There has been an awful lot of surprising news lately, but surely no one should be surprised by recent reports that President Bush’s approval rating has been slipping.
The airwaves have been filled in recent weeks with reports that Bush was bound to suffer because of the slow federal response to Hurricane Katrina and because of increasing public frustration over the war in Iraq.
Sure enough, after weeks of bad press, the president’s poll numbers declined. The news of that decline set off a second round of bad press reports, which may lead to a third along the theme, “President fails to boost job approval ratings.”
The cycle is predictable. What may not be as predictable is what will happen next. The only safe bet is that there will be a re-evaluation of some scope and, when it is complete, public opinion may undergo a revision. Hints of what that re- evaluation may include are already at hand.
The Los Angeles Times, for example, published a story yesterday detailing numerous instances in which television reporters assigned to the hurricane area broadcast “facts” that later turned out to be quite untrue.
Some of these accounts involved inflated body counts, sniper attacks, sharks in Lake Pontchartrain and the alleged rape of a 7-year-old girl. The Times carried one story that reported National Guard troops had taken “positions on rooftops, scanning for snipers and armed mobs as seething crowds of refugees milled below, desperate to flee. Gunfire crackled in the distance.”
It made for a dramatic account, but it suffers in retrospect because it was false – just like the report in the Ottawa Sun that a man seeking help had been gunned down by a National Guard soldier.
In his testimony before a congressional committee yesterday, Michael Brown, former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, made a number of statements that dramatically conflict with literally hundreds of news accounts filed at the time of the Katrina disaster.
Brown was asked why the agency hadn’t done more to evacuate New Orleans, restore order in the city and improve communication among law enforcement. He replied, “Those are not FEMA roles. FEMA doesn’t evacuate communities. FEMA does not do law enforcement. FEMA does not do communications.”
That’s a comment worth remembering, for it raises the question of who does do these things.
If the public’s first impressions about the respective roles of FEMA and the local and state government officials in Louisiana were wrong, then a number of other things will also change. The nature of the debate over what should be done to prepare for future disasters is on top of that list. Should there, for example, be a federal takeover of the responsibility for evacuation, law enforcement and communication? If not, what can be done to see that the states and localities are better prepared?
It has long been true that first impressions are the ones that last the longest and so no one should expect a sharp shift in the way the public thinks about the current administration anytime soon. Bush has been around politics long enough to know that sometimes a president gets credit when he shouldn’t (managing the economy comes to mind) and sometimes the reverse is true.
What is doubtless is that the mainstream media won’t give extra points for effort, especially when that effort can be safely characterized as belated.
Just 24 hours ago, Bush called on the American public to curtail nonessential travel so that gasoline supplies can catch up with demand. Immediately, reporters started adding up how much oil would be consumed by the president in his most recent trip to the hurricane zone.
Anyone want to guess what the same news outlets would have said if the president refused to go to the flood zone so that he might save on jet fuel?
Al Knight of Fairplay (alknight@ mindspring.com) is a former member of The Post’s editorial-page staff. His columns appear on Wednesday.
