Clueless

Remember the incident where the President's father was amazed by that breathtaking invention of the future, the supermarket checkout scanner? By all accounts, his son's Administration has assiduously avoided falling into that sort of trap. And, until now, it's been successful: The Administration might be accused of many things, but tone-deafness has rarely if ever been one of them. Particularly in times of crisis, the White House has been very careful to ensure that the President's demeanor, staging, and comments put him in the best possible light.

Until today. At the very moment when the President seemed as oblivious to the needs of the American people as he has ever been, and in the midst of his eleventh-hour efforts to erase that impression, this was what the President had to say:

"We've got a lot of rebuilding to do. First, we're going to save lives and stabilize the situation. And then we're going to help these communities rebuild. The good news is -- and it's hard for some to see it now -- that out of this chaos is going to come a fantastic Gulf Coast, like it was before. Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott's house -- he's lost his entire house -- there's going to be a fantastic house. And I'm looking forward to sitting on the porch. (Laughter.)"

No, this is not a story from the Onion. Not even the Onion, I suspect, would have the gumption to invent something like that in such a time of crisis and tragedy. The link -- parenthetical note about laughter and all -- is to an honest-to-goodness page on the White House web site. Staggering, no? For five days and nights, the Nation has been witness to devastation among a population that is predominantly poor and African-American. And the singular example of loss on which the President chooses to focus is an oceanfront property of none other than Trent Lott! Well, I don't doubt that the President will, in fact, one day sit on the grand porch of the rebuilt Lott oceanfront (second) home, sipping an iced tea and reminiscing about the good ol' days. But isn't this an especially inauspicious moment to be calling that image to mind? Andrew Sullivan's short take pretty much sums it up:

"Just think of that quote for a minute; and the laughter that followed. The poor and the black are dying, dead, drowned and desperate in New Orleans and elsewhere. But the president manages to talk about the future 'fantastic' porch of a rich, powerful white man who only recently resigned his position because he regretted the failure of Strom Thurmond to hold back the tide of racial desegregation."

As it turns out, Bush 41's scanner incident apparently was, at least in large part, an urban legend. 43's much more disturbing gaffe may, too, become legendary -- but it's all-too-true, and it speaks volumes.

UPDATE: It turns out that's not the only example this week of otherworldly comments by the President. The previous day, the President said this on Good Morning America, in explanation of the slow and inadequate federal response: "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees." To the extent this was intended -- as appears likely -- to convey the notion that the government was taken unawares of the likely damage resulting from this hurricane, it is the furthest thing from the truth. As Mark Kleiman exhaustively demonstrates in this post, it has been known with certainty, for years, that a hurricane such as this could and would leave New Orleans under water and without power, water, or other services for weeks or months: "Every study of this issue for at least two decades has drawn this conclusion, and there are no engineering or official studies known to me -- none -- arguing that the flooding we have observed would not occur, or that it was so unlikely that disaster planning should ignore it." And more than a week ago, it was clear to all who looked that there was a very good chance Katrina would be the source of such a disaster. That serious relief should only be arriving now, almost a week after landfall, therefore is, in Kleiman's words, "an historic conjunction of incompetence, unconcern, malfeasance, ignorance, and/or stupidity. Period."