from local governments without having to invoke the Insurrection Act. 

NBC's Brian Williams reports that the President's roadies, stagehands, gaffers, and grippes were at least able to get the lights on along the route his motorcade took.

Of course they turned them right off after the President was done with them, leaving residents like he left the rest of us with his speech---in the dark.

(Got the link from the Heretik and Shakespeare's Sister who both got it from Cookie Jill, who has started a list of things Bush left out of his speech.)

Comments

[Shakespeare's Sister]

What's he got?

Flop sweat.

[Fledermaus]

*Ahem*

And that reminds me that I never finished the point I was driving towards in Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?... and It's always been about Whitewater . . . I'll post it tomorrow so you can all ignore it over the weekend.

::taps foot::

::points at watch::

[coturnix]

The Day Earth Stood Still. Somebody noticed that the church clock in the background did not move during the speech. The timing, thus, was off. Bush, alone, in the semi-darkness of the deserted city, sweating, talking to the shadows. What a metaphor for where his Presidency is going!

[mac macgillicuddy]

"Bush's call for the military to intervene in future disasters was the most surreal and nightmarish moment of the entire dark drama writ in words black and blue last night."

I didn't watch the speech either. In fact, I forgot it was on until it was over and it was too late to watch it if I'd wanted to. Which I didn't.

And I've been avoiding any punditry and post-performance analysis, mainly because I had a feeling it would be as Lance describes it as being.

But I did catch wind of the part the Heretick notes, and I felt the same chill of the Bush drive toward jackbooted control wafting over me that the Heretick felt.

[Lance]

Fledermaus,

I have readers in Hawaii, so tomorrow---that is, today---lasts until 11:59 PM Honolulu time.

[GaijinBiker]

"why they thought she would object when she pretty clearly had lost control and was begging for federal troops, the Times doesn't say."

Have you not seen the video where Blanco remarks that she shouldn't have waited so long to request federal troops?

[jonst]

You know the Mort Sahl joke? "Cheney is in NYC staying at the Waldorf. Protestors outside. VP comes out...Protestors start yelling at him. VP shouts back 'Ah, go buy your own President if you don't like things the way they are'."

They own the country now. They own the press. They own, for the most part, the Dem leadership. They own, again, for the most part, the Courts. The people inclined to oppose them, the people in positions of relative political power that is: the Kerry's the Edward's, the Reid's the Pelosi's really don't have a clue how to fight this kind of opponent.

[Lance]

Gaijin, I hadn't seen that video, but I'd read similar reports. My sense was that she was wishing she'd asked before Katrina struck, and it looks to me as though the reason for her wishing it is that she was upset at how long it took to get the troops after she asked. So what she was actually wishing was that she'd known ahead of time that the Feds would be so slow to act.

But I was wrong about this. The Times does address the issue of her giving up control:

Aides to Ms. Blanco said she was prepared to accept the deployment of active-duty military officials in her state. But she and other state officials balked at giving up control of the Guard as Justice Department officials said would have been required by the Insurrection Act if those combat troops were to be sent in before order was restored.

The question is was the JD's interpretation correct? So Bush could be not angling for more power but for clarification of the existing law and some way to make it easier to get the troops in to help the next time. A change in the law that allows the Feds to send in the troops without the local authorities having to give up their control of everything might be all he wants. But sad experience tells us that when the Bush Leaguers ask for an inch, they take a mile, and a new law supposedly written for the next Katrina could turn out to be useful for the next big anti-war protest in Crawford.

[Exiled in NJ]

"But sad experience tells us that when the Bush Leaguers ask for an inch, they take a mile, and a new law supposedly written for the next Katrina could turn out to be useful for the next big anti-war protest in Crawford."

Or the next time the Reichstag burns, or there is a deadlocked election.

[Red Tory]

I wrote a little piece on the symbolic aspects of Bush's speech the other night here. It was funny to see Dowd confirm in the NYT this morning that I was far from being alone in perceiving the "Disney" aspect of the charade.

[Rana]

Thank you for writing this. I'd been listening to the speech on the radio with half an ear until that point, which made me scream out loud. If FEMA had been working, and the National Guard had been home, there would have been no need for the additional troops, so asking for more of the latter without addressing the former is duplicitous in the extreme. The administration does not need more power; it needs to make better use of the resources it already has (and which we've supposedly been paying for).

[Pepper]

Hey, the prez has a really nice blue shirt that matches his background! Rana, you missed the good stuff by listening to it on the radio!

As for Bush acting like a president and actually helping hurricane victims, he's going to do what he's always done, just on a larger scale. He's sending down oodles of trailer parks. Rebuild on the cheap as per usual. That way, the administration can use resources for what they want rather than for what the nation needs.

[cali dem]

Confession: I'm shallow. I didn't watch his speech. Didn't read the transcript either. I have, however seen the photos and think I know what I need to know just by the weird setting and the fact that his shirt was misbuttoned. Gawd, are we in trouble.