Never has the term Lame Duck been more appropriate. The rest of the waterlogged president's term in office will be played out in the ebb of Katrina. As the waters slowly recede, so will George W. Bush and his administration.
As I argue in my latest L.A. Weekly column, there's a certain unavoidable political symmetry between Mexico City's killer quake of twenty years ago and Catastrophe Katrina.
The Mexican tumbler shook off the facade of an inefficient but benign democracy and revealed instead the glaring indifference and generalized corruption of the PRI party that had ruled for more than a half century. It took fifteen more years, but the dissatisfaction born in the rubble of the quake led eventually to the PRI's historic defeat.
The American post-Katrina situation is hardly identical. But the similarities are too many and too stark to avoid.
Similar to Mexico’s PRI, Bush has — until now — somehow miraculously survived the most repugnant of his own policies: the massive tax-cut transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich, the looting and bankrupting of the national treasury, the policies of torture at Gitmo and Abu Ghraib, and the sacrificing of thousands of young Americans in a disastrous and unprovoked foreign war. To paraphrase Don Rumsfeld, the unknowable is rarely knowable. And how would George W. Bush — or Karl Rove, for that matter — have ever known that, in the end, the administration’s political undoing would stem from none of the above, but rather would flow from a flood — from, indeed, a deluge of truly biblical proportions?
Hardly a time to gloat. Bush's political opposition has to yet make a compelling case for their own redemption. The Democrats, too, should take a gander at Mexican history. After Vicente Fox finally displaced the PRI from the presidential palace five years ago he also failed to present a convincing alternative to the past decades of misgovernment. And today the old PRI is once again resurgent.
Sinking George W. Bush isn't enough. We must also find a way to refloat our national hopes.
Make sure to visit my daily site at MarcCooper.com