Hurricane blows a twister into this election
You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to worry these epochal storms may have profound effects on the political future of the United States.
When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, killing hundreds, leaving tens of thousands homeless and inflicting hundreds of billions of dollars in property damage, the world’s media decided immediately that one man was to blame. George W Bush, Republican president at the time, was almost universally condemned for the federal government’s failures: failure to prepare the city and other affected areas adequately; to co-ordinate disaster response teams to limit the devastation; to deploy federal resources quickly and effectively enough.
“Katrina’s Damage Lingers for Bush - Many see storm as president’s undoing,” declared The Washington Post a few days after. And in many ways, this verdict was self-fulfillingly correct: the negative coverage of his role in the hurricane was indeed his undoing. His approval ratings never fully recovered from the Katrina Effect.
Since the victims of the storm were predominantly black, and Bush was a white conservative Republican, the episode offered a juicy opportunity to add the inevitable racial angle to his guilt. The president wasn’t just a bumbling incompetent. He was a bigot, malevolently negligent towards Americans of colour.
“George Bush doesn’t care about black people,” said Kanye West, rapper and the go-to authority on all things cultural in America at the time for most news organisations. Bush’s reputation has fared rather better than West’s in the two decades since, especially on the topic of racial bigotry, now that we all know West is a raving antisemite. A more balanced assessment of the various factors that made Katrina’s effects so catastrophic suggests the federal government’s, and Bush’s, performance was not the main reason for the scale of the calamity.
It’s true that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) was, as large government bureaucracies typically are, slow at first in allocating resources in the immediate aftermath. But the bigger failures were at the state and local level: notoriously inept and corrupt governments in New Orleans and Louisiana (both controlled by Democrats); failure of officials at the local level to properly co-ordinate with federal and state assistance; a tragic refusal of many sceptical residents who had lived through many great storms before to heed the warning that this really was the big, existential one.
Above all, of course, nature itself was the prime culprit. When time and chance combine to place storms of that scale on a path to great population centres, there isn’t a human alive capable of preventing a massive tragedy.
Twenty years later, another hurricane season is leaving large swathes of the American south under water, denuded of structures, trees and people. Two weeks ago Hurricane Helene cut across Florida, Georgia and North Carolina with unusual ferocity. This week Hurricane Milton doubled down on the damage in parts of Florida. People have lost their lives, cities are again flooded, communities once more lie in ruins.
But this time, a Democrat is in the White House. So the blame game is a little different. You would be completely wrong now to think that any failures that have exacerbated the tragedy are the fault of the federal government run by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Instead it’s local Republican-controlled governments in the southern states; Donald Trump and his Republican campaign for spreading “misinformation” about the effectiveness of the emergency response. And there’s always that catch-all bad boy of progressive demonology, climate change. “Climate Change Increased Rain and Wind Speeds of Helene”, The New York Times told us. Of course it did.
Unlike Katrina, these storms have struck weeks before an impossibly close election, so the politics are even more potentially consequential than they were then. While much of the media has moved quickly to insulate Biden - and by extension Harris, the Democratic presidential candidate - from any criticism, the right has eagerly filled in the gaps.
Some of the claims are in the category of what we have become familiar with in the fever swamp minds of American conspiracy theorists. Marjorie Taylor Greene, that perennial seeker after evildoers in government causing wilful calamity to Republicans, has suggested that these latest storms were manufactured out at sea by the Biden administration and directed at Republican areas of the country in an effort to depress turnout in next month’s election.
Trump has been equally conspiracy-minded and hyperbolic. His claim that the federal authorities have deliberately withheld assistance from rural (Trump-heavy) communities in western North Carolina is baseless. But while his suggestion that Fema is low on resources because it has spent its money on illegal immigrants is also false, there is no doubt that the agency’s efforts on natural disaster relief have been diluted under the current administration. As JD Vance, his vice-presidential nominee, pointed out in an article in The Wall Street Journal this week: “Under Ms Harris and Mr Biden, Fema has funnelled millions of dollars to nongovernmental organisations whose stated goal is facilitating mass migration into the US.”
You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to worry that these epochal storms could have profound effects on the political future of the country. The disruption they have caused is almost certain to interfere with the willingness and ability of many voters to register and get to the polls in time for November 5.
And consider this: North Carolina is one of the seven pivotal swing states that will determine the outcome of the election. Imagine if Trump loses the state by a few thousand votes (as he lost other states in 2020); it turns out to be the key state that gives Harris victory and thousands of Trump supporters in remote areas say they were unable to vote because they had lost homes, possessions and access to ballots. The political storm then might be even more calamitous than the meteorological one.
The Times
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