I've heard this same question from several people that I've talked to: "What should Bush have done instead of playing guitar and laughing with senior citizens? It's not like he could stop the flood himself!"
WHAT A LOAD OF CRAP
There comes a point, when being the leader of a country that you must appear, what's the word...presidential...
If Bush had a car in his front yard on blocks before he was the president, that's fine. But the minute he becomes the president, what he does and how he presents himself matters. It matters in that it sets the tone for the nation. It matters in that it gives people hope. It matters in that he is the leader of this nation.
So what should he have done? He should have cut his vacation short. He should have immediately flown over the area and surveyed the damage from the air on his way to the Red Cross command center in Mississippi, or to Baton Rouge to meet immediately with the governor of LA.
Even though these actions would be largely symbolic, they would still have gone miles toward making people feel like something was being done.
Instead, everyone from the media to the state and local governments of the affected areas feels like they've been abandoned by the Federal government.
Bush should have appeared like the leader of a country facing the third worst natual disaster in its history and an increasingly terrible human nightmare...not playing guitar for senior citizens and posing for photographs with Senator McCain.
The bottom line is this…I could care less if Bush showed up in any of the areas where Katrina struck. What matters is that something is being done to help them. Everyone involved should have been more prepared to help New Orleans when they knew the eye of Katrina was heading directly for the city. There should have been emergency funds already approved by the government for New Orleans in case Katrina did hit as predicted (They had body bags prepared last year when they thought New Orleans was going to get hit with a hurricane.). No one prepared for it. It was as if we were just hoping the hurricane would just steer off course as it had done the previous year. I think “Department of Homeland Screw-Up: What is the Bush administration doing?” by Tim Naftali explains it better than I can at http://www.slate.com/id/2125494?nav=nw.
I was watching the news last night and it was absolutely atrocious to see how bad it is there. It’s as if you are looking at a third world country of people begging for someone to bring them food and water to sustain their basic human needs. I keep thinking of the aftermath. Where are these people going to live? Where are they going to get jobs? They have nothing. They are just waiting…