Chapter 160: Katrina Aftermath, Kurdistan Beginning

I don’t know which made more news that night, the first video of New Orleans after Katrina, or the video of Nagin being dragged out and cursing me out. I thought one of the better moments was when an ABC crew caught Nagin being loaded on the helicopter and trying to order the two soldiers to let him go. One of them, a black private, said, “Shut yo’ mouth, [BLEEPED], and git yo’ ass on the bird!”

The other soldier, a white corporal, laughed and added, “Yeah, y’all’s getting a free trip to the Big Easy!”

It got better when Charlie Gibson reported that Nagin had refused to order the evacuation of New Orleans, and that when I had overruled him, he had hung up on the President of the United States. While he refused to name his source, he reported multiple confirmations of the story. I couldn’t be surprised. We had almost a dozen people on that first conference call, and God only knew how many more were listening in over speakerphone. All this made for some fascinating comments from the nightly comics. It did not make Nagin look good.

For the next few weeks, right through the end of September, the only thing on the news was Katrina, Katrina, Katrina. The destruction was simply mind-numbing. While the photos of New Orleans under twenty feet of water were riveting, vastly more damage was actually done to coastal communities from Florida to Texas. In most of these towns and cities everything man-made was destroyed! Ninety-plus percent of the homes were gone, and the remaining ones were condemned. Ditto businesses; ditto ditto every church, school, hospital, clinic, police and fire station, etc. Every bridge was washed out, every road was cut, and every telephone pole and power line was down. Every single road was blocked by hundreds of trees. There was no electric, phone, or cell service, and every single transformer and substation was blown. Every radio, television, and cell tower had toppled. We could bring in every spare piece of equipment from around the nation and it still wouldn’t be sufficient. Refugees in the millions were displaced, more than during the Dustbowl of the Great Depression. If John Steinbeck was still alive and was writing The New Grapes of Wrath, the Joads would live in Pass Christian, Mississippi, and would move to a trailer park in Beaumont, Texas, the day before Rita hit.

Rita just added insult to injury. Roughly a month after Katrina, Hurricane Rita slammed into the northeast Texas coast. Prior to Katrina, Rita would have been an unimaginable disaster in its own right. Compared to Katrina, Rita was small potatoes, and never got the press it truly deserved. Many of the repairs underway in Louisiana were destroyed, and worst of all, many of the refugees had been relocated to eastern Texas, and now went through it all over again. Thousands of people were suffering from post-traumatic stress, the same as some soldiers did after combat. Mike Brown had returned to Washington after a couple of weeks in Louisiana; when Rita was announced, he simply hopped on a plane and flew to Texas without prompting. He earned his paycheck that fall, in spades!

The good news was that by being proactive at the start and forcing the mandatory evacuation early, we managed to minimize the loss of life. Rather than the almost 2,000 dead that I knew could have happened, we lost just under 250. It was still too damn many, but a lot of people had been saved, and rescue operations had been much better coordinated and quicker than they could have been. I didn’t need to fire Michael Brown, for instance, and he and John McCain got a lot of very favorable press for how they had handled things. I was content to let them, since John was going to need some help when he announced he was going to run for my job.

There was a weird dynamic going on, to my way of thinking. I knew how much better this had been handled than before, but it was still a disaster by any heretofore known standard. While the governors of Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, and Texas all hailed Mike Brown and John McCain for the work they had done and the leadership they had shown, since they were all Republicans, it was treated as partisan politics. Meanwhile, Kathleen Blanco, the Governor of Louisiana, and Ray Nagin, the Mayor of New Orleans, were loudly complaining how we had all made everything worse, and how they would have done it so much better. Governor Blanco was still smarting at our overruling her on a half dozen different measures (for instance, she had refused to order the state fish and game department to rescue people; their boss ordered them in on his own, overriding her) and wanted to take back control of the National Guard and kick everybody else out - just send her the money and she would fix the problem! Meanwhile, Ray Nagin, who had been detained and dumped at the Superdome, was back and telling the residents of his city that I had personally taken my finger out of the dike, and thus flooded the city. He began a city-by-city tour of various refugee areas, telling them how I was personally delaying the recovery of the city (send him the money, not the Governor!) and that New Orleans would be rebuilt again as a ‘Chocolate City’, throwing racial tensions into the mix. Then it came out that in 2004, during a mock emergency meeting to simulate a hurricane hitting the city, nobody from either the Governor’s staff or the Mayor’s staff bothered to show up. Congressional hearings were promised. Awkward!

