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McCain faults Bush's response to New Orleans hurricane
Ticks off a long list of mistakes by the current administration, saying there were 'unqualified people in charge and there was a total misreading of the dimensions of the disaster'.
- By Elisabeth Bumiller
- Published: 00:35 April 26, 2008
Baton Rouge, Louisiana: Senator John McCain took direct aim at the Bush administration on Thursday as he stood in the lower 9th Ward of New Orleans, the area hardest hit by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and declared the handling of the disaster "terrible and disgraceful" and pledged that it would never happen again.
McCain ticked off a long list of mistakes by the current administration, saying there were "unqualified people in charge, there was a total misreading of the dimensions of the disaster, there was a failure of communications".
The pointed critique was one of his harshest assessments yet of the Bush presidency and came as he has been moving to corral restive elements of the Republican Party - and the Bush donor network - behind his candidacy.
Asked at a news conference outside St David's Catholic Church if he traced the failure of leadership straight to the top, McCain, who has said he wants to campaign with President George W. Bush, said emphatically, "yes."
Later, McCain told reporters on his campaign bus that if the disaster had happened on his watch, he would have landed his plane "at the nearest Air Force Base and come over personally". Bush first surveyed the damage when he flew over New Orleans in Air Force One when coming home from his Texas ranch two days after the hurricane, an act that was widely criticised.
McCain has criticised the government's handling of Katrina in the past, including the actions of Congress, which he did again on Thursday, but he has not used such sharp language, and not in the 9th Ward during a presidential campaign with a phalanx of reporters and camera crews in tow.
America's forgotten places
McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, made his remarks toward the end of his tour of "America's forgotten places." Through the week, he has gone to places rarely visited by Republicans, including Appalachia and the Black Belt of Alabama, and has sought to project himself to moderates, independents and swing voters as a different kind of Republican from the one who currently occupies the White House.
Before his news conference, McCain, of Arizona, spent about a half hour on a walking tour of rubble and still-dilapidated houses in the 9th Ward, all recorded by two packed, slow-moving flatbed trucks of reporters and camera crews who rumbled just ahead of the candidate and his wife, Cindy.
Democrats immediately criticised McCain for grandstanding and portraying himself as a hero of the Gulf Coast when he had voted against billions of dollars for hurricane victims. "Touring the 9th Ward with reporters can't hide the fact that John McCain voted against billions of dollars in Katrina recovery efforts," Howard Dean, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said in a statement.
In May 2006, McCain was among 21 Republicans to vote against a Bill that included $29 billion (Dh106.5 billion) for Gulf Coast hurricane recovery; it passed the Senate with 71 votes in favour. His campaign responded that he opposed the Bill because of unnecessary spending in it and that he was committed to the recovery of New Orleans.
McCain made his first trip to New Orleans after Katrina in March 2006, when he stood in front of a destroyed house and called for more federal money for Louis-iana's housing recovery than the $4.2 billion that had already been supported by Bush. "I am for doing what is necessary - $4.2 billion, $10.5 billion, $50.5 billion," McCain said at the time. "The $4.2 billion is not the end of the requirement."
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