Two-In-Three Critical Of Bush's Relief Efforts

[Neil D]

Summary of Findings

The American public is highly critical of President Bush's handling of Hurricane Katrina relief efforts. Two-in-three Americans (67%) believe he could have done more to speed up relief efforts, while just 28% think he did all he could to get them going quickly. At the same time, Bush's overall job approval rating has slipped to 40% and his disapproval rating has climbed to 52%, among the highest for his presidency. Uncharacteristically, the president's ratings have slipped the most among his core constituents ­ Republicans and conservatives.

However, the public also faults state and local governments, as well as the federal government, for the response to Katrina and its aftermath. While 58% think the federal government has done only a fair or poor job in reacting to the devastation along the Gulf Coast, about half (51%) give sub-par ratings to state and local governments in Louisiana and Mississippi.

The storm and recent spike in gas prices have triggered a major shift in public priorities. For the first time since the 9/11 terror attacks, a majority of Americans (56%) say it is more important for the president to focus on domestic policy than the war on terrorism. While most Americans are already feeling the pinch from higher gas prices, nearly half (46%) say they are very concerned the hurricane will send the nation into an economic recession.

The latest national survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, conducted Sept. 6-7 among 1,000 Americans, finds that the hurricane has had a profound psychological impact on the public. Fully 58% of respondents say they have felt depressed because of what's happened in areas affected by the storm. In recent years, this percentage is only surpassed by the 71% reporting depression in a survey taken just days the Sept. 11 attacks. But it is significantly greater than the percentage who reported feeling depressed in the opening days of the current war in Iraq.

Half of those polled (50%) say they have felt angry because of what happened in areas hard hit by the hurricane. But overall opinion on this measure obscures a substantial racial divide in reactions to the disaster ­ as many as 70% of African Americans say they have felt angry, compared with 46% of whites. Blacks are twice as likely as whites to know people directly affected by the hurricane and are generally much more critical of the government's response to the crisis.

In addition, blacks and whites draw very different lessons from the tragedy. Seven-in-ten blacks (71%) say the disaster shows that racial inequality remains a major problem in the country; a majority of whites (56%) say this was not a particularly important lesson of the disaster. More striking, there is widespread agreement among blacks that the government's response to the crisis would have been faster if most of the storm's victims had been white; fully two-thirds of African Americans express that view. Whites, by an even wider margin (77%-17%), feel this would not have made a difference in the government's response.

The rest of the article from the Pew Research Group

[Dr. Shane]

Bush himself is critical of the way it was handled so why are only two in three of the American public? I guess that goes to show you how much the average person pays attention to what is going on.

[Ron Lambert]

People will become less critical of tbe president and more critical of the state government in Louisiana as the facts become better known, that the federal intervention was put off by Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco and other state officials, who refused to grant permission for the feds to move in--how Bush pressed Blanco to hurry up and grant permission, even bringing the paperwork allowing it for her to sign when he visited the first time, and after a night of review, she and her administration decided not to sign it. Partisan politics likely played a role here, since the state government is firmly in the hands of a Democrat machine--virtually all the elected officials from the governor on down are Democrats--and of course their party has been telling people that Republican George Bush is the boogeyman. So they were loathe to allow the president to federalize the Louisiana National Guard and take control of the relief efforts. This is in addition to the orders Governor Blanco gave forbidding FEMA and the Red Cross from moving in food, bottled water, and supplies which they already had loaded in trucks, ready to deliver to the Superdome and New Orleans Community center the day BEFORE hurricane Katrina hit. (These facts were stated by the mayor of New Orleans in an interview with Brit Hume on Fox News, and have recently been confirmed by the Red Cross, that they were forbidden to move in by state authorities.) In view of these facts, the criticism of the federal government for its slow response, and especially the criticism of FEMA for being "unprepared" and slow to respond, become really ironic.