Why Hurricane Katrina Was The Defining Event Of The Failed Bush Presidency

Looking back over the long sweep of the last eight years, Hurricane Katrina is the defining event of the Age of Bush.

That may seem crazy given seemingly larger events during his tenure -- the 9/11 attacks, Iraq war and now the worst economic crisis in 75 years -- but it was the winds of Katrina that tore the Bush presidency from its moorings.

George Bush's first-term mandate following an election that he arguably stole was iffy to begin with. As the fever chart from the Pew Research Center For the American People & The Press shows, he began his first term with an approval rating of only slightly above 50 percent.

The president did nothing of consequence in the months before 9/11. The events of that horrible day fundamentally reshaped his image, not anything that he did himself, and his approval rating shot up to 86 percent.

But his ratings soon began heading downward as support for the Iraq invasion and ouster of a regime that had nothing to do with 9/11 soured, no WMD were found, American troops were not home by Christmas, the occupation begat an insurgency that targeted the occupiers, and then a civil war.

Bush was polling below 50 percent by November 2004 and he barely won re-election against a weak challenger. The privatization of Social Security, his major second-term initiative, was dead and gone by the time that Katrina, a Category 5 hurricane, roared up the Gulf of Mexico and across New Orleans on August 28, 2005.

Katrina was different than 9/11 and Iraq -- a nonpartisan cataclysm that if Bush had handled well could and probably would have turned things around.

Instead, it revealed in real time who Bush really was as the eyes of the world focused on New Orleans and Washington: A president equal parts aloof and inept.

Bush had ignored warnings that Katrina was going to be bad. Then in the wake of the storm, he flew over New Orleans aboard Air Force One en route to Washington from another extended vacation at his Texas ranch. He joked during the overflight about partying in the city during his college days and countermanded aides who wanted the plane to land as an act of support for the storm's nearly one million victims.

Once back in the White House, aides had to force Bush to look at television news footage of the devastation before he finally roused himself to act. They were prompted by allegations that the lack of a response to a horror visited upon a unique and revered city bordered on the criminal.

When Bush did decamp to New Orleans three days later, his "You're Doing a Heck of a Job, Brownie" backslap of FEMA director Michael Brown, who despite the lessons of 9/11 had been given the government's most important disaster-relief job soley on the basis of his Republican fundraising chops, was darkly comical.

In the weeks before Katrina, Pew found that 60 percent of Americans viewed Bush as a strong and decisive leader. Three weeks after the storm, that was down to 49 percent. Meanwhile, his approval rating plunged into the 40s and then into the 30s. Today it is hovering in the mid 20s, lower than President Nixon's after Watergate.

The last eight years have reinforced something hugely positive for me. Americans are an imperfect but good people. But they do not like being manipulated, and Hurricane Katrina confirmed what many had suspected: "Compassionate conservatism" was nothing more than a focus group-tested talking point for a deeply cynical president who valued ideology and loyalty over competence.

Many of us did not like George Bush to begin with; still, he was our president. But once that truth was out, there was no turning back.