Obama in New Orleans: Been and Gone and Got It Wrong

LONDON--Thanks to WWL-TV, I watched the Obama Town Hall in New Orleans live.  Clearly the people in the room enjoyed being in his presence.  But, for those of us looking for even the semblance of substance, for just the sign that this President is not as clueless about the situation as the last President was, frankly, he could have saved the jet fuel.

Think I'm being too harsh? Here's how the President opened his prepared remarks:

“Katrina may have swept through this city, but it did not destroy this community, and that is because of you, the people of New Orleans. It has now been just over 4 years since that terrible storm struck your shores. And the days after it did, this nation and all the world were witness to the fact that the damage from Katrina was not caused just by a disaster of nature but also by a breakdown of government.  That the government wasn’t adequately prepared and we didn’t adequately respond.”

You couldn't get it more wrong.  "Katrina," the hurricane, didn't "sweep through" New Orleans, it landed, at most, a glancing sidelong blow.  "That terrible storm" was, at landfall, a Category 3; when it passed by New Orleans, it was a strong Cat 1 or a weak Cat 2.  It did do terrible damage to the Mississippi Gulf Coast, but Obama was talking about its impact on New Orleans. 

The "damage" was not caused "just by a disaster of nature" at all; two independent engineering reports (the ILIT report from UC Berkeley and the Team Louisiana report from LSU) agreed that the damage was caused by the catastrophic breaching, in more than fifty locations, of an improperly-designed and built "hurricane protection system" (derided by its own builder, the Corps of Engineers, as "a system in name only"), under storm surge pressure considerably weaker than the system was supposedly designed to withstand. 

"The government wasn't adequately prepared and we didn't adequately respond" echoes Obama's campaign rhetoric about the aftermath of the disaster; his other remarks display a glaring, and for such an intellectually voracious and insightful man, quite possibly knowing ignorance of how we got here.

Typically, having mis- or non-diagnosed the problem, he came with no solution, no pledge (aside from the vaporous "build stronger" without reference to build what, how, by whom) to take the steps only the federal government, under strong leadership from a committed chief executive, can take to prevent the disaster from recurring.

Hope he enjoyed his gumbo.

Follow Harry Shearer on Twitter: www.twitter.com/letwits

Comments

[Bozwellian]

Just truly IMAGINE that instead of having wasted all those $$$ on unnecessary war instigation and nation building that got such grandiosely supported, imagine if all those funds had been put to work on OUR DOMESTIC INFRASTRUSTURE --to repair, replace and restore to point where it was something that functioned for the greater common good of all---would have been money well spent , instead , those incharge squandered far too much--hence we are are where we are and struggling will continue with no easy fixables and little ability to COMMAND differently , no matter WHO sits in the WH !!

[hapiday]

Plenty of my friends in town refer to the "federal flood", not "Katrina"...

I was wondering who are your friends that would be so intellectual to call it the federal flood? What quarter does your crowd live in? New Orleans had one of the highest unemployment rates in the country before Katrina what was being done. Sir, while you may make some points that need to be addressed you constant usage of "them" meaning the people who have been displaced and the one's who are barely hanging on. Are you and your friends the "them" or the "us".

[Harry Shearer - Huffpost Blogger]

They're both colors, if I read the import of your question correctly. You don't have to be "intellectual" to know what hit you. I like the jiu jitsu of implying I'm an elitist and that anybody I know must similarly be elitist, thereby damning everybody else to...some other level?

[HoppinHill]

My friends and I all say "levee breaks" or "federal flood."

[GeorgeKaplan]

Huh?

[hapiday]

I have heard this defense at least a thousand times he's not keeping "promises he made during his campaign". It is disturbing that a nation with 350 million people with differing wants and needs think that a campaign that lasted for 2 years can have all the problems solved in 9 months. The campaign lasted longer than he's been president. From the start to the end of the campaign America and it's problems have changed drastically and not for the best.

[GeorgeKaplan]

More Rubbish....

