2008 : Bush Blew it on Katrina, But Where Were the Progressives?

Speaker Nancy Pelosi in Chalmette, La., Aug. 14, 2007. Pelosi and a congressional delegation of Democrats were visiting Hurricane Katrina ravaged areas. With her are House Majority Whip James E. Clyburn, D-S.C. (right) and U.S. Rep. Charlie Melancon, D-La. Photo by Dave Martin / AP.
'On one of the biggest human rights tragedies within our own borders -- a hurricane which devastated an area the size of Great Britain, killed 1,800 people and uprooted a million residents -- progressives had little to offer.'
By Chris Kromm / December 30, 2008

What was it that finally turned public sentiment against President Bush and the Republicans after their post-9/11 rise in popularity? Not the Iraq war or Abu Ghraib, issues which rightfully became focal points for progressive opposition. According to Bush's own aides, it was Washington's failed response to the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina

That's the finding of "An Oral History of the Bush White House" by Cullen Murphy and Todd Purdum in Vanity Fair. Featuring interviews with people close to Bush about key moments in his presidency, the consensus among Bush's friends and critics alike is that Katrina marked the unraveling point of Bush's presidency and Republican dominance. A couple choice quotes:

Dan Bartlett, White House communications director and later counselor to the president: Politically, it was the final nail in the coffin.

Matthew Dowd, Bush's pollster and chief strategist for the 2004 presidential campaign: Katrina to me was the tipping point. The president broke his bond with the public. Once that bond was broken, he no longer had the capacity to talk to the American public. State of the Union addresses? It didn't matter. Legislative initiatives? It didn't matter. P.R.? It didn't matter. Travel? It didn't matter. I knew when Katrina--I was like, man, you know, this is it, man. We're done.

What's shocking is how little progressives and Democrats understood this. In the months after Katrina, progressives were rightfully pouring into the streets to protest the Iraq war, and blogs and book writers were churning out millions of pages on human rights crimes like CIA torture flights and Abu Ghraib.

But on one of the biggest human rights tragedies within our own borders -- a hurricane which devastated an area the size of Great Britain, killed 1,800 people and uprooted a million residents -- progressives had little to offer.

Democratic leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi didn't make it to the Gulf Coast until six months after Katrina hit. I was in New Orleans when she came, preparing the first of several Institute reports trying to bring national attention to the ongoing crisis in the Gulf. Pelosi told the TV cameras she was "shocked" at the devastation she saw. Locals just rolled their eyes -- Pelosi only underscored how out of touch Congressional Democrats were with what was happening in the Gulf Coast.

Each time our team went to interview residents in New Orleans and coastal Mississippi, we got the same questions: Why aren't they doing anything in Washington? Where's the outrage? Where's the legislation? Has the country forgotten about us?

The strange thing is that the country hadn't forgotten about Katrina. Millions of people -- especially faith groups -- cared deeply and took action, committing time and money to deliver supplies, rebuild houses and help those in need. There was a massive constituency across the country ready to be mobilized around the cause of Gulf Coast recovery.

But progressives dropped the ball. Even after Democrats recaptured Congress in 2006 -- more the result of Katrina than anything done by Howard Dean and Rahm Emanuel -- there was little movement on rebuilding New Orleans' ramshackle levees or addressing the crisis of affordable housing.

There was no shortage of good ideas: In spring 2007, we released an entire report on concrete policy propsals coming from Gulf Coast leaders on how to jump-start the failing recovery. But aside from a few token pieces of legislation, none were honestly pursued.

The results of that failure of progressive leadership are with us today. Thousands of Gulf families are still struggling and displaced. Affordable housing is scarce. Hundreds of miles of Louisiana coast is still being destroyed by industrial activity, removing a critical natural defense against future storms.

Katrina wasn't just the turning point for Bush and Republicans. It also marked a failure of Democratic and progressive leadership -- with deadly consequences.

Source / Facing South / Institute for Southern Studies

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Explanations That Do Not Mollify Anti-War Activists

"Doctored" photo courtesy Moonbattery.com, a radical conservative site
The Why-Haven’t-You Impeached-the-President Tour
By CARL HULSE / August 15, 2008

WASHINGTON -- When House Speaker Nancy Pelosi set out to promote her new motivational book this month, she simultaneously touched off her national why-haven't-you-impeached-the-president tour.

As she made the coast-to-coast rounds of lectures, television interviews and radio chats the past two weeks, Ms. Pelosi found herself under siege by people unhappy that she has not been motivated to try to throw President Bush out of office – even if only a few months remain before he leaves voluntarily.

In Manhattan and Los Angeles, at stops in between, on network television and on her home turf of Northern California, Ms. Pelosi has been forced to defend her pronouncement before the 2006 mid-term elections that impeachment over the administration’s push for war in Iraq was off the table.

Pressed on ABC’s “The View” about whether she had unilaterally disarmed, the author of “Know Your Power: A Message to America’s Daughters” said she believed the proceedings would be too divisive and be a distraction from advancing the policy agenda of the new Democratic majority.

Then she added this qualifier: “If somebody had a crime that the president had committed, that would be a different story.”

That assertion only threw fuel on the impeachment fire as advocates of removing Mr. Bush cited the 35 articles of impeachment compiled by Representative Dennis Kucinich, Democrat of Ohio, as well as accusations in a new book by author Ron Suskind of White House orders to falsify intelligence, an accusation that has been denied.

“There’s an opportunity now for us to come forward and to lay all the facts out so that she can reconsider her decision not to permit the Judiciary Committee to proceed with a full impeachment hearing,” Mr. Kucinich said in an interview with the Web site Democracy Now!