Meanwhile, I began taking massive heat from the hard-right wing of my own party. At least a half dozen televangelists began claiming that the reason 2005 had been such a deadly year for hurricanes was that America’s leader (me!) had brought on God’s wrath. I wasn’t conservative enough, Republican enough, or Christian enough to properly lead America back to the path of righteousness. Among my many sins were my toleration of gays, immigrants, Jews, Papists (I had to tell Marilyn that I would need to divorce her to cure that particular sin; she was not amused!), and anybody else the preacher deemed unfavorable. Especially amusing was when Pat Robertson announced that when I had flown to New Orleans and Mobile, I had been on a recon flight for Satan. When Will Brucis was asked his thoughts about this at the next press briefing, he replied that he was simply incapable of understanding that kind of thinking.

The right wingers were also not amused when, in an interview after the storm, I was asked if I thought man-made global warming was to blame. “I think there is a link to climate change, though to what extent I am not sure. You can’t tell me that seven billion plus people on this planet aren’t having some sort of effect! That’s not realistic.”

“Are you saying that you believe in global warming?” asked an incredulous reporter. This was going against the entire Republican Party and conservative platform.

I nodded. “Yes, I would have to say I do. Now, we can argue about the extent and causes of it, but it’s a scientific fact, and I say that as a mathematician and a scientist. The evidence is quite clear, and scientific opinion is overwhelmingly one-sided. That doesn’t mean we know how to fix the problem yet, or what it will cost, or what the final long-term effects will be, but the science is there.”

This did not help with my standing in the Republican Party, which further dropped when Al Gore climbed up on his soapbox and loudly proclaimed how finally a Republican leader was joining him in his crusade. Wonderful! His name was anathema to the Republican Party, and the asshole was linking me to him. Just wonderful! Brewster McRiley told me bluntly that this would hurt campaign contributions from energy companies across the board in 2006 and 2008. Just fucking wonderful!

In the real world we had both good news and bad news. The bad news was very, very simple. The devastation was beyond calculating. Early estimates of the damage were in the $30 to $40 billion range and were climbing by the day. Some estimates were topping out at over $100 billion. Adding in the damage from Hurricane Rita a few weeks later, which mangled East Texas, and screwed up the recovery efforts in Louisiana, and we were well over $125 billion. It was going to take years to rebuild the levees and clean up the mess, and in some places, there was nothing left to rebuild. The Good Lord had taken everything in the path of the storms! Worse was going to be the effect on the national economy. Building materials prices were already skyrocketing, as was the price of fuel. Almost a quarter of the nation’s refining capacity had been shut down because of the storms, gas prices were shooting up, and we were seeing gas lines again for the first time since the Seventies. If I had wanted a recession to take the heat off the economy, I was about to get it in spades.

The plus side? Since I hadn’t reduced taxes, the odds were that we could pay for a lot of the cleanup. We weren’t in a deficit situation and trying to pay for two wars off the books. It makes a big difference if you can go into a disaster with some money in the bank. It doesn’t matter whether you are an individual, a family, or a country, the principle is the same. Our national credit rating was still exceptionally good, and if we did need to borrow, going into a deficit (quite probable, actually) would be a manageable situation, and one we could get out of in a year or two. Once again, I needed to figure out how not to let a perfectly good crisis go to waste. It is appallingly cold blooded, but that was how the game was played at this level. Maybe we could do something about the national flood insurance program, environmental concerns, and the like. I wasn’t sure if I could pull it off, though. My popularity ratings continued to drop and were now into the mid-40s.

The real plus side? My message that we were all Americans and we all needed to join together took real traction. Millions of people had been displaced by the storms, some for weeks and some for what looked to be many months, if not longer. Across the country, Americans were taking in their fellow citizens, providing temporary housing and food and support. Convoys of food and water, clothing, toys, and building supplies were pouring in from all over the nation. Utility crews were being rushed from all over America. Unsurprisingly, the youngest Americans took it to heart the most. College students were using their breaks and vacations to head south to help in the cleanup. Marilyn and I discovered this firsthand, when Holly and Molly announced they were going with some college friends down to New Orleans to help over the Christmas break. We simply nodded and Marilyn loaned them her American Express card for the trip. I knew the twins would be buying more than necessities with it; a close look at the next bill would probably end up showing thousands of dollars of emergency and relief supplies that I would turn a blind eye to. We had raised some good kids.

We stumbled through the end of 2005 without suffering anything else major happening. That didn’t mean we got away scot-free. I was in a routine press conference in mid-November, discussing some budget plans and the proposed Congressional hearings related to Katrina, when a question was lobbed out of the blue at me. “Mister President, how do you feel about Kansas requiring that creationism be taught in their schools?”

