The Katrina Administration

Posted on September 19, 2005

Former Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry fired a shot across the bows of the White House today in a stinging address at Brown University. Excerpts of the text of the speech were in an email sent to supporters. Kerry is quite a writers: the missive is just full of zingers, such as defining the Bush Administration as "The Katrina Administration."

Katrina is a symbol of all this administration does and doesn't do. Michael Brown -- or Brownie as the President so famously thanked him for doing a heck of a job -- Brownie is to Katrina what Paul Bremer is to peace in Iraq; what George Tenet is to slam dunk intelligence; what Paul Wolfowitz is to parades paved with flowers in Baghdad; what Dick Cheney is to visionary energy policy; what Donald Rumsfeld is to basic war planning; what Tom Delay is to ethics; and what George Bush is to "Mission Accomplished" and "Wanted Dead or Alive." The bottom line is simple: the "we'll do whatever it takes" administration doesn't have what it takes to get the job done.
This is the Katrina administration.

Where were all these zingers in Kerry's stump speeches? During the post-mortems of the campaign, it came out that Kerry deleted all the best lines from his speeches because he thought they were schmaltzy. Or something like that. The sad truth of American politics is that schmaltzy plays in the heartland. Zingers and catch phrases are a good thing. Leave the reasoned policy discussions to the smoke-free backrooms of the Democratic party, the think-tanks and those who blog the media and politics, and who love a good wonkfest. Because when you run a campaign, you need to boil it down for the average voter who just doesn't have the time (sadly enough) to crunch the numbers and hear all the boring details....The Katrina Administration. It's catchy.