Mr. Kucinich, long a proponent of starting hearings to impeach both Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, earlier this week applauded signals that the Judiciary Committee would look into the claims made by Mr. Suskind in his book.

While the Judiciary Committee might do exactly that, the chances that such an inquiry would culminate in an impeachment proceeding are, according to top Democratic officials, virtually nil.

At the moment, the House is officially scheduled to meet for less than three weeks in September before adjourning for the elections and perhaps the year – hardly enough time to mount an impeachment spectacle even if top Democratic lawmakers wanted one.

And they do not.

Despite whatever resonance pursuing the president might have in progressive Democratic circles, it is not the message Democrats want to carry into an election where they need to appeal to swing voters to increase their Congressional majorities and win the White House. They would rather devote their final weeks to pushing economic relief and health care, even if they thought Mr. Bush and the conduct of the war merited impeachment hearings.

And leading Democrats argue anyway that Mr. Bush has already been tried and convicted in the court of public opinion.

“He has been impeached by current history,” said Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, chairman of the House Democratic Caucus. “He is going down as the worst president ever. The facts are in.”

Republicans have previously shown some appetite for luring Democrats into what they see as an impeachment trap, a set of hearings they could use to portray Democrats as bitter partisans. But Republican strategists also recognize the political danger in getting too deep in defending Mr. Bush right before the election or in justifying the buildup to the Iraq war. They might not be as eager as they once were for an impeachment fight.

Both parties know full well that the Republican push to impeach President Bill Clinton in 1998 did not work out for Republicans in the way they had hoped, giving many lawmakers pause when it comes to gaming out the political ups and downs of such an action.

The impeachment unrest among progressives dovetails with their profound disappointment that Democrats failed to cut off spending for the war in Iraq or impose a timetable for withdrawal after winning control of Congress in 2006. It is a disappointment that Ms. Pelosi has acknowledged she shares and one she attributes to the thin Democratic majority in the Senate and Republican determination to support Mr. Bush on the war, explanations that do not mollify staunch anti-war activists.

The disillusionment has crystallized in a challenger for Ms. Pelosi in the person of Cindy Sheehan, the anti-war activist whose son was killed in Iraq. Ms. Sheehan and her allies collected more than 17,000 signatures to qualify her as an independent for the November ballot in San Francisco.

While Ms. Pelosi has been navigating the impeachment issue on her book tour, House Republicans have been assailing her on the floor for refusing to allow a vote on lifting a ban on oil drilling along much of the nation’s coast. Democrats are back-tracking a bit on that stance, opening the door to a September vote on relaxing the restrictions on drilling as part of a broader energy bill that would also include Democratic initiatives to reduce subsidies for oil companies and encourage more use of natural gas.

These have not been easy weeks for Ms. Pelosi as she juggled promoting her book with defending her impeachment stance and fending off the Republicans. But party strategists say she’s in a strong enough political position to weather the attacks, while taking some of the political heat off more vulnerable Democrats. She might be under fire from the left and the right, but there is no talk of impeaching her.

Source / The New York Times

Thanks to Diane Stirling-Stevens / The Rag Blog

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How Cindy Sheehan is Putting Impeachment on the Table

Pushing issue in Congressional campaign
By John Nichols / July 23, 2008

Does anyone seriously doubt that one of the reasons why a House Judiciary Committee hearing will at least discuss the "I" word on Friday is Cindy Sheehan's independent challenge House Speaker Nancy Pelosi?

Pelosi, famously, took impeachment "off the table" just before the 2006 election.

Then, this summer, she edged it back on the menu – suggesting that the Judiciary Committee might take up the matter of Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich's proposal to impeach the president for using deception to draw the nation into an illegal and immoral war.

Judiciary Committee chair John Conyers, the Michigan Democrat who has never made any secret of his desire to address the imperial reach of the Bush-Cheney presidency – especially on matters of war and peace – jumped at the chance to schedule the hearing. A two-hour session, at which the "i" word will be discussed openly by advocates such as Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich, is scheduled for Friday.

Though the hearing is unlikely to evolve into the full-fledged inquiry that many of us believe necessary, it is remarkable that in the summer of a presidential election year the key committee in a chamber where impeachment was supposed to be off the table will turn its attention to the tool that the founders afforded the legislative branch for constraining the executive.

Why is this happening now?

It is worth noting that this is petition-gathering season for independent candidates running in California. Sheehan, the mother of a slain Iraq War soldier who turned her grief into activism, and her supporters are busy collecting the 10,198 signatures that will be needed to get her name on the ballot.

And Sheehan has made impeachment a central issue of her campaign in a city that voted overwhelmingly to support holding Bush and Cheney to account.

Indeed, Sheehan announced that she would challenge the speaker after it became clear – after President Bush commuted White House aide Scooter Libby's prison sentence last summer -- that Pelosi was blocking consideration of impeachment by the House.

Local media has focused on Sheehan's advocacy for impeachment, noting this spring when she filed initial paperwork for her candidacy that the woman who has been referred to as "the Rose Parks of the anti-war movement" had decided to run because "seeing George Bush impeached would be a victory for humanity."

Sheehan is a realist. She admits that her candidacy is "an uphill battle."

But she has drawn significant television, radio and newspaper coverage in San Francisco, as well as endorsements from the local Green and Peace and Freedom parties and local officials such as the president of the city's school board and plan commission. She has raised more than $100,000 for the campaign, attracted an energetic team of volunteers. And, now, as those volunteers hit the streets to collect the signatures to put Sheehan's name on the ballot, Pelosi is suddenly showing some flexibility – the key word being "some" – with regard to the impeachment discussion.

No matter how many votes she gets in November, give Cindy Sheehan credit for opening up the debate – not just in San Francisco but in Washington.

Source / The Nation

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