[Bozwellian]

No , not "mere rubbish', just reality as there are NO MAGIC WANDS able to be put to use in one or een several fell swoops !! THe catastrophe of NO that did capture the attention of due to the ONGOING and KNOWN POTENTIALITIES that NONE did much about other than cross fingers and hope was at least NOT ON THEIR WATCH is just rather DBAU approach to our INFRASTRUCTURE which is CRUMBLING from coast to coast NOT JUST IN NO !!! You want lower taxes ...you want balanced budgets, you want services that include roadways, schools, food /water safety and product safety and , and, and....need to tend to the details on how to actually so accomplish cuz its costing MORE with each passing day with results that do NOT serve the infrastructure or citizenry any too well at all !!!

[hapiday]

This is like a middle class family with limited funds planning for a European vacation, which sometimes takes up to a year or two to plan with a family of four. Everyone is excited, the children tell everyone about it. Well, during the years of planning, a death in the family happens, the house burns down, and the father loses his job and the mother gets sick. They have to prioritize which to address first. Finally, the time comes for the trip and the vacation plans are complicated because of a combination of these events, the vacation has to be postponed. The children state you promised, I h@te you! President Obama, two wars, the economic crisis, the republicans just say no, the gay community, say you promised, I hate you! The teapartiers say socialist, nazi, fascist, communist, birther, I hate you! Liberals, say you're not liberal enough you're just like Bush, I h@te you! The military generals plot and plan to escalate the war and if he doesn't he's a wimp. If he does, he's a war monger, I h@te you! The media says, it doesn't matter, the h@te makes for good tv, radio and newsprint ratings.

[Bienville]

Imagine that family planning their lives. Susie wants to get married next year. Billy starts college the year after that. Mom is finally ready to open her "little shop." Grandma and Grandpa want to sell the "big old place" and move someplace smaller and easier to maintain.

Then a goddamn dogshit Corps levee fails at 4 feet below its design elevation. They find out they can't sell the house, they can't fix the house, there is no shop, there is no school, there is no wedding until things "get back to normal." Year after year, the Corps drags its goddamn dogshit feet and makes excuses after excuses and can't or won't bring the levees up to the standards ordered by Congress over 40 years ago. Insurance companies won't pay claims. Money allocated by Congress for community development block grants is held up in epic red tape.

Four years later, after enough broken promises to sink a ship, a president finally come to town to make more promises. And he doesn't even bother to understand the problem.

It's the levees, man! Fix the goddamn levees! Make the people feel safe to return. Make businesses feel safe to invest. Make the Corps do its f'ing job!

[RepugsOut08]

Man, I love it when the monitors finally allow someone to tell it like it is! Bravo!

[doctorj2u]

Bravo!

[KnowzyRowzy]

Spot on!

[scb24910]

Yeah, but we don't walk around saying "the levee break destroyed my house". The ruin of the city is blamed on "Katrina" every day. If he were to refer to the disaster as "the levee break", he would sound silly to people who live here. To everyone else, whatever...

[HoppinHill]

Using lazy shorthand and saying Katrina flooded New Orleans is like saying traffic wrecked that bridge in Minneapolis.

Both Katrina and the traffic revealed structural flaws. Both exposed blatant civil engineering incompetence.

And in the case of New Orleans, the engineers worked for YOUR Army Corps.

[HoppinHill]

As noted by author John McQuaid, using Katrina Shorthand gives "underlying associations of “natural disaster swamps city below sea level – what the heck are those people doing living down there?"

This is not a minor semantic point, he says.

Sure, lumping this altogether as "Katrina" is shorter, but it's not accurate. And the future of a million people depends on proper characterization of the flooding on August 29, 2005.

[Harry Shearer - Huffpost Blogger]

Plenty of my friends in town refer to the "federal flood", not "Katrina"...

[RepugsOut08]

It really is important how it's referred to, and "federal flood" is the description I'm adopting from now on.
I wonder how far along health care reform would be, if Obama and the Dems referred to it as "Medicare for All" rather than the lame "Public Option?"
But then that would assume they were ever really serious about health care reform, wouldn't it?

[Stuart]

I do say "when the floodwalls fell over". At first it took conscious effort resist using Katrina as a shorthand catch phrase, but it's become second nature.

