Amid the Ruins, a President Tries to Reconstruct His Image, Too

New York Times, September 16, 2005

By RICHARD W. STEVENSON

WASHINGTON, Sept. 15 - George W. Bush, whose standing for the last four years has rested primarily on issues of war and peace, introduced himself to the nation on Thursday night in an unfamiliar and somewhat uncomfortable new role: domestic president.

The violence of Hurricane Katrina and his faltering response to it have left to Mr. Bush the task not just of physically rebuilding a swath of the United States, but also of addressing issues like poverty and racial inequality that were exposed in such raw form by the storm.

The challenge would be immense for any president, but is especially so for Mr. Bush. He is scrambling to assure a shaken, angry nation not only that is he up to the task but also that he understands how much it disturbed Americans to see their fellow citizens suffering and their government responding so ineffectually.

So for nearly 30 minutes, he stood in a largely lifeless New Orleans and, to recast his presidency in response to one of the nation's most devastating disasters, sought to show that he understands the suffering. He spoke of housing and health care and job training. He reached with rhetorical confidence for the uplifting theme that out of tragedy can emerge a better society, and he groped for what he lost in the wind and water more than two weeks ago: his well-cultivated image as a strong leader.

It was not the president's most stirring speech, but it conveyed a sense of command far more than his off-key efforts in the days immediately after the storm, when he often seemed more interested in bucking up government officials than in addressing the dire situation confronting hundreds of thousands of displaced and desperate people.

But if the speech helped him clear his first hurdle by projecting the aura of a president at the controls, it probably did not, by itself, get him over a second: his need to erase or at least blur the image of a White House that was unresponsive to the plight of some of the country's most vulnerable citizens and failed to manage the government competently.

Whether he can put a floor under his falling poll numbers, restore his political authority and move ahead with his agenda will determine not just the course of his second term but the strength of his party, which by virtue of having controlled both the White House and the Congress for more than five years has trouble credibly pinning the blame elsewhere.

"He was giving a speech as if the nation were disheartened and worried and had lost its spirit, but that's not what people were thinking," said Mickey Edwards, a former Republican congressman from Oklahoma. "They were thinking, why did the government screw up?"

To those storm victims in need of immediate help and to those who face the continued upheaval of their lives for weeks or months or longer, he offered an expansive government safety net of specific programs, from paying the costs of reuniting families to a commitment to moving everyone out of shelters into housing by mid-October. Doing so marked a distinct shift for a president whose perceived hostility or indifference to government's role in social welfare programs - manifested in budgets that have sought to cut such programs or curtail them - has long been a flash point in his relationship with poor and minority voters.

But if this was big government, it was at least in part on Mr. Bush's ideological terms: federal reimbursement to allow displaced students to attend private and parochial schools, tax-free business zones, a call for charitable and religious groups to continue with relief work. Having no choice but to open the fiscal floodgates, he sought to reassure nervous conservatives that he would guard against fraud and waste.

When it came to the issues hardest to address and most in need of sustained commitment, new ideas and risk-taking leadership - the gap between rich and poor, its causes and consequences, its racial components - he was less effective.

"We have a duty to confront this poverty with bold action," he said.

Yet he spoke of "deep, persistent poverty" as something the nation had seen on television rather than as a condition that many citizens had been living in for generations. He defined the problem as regional rather than national in scope, and offered only regional rather than national solutions.

"The reconstruction, massive as it is, is really the easy part," said Bruce Reed, president of the Democratic Leadership Council, an organization of centrist Democrats. "Rebuilding confidence, especially among the poor and vulnerable, is going to be extraordinarily difficult."

In dealing with the more concrete aspects of the job ahead, Mr. Bush slipped comfortably into the language that he has used as commander in chief to comfort and exhort the nation as it has waged war, hailing those Americans who have "served and sacrificed" and vowing that the government "will stay as long as it takes" to get the job done, an echo, almost word for word, of his formulation for how long the United States will remain in Iraq.

The president forthrightly linked the failures in response to the storm to a vulnerability to a terrorist attack and said he wanted to know "all the facts" about what had gone wrong.

Mr. Bush called for unity in tackling the problems. But with only a camera before him, and New Orleans silent around him, he could draw no strength or self-assurance from the cheers of a united nation, as he did when he addressed a joint session of Congress nine days after the Sept. 11 attacks. Not only did his own stagecraft leave him alone in the spotlight, but whatever good will flowed to him across the aisle in those moments after the terrorist attacks is long gone, a victim of a polarized political culture that he did not create but to which he has often contributed.

For Mr. Bush, this was a moment for the country to turn away from what he and his aides have dismissively labeled "the blame game" toward a hopeful vision of a rebuilt Gulf Coast and a smarter government. But it is not yet clear that his performance will stanch the political wounds he has suffered or ensure that he can avoid being hobbled through his second term, not just by what he lost in the faltering response to Hurricane Katrina but by the rising death toll in Iraq, sky-high energy prices and worrisome deficits.