The Katrina Moment

In the summer of 2005, New Orleans was devastated by hurricane Katrina. A state of emergency was declared. The whole city was flooded. The Louisiana Superdrome and the Houston Astrodome went from emergency evacuation and relief centres to major crime scenes. Tens of thousands of people were evacuated, never to return

The event was a major disaster. Failures of governance were abundant. Before the event, environmentalists and flood engineers had advised the city fathers that New Orleans was vulnerable. Indeed, The Sunday Times Magazine published an article a while before Katrina, forecasting exactly what occurred. The cost of protecting New Orleans would have been in the billions of dollars but the city, state and federal governments could not agree how such cost would be shared. After Katrina, those governments were severely criticised for the delayed response to the flooding, for mismanagement and lack of leadership at all levels.

However, the political error of errors belonged to President George W Bush. He cut his vacation in Texas short, although he had already spent 27 days in his Crawford ranch. He flew back to D. C. while having Air Force One fly over some of the devastated areas of Louisiana. He glimpsed the wreckage of New Orleans only from his plane. Subsequently, the American public regarded Bush as uncaring and distant from obvious abject misery below him.  An anonymous former Bush adviser and strategist later commented that Bush never recovered from Katrina. He was seen for the remainder of his Presidency as a man who had no understanding of true leadership.

Last week, Guardian columnist Jeremy Freedland wrote about British Prime Minister May's "Katrina Moment." The disastrous fire at Grenfell Tower in London's Notting Hill took 79 lives and left the surviving residents homeless and destitute. The next day, May briefly visited the site and spoke with members of the fire department, health service and police. She ignored the residents. Just ten minutes of her time would have been sufficient for her to show she cared and was aware of their plight. Her PR people subsequently stated there were security problems. Bushwah!

May rectified her error later in the week but she was so clearly uncomfortable in the company of poor, disadvantaged people. Her reputation for arrogant aloofness and lack of empathy is now set in stone. Until her Party lost its majority in the recent General Election, she behaved with her political colleagues and Parliament as if she was Louis XIV, "l'etat, c'est moi". I suspect she will not remain Prime Minister for much longer. But she is the author of her own misfortune.

And so it continues. Is President Trump about to have his Katrina moment? The House of Representatives has passed an American Healthcare Bill. Subsequently it was scored by the Congressional Budget Office who anticipate that between 20 and 28 million Americans will lose their healthcare insurance over the next six years. The Senate will soon vote on its version of the Bill. It has major differences to the House's Bill but Medicare is under attack, as is the funding of Planned Parenthood, and the numbers who will lose their insurance or be rejected on grounds of pre-existing conditions seems to be similar to the House version.

Trump has said the new Healthcare laws will be better for Americans. This is true if you apply his comments to the wealthy who neither need nor use Obamacare insurance. I wonder if Trump himself even has health insurance. If he needs medical help, he can pay for it from his petty cash box. Trump seems intent on passing any new healthcare legislation put forward by Congress just so he can boast that he has kept an election promise to repeal and replace Obamacare.

The major part of the brief for a political chief executive, whether President or Prime Minister, is crisis management. In the days of 24/7 media, this means being visible.  FDR had problems because he was not mobile. Instead, his wife, Eleanor, got despatched to crisis scenes. In some years she travelled 50,000 miles around America and was fearless, whether visiting coal miners in Pennsylvania or disadvantaged blacks in the Deep South. FDR called her, “my eyes and ears.” Since FDR, all Presidents have got to understand the importance of PR, although in Bush Jr’s case, it came too late.

Cannot any member of Trump’s coterie, the American media he listens to, someone he might hear, maybe the First Lady, tell him that acceptance of any old healthcare legislation is not leadership, it is caving in? Since I have already referred to the words of French royalty, perhaps the words of Marie Antoinette are the most appropriate to Trump’s attitude: “let them eat cake.” But only if you’re rich enough to afford the healthcare a sugar diet may give you. And we know what happened to Marie Antoinette!