I had to blink for a second at that. Somewhere in America, every day of the year, somebody is trying to stop teaching evolution and begin teaching creationism instead. The latest round was when the Kansas Board of Education had some fundamentalists elected, and they promptly began phony hearings to discuss the ‘controversy.’ Just a week ago they had passed their new rules. Generally, I had avoided this sort of thing. The scientists and judges would eventually win, and I wasn’t going to convince any of the fundamentalists anyway.

Now somebody had dropped it in my lap. I needed this like I needed more holes in the head. After a second, I answered, “Well, I think it is the right of the citizens of Kansas to teach their children the way they see fit. If that means they want to stop teaching science and start teaching the Bible, then I suppose that is okay. On the other hand, it is also the right of every accreditation board in Kansas to yank the accreditation of any school that teaches creationism, and it is also the right of every college around the country to refuse to admit students who haven’t been properly taught science.”

That set a fox in the hen house! Punish children for the mistakes of their parents? How dare I suggest such an inhumane thing! More than a few op-ed pieces agreed with me, but not all. Several newspapers, mostly from rural areas, railed about how Washington was taking over local education, and how much better children would be learning the values of their parents and communities, and how education was historically a state and local matter, and how I had overstepped my bounds by weighing in on the subject. I tried to stay out of it, since I was figuring the matter would eventually blow over. Sooner or later the fine citizens of Kansas would come to their senses and toss out the religious right.

Will and Frank came to me and asked me if I wanted to speak on this in some public forum. I looked aghast at this, and answered, “Not on your life! You want me tarred and feathered?”

Will replied, “There are a lot of religious groups that want to ask your feelings on things.”

“And that is exactly why I don’t want to answer them! Ever heard that a little religion goes a long, long way? Will, we do not want to fight this fight.”

“How so, Mister President?” asked Frank.

“Because religion makes no sense. You can’t mix religion with science and math. The religious folks want me to be a true believer, and I’m not all that true. If I say that evolution is correct, then I am telling them that the Bible is wrong. There are huge numbers of people who believe that Jesus personally wrote the Bible in 17^th Century English. Well, he didn’t, and you know it. It’s entirely possible the man couldn’t even read and write, and if he did, it would have been in Aramaic! Do you think I want to get into this on national television?”

“So, how do you reconcile the facts?’, he asked. “I’m just curious, is all.”

I smiled at that. “The same way most of us do, by picking and choosing and ignoring what I don’t understand. Am I a Christian? Yes, but not one who’s all that fired up. They say there are no atheists in foxholes, and I’ve been in a foxhole, and that is true. Us scientific types believe in the Big Bang which started everything. Great, but somebody had to light the fuse, right? Let’s leave it at that.”

I refused to get dragged any further into this. The religious right did not have a friend in me, and they knew it. They had learned that very early on in my first term, when I refused to put into law any restrictions on stem cell research. George had planned a ban on research, and I shitcanned that, just about the same time I cleaned out the Faith Based Initiatives group. Likewise, I had studiously stayed out of the Terry Schiavo case, refusing to allow the Justice Department into that mess, and counseling Jeb Bush to leave it alone. The same was true with my stance on gay rights. I was the only Republican to have voted against the Defense of Marriage Act when it passed in 1996. It wasn’t so much a matter of gay rights (I wasn’t ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’, I was ‘Don’t ask, don’t care.’) as the fact that the law was unconstitutional on its face. These were fights I was never going to win.

Meanwhile, John began ramping up his campaign, and began flying out to Iowa and New Hampshire on a regular basis. I advised him to feel relatively free to publicly disassociate himself from some of my positions, though I was sure that was going to bite the both of us in the ass. For instance, I had managed to avoid supporting ethanol for fuel throughout the last campaign, since I didn’t have to campaign in Iowa for the primary. Personally, I thought that using corn for fuel instead of for food was moronic! John was not going to have that luxury. He was going to need to campaign, and in Iowa, and somebody was going to ask him.

He wasn’t the only one running, of course. Oh, no question, he was the front runner, and the strong favorite, but there were a bunch of others. Whatever unanimity the party had was breaking down. Mike Huckabee was the former governor of Arkansas (a job Bill Clinton once held) and was the vanguard of the Religious Right. Ron Paul, a Congressman from Texas, was pushing his Libertarian agenda, and Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, was pushing his business credentials. Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, was riding his leadership during 9-11 in the hopes of moving into the big leagues. There were others, too, without a hope in hell, but looking for support. Nobody had officially announced they were in the running, but everybody was forming exploratory committees dedicated to exploring for money and support among the local party faithful.

