How did CLINTON Handle Hurricanes?

[liberalpragmatist]

Whatever you think about Bill Clinton's remarks today, stop trying to claim that Clinton hates the people of NOLA or is selling them out.

If Clinton were still president, or for that matter Gore or Kerry, this disaster would never have happened. The Hurricane may well have, but the ensuing disaster would not have.

From washingtonmonthly.com:

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2005_08/007014.php

...Because FEMA had 10 times the proportion of political appointees of most other government agencies, the poorly chosen Bush appointees had a profound effect on the performance of the agency. Sam Jones, the mayor of Franklin, Louisiana, says he was shocked to find that the damage assessors sent to his town a week after Hurricane Andrew had no disaster experience whatsoever. "They were political appointees, members of county Republican parties hired on an as-needed basis....They were terribly inexperienced."

In 1992 the GAO recommended sweeping changes in FEMA's mission and organization, and the newly elected Bill Clinton took the GAO's recommendations seriously. The first thing he did was appoint as FEMA's director James Lee Witt, a former construction company owner who had worked with Clinton in Arkansas as director of the state Office of Emergency Services, where he earned high marks for his management of three presidential disaster declarations, including two major floods in 1990 and 1991.

Witt resurrected FEMA's reputation and turned it into a highly respected agency, but via email, Franklin wonders if the widely reported problems regarding federal response to Hurricane Katrina are related to George Bush's rather more patronage minded approach to staffing critical positions:

The difficulties of coordination seem to indicate we've returned to the bad old days where the FEMA administrator position is given away on the basis of political favor, rather than hard experience. The whole story of FEMA's response to Katrina has yet to be written, but it has always troubled me that Bush has appointed, in succession, his 2000 campaign manager and an Oklahoma lawyer whose only emergency management experience prior to joining FEMA was as an assistant city manager.

***

Separately, how Clinton and his staff planned for a hurricane in New Orleans:

http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/12528233.htm

... in the 1990s, in planning for a New Orleans nightmare scenario, the federal government figured it would pre-deploy nearby ships with pumps to remove water from the below-sea-level city and have hospital ships nearby, said James Lee Witt, who was FEMA director under President Clinton.

Federal officials said a hospital ship would leave from Baltimore on Friday.

"These things need to be planned and prepared for; it just doesn't look like it was," said Witt, a former Arkansas disaster chief who won bipartisan praise on Capitol Hill during his tenure.

[Inland]

1. I want good, effective government again.

I want a government that produces plans and results, not excuses.

[Autonomy]

2. Me too. Let's get Big Dawg back in office!

Or Al Gore. Just as good.

[txaslftist]

3. But...but...but...the Clenis.....

[LeftyElvis]

4. Clinton and Gore

were on top of global warming; this asswipe is not. The storm may have never hit if chimpco would paid attention to global warming. The Day After Tomorrow? Not so irrelevant now, is it; chimp face?

[Roland99]

5. How did he handle the flood in North Dakota?

[Inland]

7. They were talking about that on the Ed Shultz show

Clinton went up there and spoke to people.

But there was no comparison, destruction wise.

[Gman]

6. I remember thtat FEMA got blasted terribly when it's response

to some disaster was inept to some disaster way back then. I remember very well that Clinton reformed FEMA to be an efficient well oiled machine that handled any crisis like clockwork.