"Floodwalls fell over" carries several truths with it:

I say "floodwalls" instead of "levees", because we do have levees that work well. They're just along the Mississippi, not the lake. That undercuts the "it's impossible to protect against Mother Nature" argument; the Corps has done it since the 1930's. Katrina did generate a storm surge, but it was the same height as river flood stages and lasted hours, not weeks.

I say "fell over" because that's what they did. In the majority of the cases, they weren't "overwhelmed" or "overtopped", they just fell over. And in cases where they were overtopped, they disintegrated down to their bases. Think of an upstairs bathtub: If it overflows for a few minutes, you'll get a few water stains on the ceiling. But if the side cracks open and 100 gallons cascade out, you could call that a Federal flood.

[Bienville]

The Corps has done it far longer than the 1930s. Read _Rising Tide_ by John Barry.

There was a river control board that included Army commissioned officers and civilians, although the civilians were in the minority. Later, the Army Corps of Engineers, a civilian branch under direction of commissioned officers took over. By 1927, the river levee system was exactly what the Corps wanted it to be - a levees-only project from the major tributaries to the Gulf. Then the Great Flood of 1927 broke the levees-only concept for the River. That's when - in the 1930s - that they conceived the various spillways, floodways and other control and relief structures that they built over the next few decades. Bonnet Carre spillway is one of those.

They need to kill the levees-only concept for hurricane flood control now. Someone said build a waffle, not a bowl. Exactly right. No army fortification consists of a single line of defense. No hurricane protection system should consist of a single line of defense either.

Incidentally, the River hasn't flooded the City since EIGHTEEN-40.

[HoppinHill]

Even Mississippi residents, envious of the attention Louisiana has received since August 2005, even THEY point out that metro New Orleans wasn't "struck by Katrina" but was flooded by levee failure.

And Mississippi isn't exactly enamored with the folks in LA.

[Matt7]

Why, in dire situations, do search and rescue workers "call out" to the victims being rescued, saying things like "hang in there" "we're coming to get you" "help is on the way"? If they're going to rescue them, why not just DO something, or shut up about it already and go home. What's the POINT? Those are JUST WORDS.

Well, as it turns out, people are human after all. And there's something about hope, and knowing that help is coming, that gives you the strength and fortitude to hang in there until help actually arrives.

People in the Gulf Coast have not heard from THEIR PRESIDENT in a long time -- not that help is on the way, that there IS help to be had, or that he even knows they EXIST. Living in seriously "deep red" country they rarely, if ever, hear anything positive about this President/­Administra­tion (F0X and Thugs "rule" in bayou country). So, for this President -- who now even looks like many of them by the way -- to come and say to them, "you are an important part of this country, we've not forgotten you, and we'll help you to get stronger" is a boost and a balm. Specific questions can now be directed to a concerned/caring government.

How arrogant and selfish of you; overfed on his words, secure in the probability that YOUR state can recover from this ECONOMIC catastrophe, to try to minimize or deny the effect and the message of hope, for

[Matt7]

. . . don't know where it went, but the last word was, "THEM."

[cgoodie]

Fanned!

[CrescentCityRay]

I fanned Matt7 too.

[CrescentCityRay]

Yea you right. If the rescuer calls out "hang in there" or "help is coming" it provides an incentive for the rescuee to wait a little longer before giving up and putting a gun to their head.

[Imago]

Oh, fanned, too, Matt7!

[dsgeorge]

Most disturbing to me was Obama's answer to the man asking why there is no hospital after 4 years - that he would expect that from Bush, but not Obama - and Obama says "I wish I could write a check"??? Are you kidding me? After the government wrote checks to big banks, wall street and Detroit he doesn't have a check for a d am hospital?? That is not hope the people of New Orleans can believe - or change.

Cmon Mr President - you were appalled at Bush's response -- make some demands of your staff to get things moving -- I still believe you can - but you have to engage big time.

[kcinci]

ummm... it was congress that wrote and passed laws to let loose that money with no strings attached or accountability.

