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Sunday, Jul 12, 2009
In 2004, swing-state Florida voters slammed by hurricanes received lots of help and close personal attention from President Bush. But there's no election this year.
Sep 5, 2005 | As they look back on the wreckage wrought by Hurricane Katrina, the bewildered survivors of the life-changing storm must be mulling over all sorts of hypothetical scenarios. What if the levees had held? What if more people had been evacuated? What if search-and-rescue missions had started earlier?
A less obvious what-might-have-been worth considering is, what if Katrina had struck during an election year? Would the Bush administration have swooped in with a more muscular, proactive response to the catastrophe? After all, the administration's previous track record on hurricane relief might lead one to believe its performance this time could have been far superior.
FEMA's often invisible and incompetent reaction to the devastation in New Orleans stands in sharp contrast to the way the relief agency and the entire Bush administration sprang into action last summer as a series of deadly hurricanes -- Charley, Frances, Ivan and Jeanne -- battered the crucial swing state of Florida just weeks before Election Day.
There's no question that the scale of the New Orleans disaster far surpasses what Florida faced. But even so, a look back at the administration's relief efforts in 2004 indicates that a quick response to a potentially politically damaging situation commanded a higher priority from the top levels of government back then than did the flooding of New Orleans in 2005.
That's not to say FEMA performed flawlessly during 2004. Some Florida emergency officials criticized FEMA's slow response rate last year. But overall, FEMA, and more importantly Bush, scored high ratings for their handling of the election-year hurricanes. No expense was spared bringing relief to storm victims who just happened to live in the most important swing state in the country.
While Democratic nominee Sen. John Kerry, citing respect for the loss of life and devastation, stayed out of Florida for weeks during the crucial months of August and September, Bush surveyed hurricane-wracked communities on Aug. 15, Aug. 27, Sept. 8, Sept. 19 and Sept. 29.
Some FEMA insiders were so happy with how they handled Florida's flurry of election-year hurricanes that they made a serious pitch within the administration to get FEMA director Mike Brown, now a target of sustained criticism, promoted to homeland security chief.
"Homeland Security sources said after the hurricanes," reported a May 19 Washington Post article, "that Brown and his allies promoted him as a successor to Tom Ridge as Homeland Security secretary because of their contention that he helped deliver Florida to President Bush by efficiently responding to the Florida hurricanes." A FEMA spokeswoman denied the report at the time.
Floridians had good reason to be grateful. In the summer of 2004, FEMA handed out hurricane relief checks with wild abandon, doling out nearly $30 million to residents of Miami-Dade County to replace TVs, computers and microwaves, even though that county suffered little or no hurricane damage.
Writing last November for GovExec.com, which touts itself as "the independent business magazine of government," Charles Mahtesian noted, "Now that President Bush has won Florida in his 2004 reelection bid, he may want to draft a letter of appreciation to Michael Brown, chief of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Seldom has any federal agency had the opportunity to so directly and uniquely alter the course of a presidential election, and seldom has any agency delivered for a president as FEMA did in Florida this fall."
