A swamped nation-builder

NOW WE KNOW HE’S SERIOUS: President Bush has taken the most important issue facing his administration, the Katrina relief mission, and kicked it upstairs to the vice president’s office. Bush announced Tuesday that he is deploying Dick Cheney to the Gulf Coast region on Thursday, and Cheney will join the thousands of troops who have poured in to impose order on the relief effort. After its initial halting response, the federal government is bringing the full force of its power to bear on the crisis. The Coast Guard, FEMA, the National Guard, active military units and even the Border Patrol have been coordinating the rescue of tens of thousands of Gulf Coast residents. The evacuation of survivors has become far more orderly. On Tuesday, the Army Corps of Engineers plugged one of New Orleans’ broken levees, and pumping water out of the city quickened.

Still, the overriding fact on the ground -- both in Washington and along the Gulf -- is this: Too many people died needlessly because their governments were too concerned about the threat of terrorism to pay attention to the threat posed by Mother Nature.

There will be plenty of time for politicians to play the blame game and to embrace facile, inside-the-Beltway solutions to the botched rescue. (A Cabinet seat for FEMA! Repeal the Posse Comitatus Act!) And some of the investigations now being called for -- the president himself has graciously offered to lead one of them -- may yield some useful information.

But the human tragedy will haunt the remainder of the Bush presidency. Bush was dismissive of nation-building in 2000; now his presidency will be judged largely by his performance as a nation-builder -- both in Iraq and at home.

Setting aside the government’s overall performance, the president himself, already reeling from extraordinarily low approval ratings, has not been sure-footed in responding to Katrina. He embarrassed himself on TV last Thursday when he said that he didn’t think “anybody anticipated the breach of the levees.” On Tuesday, sounding more like someone who’d just wandered into the Oval Office than like the commander in chief who saw us through 9/11, Bush said: “It’s very important for us to understand the relationship between the federal government, the state government and the local government when it comes to a major catastrophe.”

Get it together, Mr. President.