Prez officials have been to NO 35x in last 9 mo. $1.4B loosed from bureaucratic red tape and at work in NO and area. Army core on track for 2011 completion, although Harry seems to think that apparently it's being built all wrong.... but hey, all this is nothing, right?

Well, it now seems Joe Scarborough is on his way so NO is saved. Hope they'll all be very happy with him fixing the problem.

[Harry Shearer - Huffpost Blogger]

It's not me who thinks the Corps is making serious mistakes. Google Office of Special Counsel, check out their investigation of the whistleblower report by Maria Garzino, results of which have sat on President Obama's desk since June. I wouldn't care what my opinion is about defective pumps, but I do care what the OSC, their independent investigator, and Ms. Garzino say about them. And so, as a person who helped pay for defective pumps, should you.

[kcinci]

in addition.... why hasn't LA come in there and rebuilt a fully functioning hospital? Public hospitals historically are governed by state, not the fed.

[Harry Shearer - Huffpost Blogger]

Good question. Charity was flooded by the failure of the levees, and that means FEMA was legally bound to reimburse the state. There has ensued a long-running battle between the state and FEMA over the degree of destruction of Charity: the state says 100%, FEMA (and a group of doctors who worked at Charity and want the existing building repaired and retrofitted) say much less. This has dragged on, exacerbated by LSU's desire to build a brand-new hospital in another part of town, which would entail destroying a lot of historic houses. Welcome to New Orleans.

[CrescentCityRay]

IMO, this is an issue of greed on the parts of many state politicians and LSU. They don't seem to care about the health of New Orleans. Like many, they want to unfairly profit at that expense of the little guy and FEMA, understandably, is committed to prevent such abuse. It is a major problem, but it doesn't really matter long term if the Corps isn't forced to do their job right.

[underoath]

Does bobby Jindal, Mary Landreu , David vitter deserve any of the blame.

[Harry Shearer - Huffpost Blogger]

Did they when Bush was President?

[doctorj2u]

Thank you Harry for that comment.

[CrescentCityRay]

Jindal seems a little more two faced and seems to have inappropriate national aspirations compared to when campaigning for office, but no, in my view our senators, while sometimes embarrassing, have seemed to be trying as hard as they can to solve our most serious problems - adequate levee reconstruction and wetland restoration.

[HoppinHill]

Do Jindal, Landrieu or Vitter deserve blame for what? For the flooding? Because the answer to that is a resounding no.

In New Orleans, by federal mandate, responsibility for designing and building the flood protection belongs solely to YOUR Army Corps of Engineers.

http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d051050t.pdf

[Rao]

Harry has all the facts right. You can legitimately argue that Obama has only two hands and his problems are numerous and mind boggling. But to say Harry has no right to express his thoughts for the sake of solidarity is absolutely wrong. BTW Obama's speeches have become monotonous and boring. His speech in New Orleans as Harry dissected is stupid and misinformed. Much as we would love Obama and he is our only hope, it is important to tell him when he is talking through his other end.

Harry please go on fighting for this neglected New Orleans. I thank you for it.

[Pierpier]

Harry being right or wrong I'm not interested. But I'm sick and tired of these journalists who think the whole world is in their laptops, One thing Obama said right about today's journalism: it's 100% opinions. Not only. I would add it's 100% opinions on opinions. They believe to dominate the internet instead they have been engulfed by it: they are virtual reality.

[KnowzyRowzy]

Excellent comment!

[CrescentCityRay]

I gotta get around to reading the entire transcript. I was busy and only heard bits and pieces. When I heard him say the feds were at least "partially" responsible for our flooding, I felt ahuge sense of partial vindication. I slept better last night than I've slept for miserably months. Maybe I shouldn't read the entire transcripts.

I did read all of the Q&A's and they were very underwhelming. You gotta wonder if that part was totally staged. Geez, hardly anyone asked about anything critical. Why do they hate you? Pfft. What a waste of a potentially important question!

[HoppinHill]

It's true, the President did say later in the speech that "the feds were at least "partially" responsible for our flooding."

It was rather buried, and spoken in a general non-specific way, but yes, he did say it.

