As if we needed more reminders about why not only should Gov. Kathleen Blanco not be reelected if she chooses to run for governor again, but why she never should have been elected in the first place, when she whines about immediate post-hurricane events:
The talking heads in Washington started attacking Bush with his inaction. People who worked for Bush decided he wouldn't be the only heavy. They didn't like him getting beat on. They said, “Why my president? Why not that little woman governor?” We had a distinct shift in questions mid-week from the national press corps. [Presidential adviser Karl] Rove turned the stable of [conservative] talking heads on us.
I see, so it was the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy that caused her to fail to implement the state’s inadequate evacuation plan, to appear clueless as to what to do (even as in the year previous a simulation and the real thing should have trained her what to expect and do), to run around like the sky was falling waiting for somebody to rescue the state except (as her e-mail messages showed) when trying to find ways to reverse her increasingly negative image at the expense of providing real leadership, and then to try to shift the blame on anybody else since. No doubt as 2007’s election day approaches she’ll eventually get around to blaming the VRWC for sending the hurricanes to ruin her term in office.
This blind, narrow, parochial, conspiratorial mindset married with a realization that political power was slipping away in those early days of Sept., 2005 regrettably made her put politics before responsibility and leadership:
The White House, she believes, also capitalized on the mixed signals she sent in response to Bush's request that she federalize Louisiana's National Guard. The request came during the president's first visit, on the Friday after the storm. Edwin Edwards … has said she should have accepted the offer and put the onus for the mess on Bush. That strategy, Blanco counters, would have meant shirking her responsibility.
Instead, she says she rejected the request because she didn't believe it was needed. “If you federalize them, they ... would have lost the capacity to back up local law enforcement.”
Like not having them under federal command was really helping to stop looting….
She suspects that Bush administration officials, knowing this, wanted to have the full forces under their command to take credit for improving things in New Orleans.
A real leader would not have cared who got the credit for easing the state’s pain. An incompetent one turns down the optimal strategy and wastes time until events force things on her. And also blames the negative impression that people are getting about her on this issue as a “communications problem.” (Adding to the blame game, she singles out New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin for being “used” by the VRWC against her – although just a few months ago, she was singing a completely different tune.)
Blanco’s real problem is she has always seen herself as a fuzzily-liberal den mother to the great unwashed citizenry who she thinks are better off having government to decide and do things for them than to trust them. It hasn’t occurred to her that a large number of them have figured out her problems don’t come from these unseen forces and procedural difficulties, but that her policy mistakes and the negative impression they leave emanate from her own shortcomings borne of a politician whose worldview was wrong for Louisiana before the hurricane disasters, and doubly validated by the events spawned afterwards.
When you try to shift blame, all that usually does it make even more obvious you’re to blame in the first place. Until Blanco realizes that, she's continues to be stuck on stupid.
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