Sunday, September 04, 2005
8:07 pm | Posted by
Mark Chataway |
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Thanks to the BBC we may know a bit about the Republican game plan for dealing with the fall-out from New Orleans. Shawn Steel, past president of the California Republican Party and a trusted Bush operative, was on Radio Five Live last night. He probably laid out more of the response than domestic Republican spokespeople are doing at the moment. As an exercise in communications, it was bold but predictable. Here are the key points.
• The victims are to blame. Nearly all had access to cars but they took a calculated risk and decided to stay. There’s nothing wrong with taking risks, he seemed to say, but people shouldn’t start crying when their risk-taking goes wrong.
• New Orleans is to blame. “The murder rate is ten times higher than the average for US cities” so a uniquely awful criminal underclass was ready to take advantage of the disaster in ways which would be unthinkable elsewhere. Besides which, the City Council is legendary for corruption. They chose not to reinforce the flood defences. There was no direct criticism of the mayor but many suggestions that he headed a deeply corrupt organisation.
• Alabama and Mississippi were also hard hit but did a much better job of recovering, illustrating that the state governments there (run by Republicans) coped better than that in Louisiana (with a Democratic governor)
• The Federalist system of the US meant that the US Government could not step in until the Governor asked and in Louisiana she never did.
Don’t expect to see the full force of these arguments in the US while there are pictures on TV of the corpses of dead old ladies still in their wheelchairs: effective propagandists know that it is much easier to change recollections of history than perceptions of the present, especially when those perceptions have taken such a strong hold. In a month or so this will, though, undoubtedly be the approved White House version of what happened during and after the hurricane.
It seems unlikely that the White House will get away with this but who would ever have imagined they could escape so lightly from the analyses of what happened in the run-up to the attack on Iraq?
• The victims are to blame. Nearly all had access to cars but they took a calculated risk and decided to stay. There’s nothing wrong with taking risks, he seemed to say, but people shouldn’t start crying when their risk-taking goes wrong.
• New Orleans is to blame. “The murder rate is ten times higher than the average for US cities” so a uniquely awful criminal underclass was ready to take advantage of the disaster in ways which would be unthinkable elsewhere. Besides which, the City Council is legendary for corruption. They chose not to reinforce the flood defences. There was no direct criticism of the mayor but many suggestions that he headed a deeply corrupt organisation.
• Alabama and Mississippi were also hard hit but did a much better job of recovering, illustrating that the state governments there (run by Republicans) coped better than that in Louisiana (with a Democratic governor)
• The Federalist system of the US meant that the US Government could not step in until the Governor asked and in Louisiana she never did.
Don’t expect to see the full force of these arguments in the US while there are pictures on TV of the corpses of dead old ladies still in their wheelchairs: effective propagandists know that it is much easier to change recollections of history than perceptions of the present, especially when those perceptions have taken such a strong hold. In a month or so this will, though, undoubtedly be the approved White House version of what happened during and after the hurricane.
It seems unlikely that the White House will get away with this but who would ever have imagined they could escape so lightly from the analyses of what happened in the run-up to the attack on Iraq?
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