Nation’s Political Divide Is Highlighted

As Patricia Montoya sat in a small rock garden outside the upscale Cottonwood Mall, she considered a frightening thought.

“If this disaster happened in the United States, you know, with just water, what’s going to happen if the terrorists hit us again?” she asked. “I don’t think we learned anything from 9/11.”

Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath have rattled the nation like nothing since those four hijacked airliners plunged out of a clear blue sky four years ago Sunday.

Both events prompted an outpouring of compassion, which has already yielded well over half a billion dollars in private donations to hurricane victims.

But unlike the unifying Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the damage wrought by nature -- and compounded, in the eyes of many, by a dithering government response -- has done little to bridge the nation’s political divisions. In this politically telling place, partisanship runs jagged and deep.

Looking at the devastation on the Gulf Coast, critics of President Bush find validation for their worst beliefs.

“The hurricane created the mess, and I feel that Bush is responsible for the mess continuing to be one, because the earth-moving vehicles that should have been there to correct this problem are in Iraq,” said Democrat Belinda Martorelli, 51, a clerk with New Mexico’s motor vehicle department.

Defenders of the president are quick to blame state and local officials for the haphazard response to the disaster, and to criticize the president’s critics.

“I think it’s politically motivated, and that’s what I hate to see,” said Robert Mascarenas, a 59-year-old Republican who was leaving his job at Target with a bag of popcorn. “No one anticipated the devastation or strength of the hurricane. I think it just caught the whole system off guard.”

The overarching sentiment, one shared by the left and the right, is that elected officials, from Bush to New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin, fell down on the job, failing to fulfill their most basic responsibility: protecting the people they serve. The anger, frustration and contempt stand in marked contrast to the feeling of unity that flowed after Sept. 11, when many regarded their elected leaders with hope and expectation, rather than cynicism.

“With this whole new Cabinet” -- the Department of Homeland Security created after Sept. 11 -- “you’d think that they would plan better,” said Montoya, a 58-year-old Democrat puffing a cigarette beneath a Palo Verde tree in the mall’s shady rock oasis. “That’s what scares me.”

Upstairs, at the Big Train Cafe, Republican Jean Stewart let out a chuckle as dry as the desert air. “I wouldn’t wait for government” if disaster struck, said the 60-year-old housewife and grandmother. “I’d be on my own.”

New Mexico has long been a bellwether in national politics. Since statehood in 1912, it has a near-perfect record of going with the winner of the popular vote for president; the results in the last two elections, in particular, reflected the country’s profound political divide. In 2000, Vice President Al Gore won New Mexico by a 365-vote margin -- a closer count than in Florida. In 2004, Bush carried the state by fewer than 6,000 votes.

In a series of sidewalk interviews, this city on the Rio Grande seemed once more to hold up a mirror to the nation, reflecting the political divisions in Washington and the partisan hostilities roiling the Internet and talk radio.

Bush critics blamed the president for the stumbling response to Katrina, tying the failure at least partly to the war in Iraq and pointing to the outsized suffering of African Americans and the poor.

“I wish we would have had more preparedness to help people here instead of being stretched thin in other places,” said Democrat Anthony Boser, the 27-year-old manager of a Red Wing shoe store in the city’s prosperous Paradise Hills neighborhood. Bush’s policies, he said, have boosted “the people who have their offices on the top of a big building, and the people who drive Porsches and Rolls-Royces.”

The president’s defenders pointed fingers -- to the extent, they said, that you can blame anyone for an act of God -- at the mayor of New Orleans and the governor of Louisiana, both Democrats. Where were the buses to evacuate those who couldn’t flee on their own? Where was the plan to fix the levees before they burst and New Orleans was swamped? Some suggested the attacks on Bush reflected an attitude fostered by years of government giveaway programs.

“There’s a mentality that people think that government should save everything, and it’s not always the government’s job,” Alexandra Crelier, a 32-year-old airline employee, said as her little girl, Madison, played outside Target. “Because they’re impoverished, they rely more on the government because that’s how their sense of living is.... So maybe that’s why the feeling is there should have been more done sooner.”

Not everyone fell back on familiar party positions. Richard Taylor doesn’t like Bush or support the president “in any way, shape or form.” But the 62-year-old retired pastor, a Democrat, said, “To lay it all at his feet isn’t good.”

“I think the response was slow,” Taylor said in a soft twang over the sputter and cough of his weathered Ford Regal. “I think he’s trying to make up for that, and I have to give him credit.”

Eric Johnson, by contrast, was scathing in his assessment of Bush’s performance. “Here’s a guy who wages war in Iraq and loses a state in America,” said Johnson, 46, a real estate developer and “staunch Republican” until he soured on Bush even before Katrina hit. “Mayor Nagin threw up the white flag immediately. He says, ‘I need to evacuate this city.... Help!’ What else do you want them to say?”

Amid the clamor, there were some areas of bipartisan consensus. Tax cuts, for one.

Before Katrina hit, Republican leaders in Congress were pushing to abolish the estate tax, which stood to benefit the wealthiest Americans, and provide another $70 billion in federal tax cuts. Both measures have been shelved as Congress focuses on disaster relief.

Of more than three dozen people interviewed, only a handful favored cutting taxes at this time. Most, Democrat and Republican alike, said that they could use the extra money but that the victims of Katrina could use it more. Many also questioned how the government could pay for tax cuts when money was gushing out of the Treasury at a rate of $2 billion a day.

“The war is running, what, a billion a week? And this disaster, easily over $100 billion,” said Democrat Robert Whitehead, 59, leaning on a glass case of silver and turquoise jewelry at his boutique. “The economy’s slow, the price of gas is high. You’ve got another 400,000 unemployed all of a sudden. And all that costs money. If we had a surplus, it would be another issue.... We have a deficit, and the hole will only get deeper.”

There was also widespread agreement that any investigation of the disaster should be bipartisan -- or, better, nonpartisan -- and kept as far from the White House as possible, though critics and defenders of the president had different reasons for that.

Critics fear a whitewash. “It should be ... somebody that’s clean,” said Martorelli, the motor vehicle worker. Otherwise it will “make [Bush] look good instead of bad. I don’t trust him.”

Backers of the president said he already had plenty to do, and an independent investigation would enhance “the believability,” as Jim Robinson, a 77-year-old retired Sandia lab technician and Republican, put it.

Many expressed hope, but little confidence, that the events of the last two weeks would serve to “wake up” -- the words several people used -- the country’s elected leaders before the next epic disaster hit.

For people on opposite ends of the political spectrum, the Gulf Coast catastrophe was less a revelation than confirmation of what they long suspected.

To Carol Sadzewicz, a 66-year-old retired cashier and Democrat, the devastation underscored her view that Washington politicians were out of touch. “Ninety percent of them are millionaires,” she said. “They have no idea how the common person lives.”

To Stewart, sipping coffee at the Cottonwood Mall, the tragedy points out the clumsy, bureaucratic nature of government. The response has been poor, she said, “from the bottom up.”

Neither felt reassured in the event of another Sept. 11.

“Hopefully,” Stewart allowed, “this will help.”