Katrina Coverage

Michael Tackett of the Chicago Tribune offers "Bush speech was part Franklin Roosevelt, part Lyndon Johnson":
Throughout his nationally broadcast address from a shattered New Orleans, it was as though the disaster of Hurricane Katrina had transformed the president from the logical heir to Ronald Reagan to some curious amalgam of Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson.
He offered up a relief program that seemed to draw reconstruction inspiration from the Marshall Plan, the Works Progress Administration and the Tennessee Valley Authority and social policy animated by the Great Society...
..."History is sometimes the moment a bell rings," said Douglas Brinkley, a historian and professor at the University of New Orleans. "He had a historic opportunity to seize this and become a great leader and he bobbled it not just once but four or five times. This is a speech that needed to have been delivered within days of the hurricane."
Tardy perhaps, and freighted with potential problems even within his own Republican Party, the president's recovery plan called for a new alphabet soup of government initiatives (Gulf Opportunity Zones, Worker Recovery Accounts, an Urban Homesteading Act) that sounded like pages taken from the New Deal. Stung by charges that the government might have been slow to respond because of racism, he even emphasized the need for, in effect, minority set-aside programs to be a major part of the rebuilding...