There was a weird dynamic going on, to my way of thinking. I knew how much better this had been handled than before, but it was still a disaster by any heretofore known standard. While the governors of Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, and Texas all hailed Mike Brown and John McCain for the work they had done and the leadership they had shown, since they were all Republicans it was treated as partisan politics. Meanwhile, Kathleen Blanco, the Governor of Louisiana, and Ray Nagin, the Mayor of New Orleans, were loudly complaining how we had all made everything worse, and how they would have done it so much better. Governor Blanco was still smarting at our overruling her on a half dozen different measures (for instance, she had refused to order the state fish and game department to rescue people; their boss ordered them in on his own, overriding her) and wanted to take back control of the National Guard and kick everybody else out — just send her the money and she would fix the problem! Meanwhile, Ray Nagin, who had been detained and dumped at the Superdome, was back and telling the residents of his city that I had personally taken my finger out of the dike, and thus flooded the city. He began a city by city tour of various refugee areas, telling them how I was personally delaying the recovery of the city (send him the money, not the Governor!) and that New Orleans would be rebuilt again as a ‘Chocolate City’, throwing racial tensions into the mix. Then it came out that in 2004, during a mock emergency meeting to simulate a hurricane hitting the city, nobody from either the Governor’s staff nor the Mayor’s staff bothered to show up. Congressional hearings were promised. Awkward!
Meanwhile, I began taking massive heat from the hard right wing of my own party. At least a half dozen televangelists began claiming that the reason 2005 had been such a deadly year for hurricanes was that America’s leader (me!) had brought on God’s wrath. I wasn’t conservative enough, Republican enough, or Christian enough to properly lead America back to the path of righteousness. Among my many sins were my toleration of gays, immigrants, Jews, Papists (I had to tell Marilyn that I would need to divorce her to cure that particular sin; she was not amused!), and anybody else the preacher deemed unfavorable. Especially amusing was when Pat Robertson announced that when I had flown to New Orleans and Mobile, I had been on a recon flight for Satan. When Will Brucis was asked his thoughts about this at the next press briefing, he replied that he was simply incapable of understanding that kind of thinking.
The right wingers were also not amused when, in an interview after the storm, I was asked if I thought man-made global warming was to blame. “I think there is a link to climate change, though to what extent I am not sure. You can’t tell me that seven billion plus people on this planet aren’t having some sort of effect! That’s not realistic.”
“Are you saying that you believe in global warming?” asked an incredulous reporter. This was going against the entire Republican Party and conservative platform.
I nodded. “Yes, I would have to say I do. Now, we can argue about the extent and causes of it, but it’s a scientific fact, and I say that as a mathematician and a scientist. The evidence is quite clear, and scientific opinion is overwhelmingly one-sided. That doesn’t mean we know how to fix the problem yet, or what it will cost, or what the final long term effects will be, but the science is there.”
This did not help with my standing in the Republican Party, which further dropped when Al Gore climbed up on his soapbox and loudly proclaimed how finally a Republican leader was joining him in his crusade. Wonderful! His name was anathema to the Republican Party, and the asshole was linking me to him. Just wonderful! Brewster McRiley told me bluntly that this would hurt campaign contributions from energy companies across the board in 2006 and 2008. Just fucking wonderful!
In the real world we had both good news and bad news. The bad news was very, very simple. The devastation was beyond calculating. Early estimates of the damage were in the $30 to $40 billion range, and were climbing by the day. Some estimates were topping out at over $100 billion. Adding in the damage from Hurricane Rita a few weeks later, which mangled East Texas, and screwed up the recovery efforts in Louisiana, and we were well over $125 billion. It was going to take years to rebuild the levees and clean up the mess, and in some places, there was nothing left to rebuild. The Good Lord had taken everything in the path of the storms! Worse was going to be the effect on the national economy. Building materials prices were already skyrocketing, as was the price of fuel. Almost a quarter of the nation’s refining capacity had been shut down because of the storms, and gas prices were shooting up, and we were seeing gas lines again for the first time since the Seventies. If I had wanted a recession to take the heat off the economy, I was about to get it in spades.
The plus side? Since I hadn’t reduced taxes, the odds were that we could pay for a lot of the cleanup. We weren’t in a deficit situation and trying to pay for two wars off the books. It makes a big difference if you can go into a disaster with some money in the bank. It doesn’t matter whether you are an individual, a family, or a country, the principle is the same. Our national credit rating was still exceptionally good, and if we did need to borrow, going into a deficit (quite probable, actually) would be a manageable situation, and one we could get out of in a year or two. Once again, I needed to figure out how not to let a perfectly good crisis go to waste. It is appallingly cold blooded, but that was how the game was played at this level. Maybe we could do something about the national flood insurance program, environmental concerns, and the like. I wasn’t sure if I could pull it off, though. My popularity ratings continued to drop, and were now into the mid 40s.
The real plus side? My message that we were all Americans and we all needed to join together took real traction. Millions of people had been displaced by the storms, some for weeks and some for what looked to be many months, if not longer. All across the country, Americans were taking in their fellow citizens, providing temporary housing and food and support. Convoys of food and water, clothing, toys, and building supplies were pouring in from all over the nation. Utility crews were being rushed from all over America. Unsurprisingly, the youngest Americans took it to heart the most. College students were using their breaks and vacations to head south to help in the cleanup. Marilyn and I discovered this firsthand, when Holly and Molly announced they were going with some college friends down to New Orleans to help over the Christmas break. We simply nodded and Marilyn loaned them her American Express card for the trip. I knew the twins would be buying more than necessities with it; a close look at the next bill would probably end up showing thousands of dollars of emergency and relief supplies that I would turn a blind eye to. We had raised some good kids.
We stumbled through the end of 2005 without suffering anything else major happening. That didn’t mean we got away scot-free. I was in a fairly routine press conference in mid-November, discussing some budget plans and the proposed Congressional hearings related to Katrina, when a question was lobbed out of the blue at me. “Mister President, how do you feel about Kansas requiring that creationism be taught in their schools?”
I had to blink for a second at that. Somewhere in America, every day of the year, somebody is trying to stop teaching evolution and begin teaching creationism instead. The latest round was when the Kansas Board of Education had some fundamentalists elected, and they promptly began phony hearings to discuss the ‘controversy.’ Just a week ago they had passed their new rules. Generally I had avoided this sort of thing. The scientists and judges would eventually win, and I wasn’t going to convince any of the fundamentalists anyway.