Bush and Katrina

September 6, 2005; WSJ Page A28

The White House is slowly recovering from its first-week stumbles responding to Katrina, with President Bush taking his second trip to New Orleans yesterday. His quick elevation of John Roberts to Chief Justice is another welcome sign of energy. But Mr. Bush can't afford to stop there, because the aftermath of Katrina poses a threat to his entire second term.

We aren't referring here to the storm surge of recrimination blaming post-Katrina problems on everything from Iraq, to tax cuts, to his refusal to endorse the Kyoto Protocol. The American public knows this was an epic natural disaster and won't fall for political opportunism. By the same token, Americans also won't have much patience for White House claims that state and local officials were the greater incompetents. Yes, Louisiana needed a Rudy Giuliani. But what Americans want now is proof that their government understands the nature of the challenge and is acting forcefully to meet it.

On this point, Mr. Bush is going to have to recognize the obvious initial failure of the Department of Homeland Security in its first big post-9/11 test. The President created this latest huge federal bureaucracy, against the advice of many of us, and we're still waiting for evidence that it has done anything but reshuffle the Beltway furniture. If FEMA can't now handle the diaspora out of New Orleans to Houston, Baton Rouge and other cities, the political retribution will be fierce.

Notably, the New Orleans mess improved only after the Pentagon got involved. Though the military is normally barred from domestic law enforcement by the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, Defense officials have been doing a lot of creative thinking about what they can do and what the public now expects post-September 11. The press corps might even want to report on that thinking, which is contained in a June 2005 report, "Strategy for Homeland Defense and Civil Support." If he ever fires anyone, Mr. Bush could do worse than find a few more Donald Rumsfelds as replacements.

Mr. Bush will also need to guide the rebuilding choices for New Orleans and the Mississippi delta. We're hearing a lot these days about the need to restore barrier marshlands, often from the same people who have long hated the Army Corps of Engineers that would help restore them. But clearly there is an issue of how much federal money to pour into a city that is below sea-level and would still be vulnerable to another Category Four or Five storm.

Mr. Bush should name one or more people, in or out of his Administration, to sort through the ideas and avoid what will be the liberal/GOP Congressional impulse to throw money at everything. An alternative would be to name the entire stricken area an enterprise zone for some period of time, which would offer both tax incentives and regulatory waivers to stimulate reinvestment. There's a danger here of tax breaks for floating casinos, but the greater risk is spending $20 billion or more solely on the priorities of local politicians.

Which brings us to Mr. Bush's broader domestic agenda. The President has admirably refused to give up on Social Security, but Katrina makes reform impossible in the near term. The more urgent Presidential priority now is to take steps to keep the U.S. economy growing. Last week's regulatory moves on fuel emissions and the Strategic Petroleum Reserve are already helping on gasoline supplies, and the price shocks are an opportunity to prod Congress to remove obstacles to more oil and natural gas drilling.

Economic leadership also means instructing Americans on the link between tax cutting and the economic vitality needed to fund both Katrina relief and the war on terror. Predictably, the Bush tax cuts are under attack for denying revenue to the government and because they don't require "sacrifice" in wartime. But the truth is that federal revenues are rising by an estimated $262 billion -- or roughly 14% -- this year thanks to the growth that followed the 2003 tax cuts. Republicans have been far too defensive on tax cuts, and Katrina is an opening to explain their necessity and to push for making them permanent.

What's really at stake in the coming months is the Republican claim to be the governing party. That claim has been based in part on the assertion that energetic government doesn't also have to be big government. Mr. Bush's refusal to restrain a free-spending GOP Congress has already undermined the latter, while Katrina is stretching the credibility of the former. Democrats will spend the next year asserting that at least they'll spend tax dollars on levees in New Orleans, rather than Alaskan bridges to nowhere.

As the initial polls are showing, most Americans aren't yet blaming Mr. Bush for Katrina's aftermath. But with war in Iraq and terrorism, rising energy prices and now a natural disaster, these are also anxious times. Voters will forgive a President many mistakes but no leader can survive a public judgment that he is unsure of himself and hostage to events. We've thought for some time that Mr. Bush's reticence was hurting him on Iraq, and that he needs to be both more visible and more assertive in making his case to Americans. After Katrina, we'd say that's imperative.