[Kitsuiko]

No, he didn't say Obama was misinformed. He said Obama's language didn't have enough bombast for his situation, effectively.

It's like a child who cracked a tooth right to the root getting really upset when that wound hurts as bad as anything they've ever felt and their parent saying "Here, let me get you something for that ouch." It's not that the parent is abandoning them when they leave into the house for the first aid kit (though there's a bit of accusation that the "parent" has abandon the child by going back inside looking for some tylenol and to phone a dentist). It's that they didn't agree their face was split open and gushing blood. It's that they didn't understand the pain was enough to cause them to black out.

We want our parents to scream and wail in pain and horror and fear because it hurts that much that it seems appropriate. But, you know, that doesn't really help us even if it may make us feel a little better. It just wastes time that should be used with tylenol, gauze and a call to the doctor.

[rich3324]

Obama needs to try and rescue Detroit. At least they would appreciate the efforts.

[GoCards1978]

You've got that right, considering we've been treated like the country's septic tank for the past 30 years. Still we feel your pain.

[olivesforbreakfast]

Thank you, Harry. Excellent post, as always.

[blackspeak]

This author is engaged in symantics... Did he real expect Obama to go into that level of detail during his speech???

[Harry Shearer - Huffpost Blogger]

Nope, I expected him to do more than deliver a fact-challenged speech, but to, with the aid of more technicall­y-knowledg­eable aides, deliver a clear message to the Corps: do it right this time. He's their commander, and they're making the same mistakes they made last time. Those were deadly mistakes.

[Pierpier]

how do you know he hasn't done so ? do you think his dealing with Katrina starts and ends with the speech ? Any serious judgment about the gvt and the reconstruction process in Lousiana would require a minimum of investigations. I can find out that half of N.O. is above sea-level and that OBAMA a speech with GOOGLE even from Scott-Amudsen Base on the South Pole. That's what I expect from commenters not from editorialists.

[Pierpier]

he's not an engineer, he's a politician. So expecting him to illustrate technically what building stronger means is unfair

[kingofscotts]

And how about when asked about the much needed hospital he replied "We can't simply write a check". When challenged by someone in the audience with "why not". Obama got cute and said "well there's this whole constitution thing"!!!

Arrogance.

Writing checks is all this administration has done. There didn't seem to be a problem with writing checks when it came to GM/Chrysler or the financial firms.

But now suddenly he has no power to instruct congress to work on legislation to get this MAJOR city a much needed hospital?

Please!

It's all lip service. Instead of visiting Mississippi which was actually hit by the storm he flew off to San Fran for a fundraiser? Talk about tone deaf. This is like deja vu. This is exactly the kind of nonsense Bush pulled.

[CrescentCityRay]

The big problem here, for all we know, is that the engineers allowed to bend the President's ear might be JUST the fibbing, under-smart, unethical, apparently corrupt, arse covering, greedy USACE. Furthermore, for all we know, his science and technology advisers might be getting the vast majority of their knowledge on our most important issues from the USACE. I want to know for sure someone like Garrett Graves from our state government is explaining things to him and his advisors or that they read fixthepump­­s.blogspo­t­.com and that they have at least read the OCS findings. I want to know why the Corps is being allowed to continue their bad behavior. This is a very frightening matter of life and death for my family, friends and neighbors.

So you might say - you never should have returned to the city. What makes you think I could have afforded to, or be willing to do anything else? After our schooling, we moved to dc for four years, but discovered we couldn't live anywhere but N.O. and be happy, being fish out of water and all. Financially and professionally we were succeeding at being quickly rising stars with ever increasing amazing unfathomable opportunities and bank accounts, but still we felt we absolutely had to return to n.o. and take unsatisfying career killing positions just to be back home.

[Bienville]

Mr. Shearer is also not an engineer. But, he has done an admirable job of learning the technical information any layman should know before participating in this discussion. The President could, and should, hope to do as well.

I don't expect this President, or any president, to become an engineer, but he should know enough about what engineers to know when he's being misled. Reading the ILIT Report Executive Summary (Google: "ILIT Berkeley") would be a tremendous start.