The standard plan would be to explore all through 2006 before making an official announcement sometime around the end of 2006 or the beginning of 2007. After that, they would be officially campaigning. The primaries would start in January of 2008, run for about three or four months, and be tied up long before the conventions.

Right now, everybody was running around New Hampshire and Iowa, trying to line up precinct captains and local supporters, and giving speeches and going door to door. No way would I ever have gone through with that! Some of these guys were practically living in these states. The theory was that they only had a little money, so they would concentrate in the early primary states. If they could do well, they could use that to force open donor’s wallets and get enough money to bombard the next few states, and so forth. These were all long shot candidates, but it was a definite possibility, which was why they did it. It was what Carter had done, after all.

On the Democratic side, the odds-on favorite was Hillary Clinton, who had separated herself politically from her worthless philandering husband and was now the junior senator from New York. After that, it was just a pack of wannabes, led by John Edwards, the V.P. nominee from last time, the guy who had ridden my ass about my bastard son. The dark horse candidate (and what a pun that was!) was Barack Obama, who had given such an electrifying speech at their last convention and was the junior senator from Illinois. There was a very dangerous dynamic going on. Women loved Hillary, and most women voted Democratic. Blacks loved Obama, the first serious black candidate this country had ever seen who could win white votes. Either one might win their nomination and face off against John McCain.

When this happened on my first trip, the country had been on a seven-year binge of overspending and a real estate bubble, all of which broke the economy in the late summer of 2008. Until that point, McCain was winning. After that, he lost. Additionally, he had the albatross of a very unpopular President around his neck. I was nowhere near as unpopular as George would have been by now. McCain had an excellent chance at beating either Clinton or Obama unless the wheels came off by 2008. It was my job to see that didn’t happen.

It didn’t always work out so easily. In early 2006, Harry Reid decided to poke a finger in my eye, because he was getting heat from Governor Blanco in Louisiana. He decided to put a hold on any further appointments I wanted to make. He had been making himself a nuisance for the last year, since the Democrats took power in the Senate, and was starting to feel like he was in charge. My appointments last year had taken longer to confirm, with a lot of hullaballoo at times, and several Federal judgeships were still sitting vacant. Now he informed us that nothing would get approved until hearings were held on the Federal response to Hurricane Katrina. He wanted Michael Brown’s head on a platter, as a sop to Blanco.

I grimaced and had Brown over to the White House when I heard about this. I told him that I had no intention of firing him, and that his performance during the hurricanes had been good. My question was what were his intentions for staying at FEMA?

“I was planning to leave at the end of the year, sir, if that is all right. I have been getting some interesting offers from a few outfits over on K Street, if you know what I mean.”

I nodded. “I am sure you have had some offers. I imagine you’ll also be working on some political fund raising for a few people.”

He smiled and nodded. “The Vice President has made a few comments along that line.”

“That’s only because John McCain is a smart guy and is going to win this thing! Okay, so, you are going to leave by the end of 2006, but not right away. That works for me, and I’ll support you, but don’t be surprised if Harry Reid makes an ass of himself along the way. He is definitely going to be holding hearings on Katrina, and you and your agency are going to be giving testimony. I wouldn’t be able to stop that even if I tried, and it would be hopeless for me to fight it.”

“What are you going to do about the hold on appointments?” Brown asked.

“I am not sure, at least not yet,” I answered, with another grimace. “Listen, about you and FEMA, you’re going to be leaving there. Now, don’t get me wrong, but you’re political, a money man and a fixer. That’s why George put both you and Allbaugh over there. I’m not saying you both didn’t do good jobs, but I want the next guy to be a pro, you understand.”

“I follow you, Mister President. You’re right, that’s how we ended up there,” he agreed.

“So, like I said, you both did well, but I’m going to want one of your long-time people taking over when you leave. Figure out a name or two for me. Neither of us wants to see an amateur in that job. If the climate scientists are right, the problems are going to increase, not decrease!”

“Crap!” he said quietly. He nodded in understanding, and I let him go at that. I smiled to myself, though. Mike Brown would be leaving his job at some point, but not in disgrace. Assuming he did a decent job as lobbyist and fundraiser over the next couple of years, he was a prime candidate for a Cabinet post in a McCain administration. Commerce or Transportation would be naturals for him.

I thought about it, and then called and asked Frank Keating to come over.

John Ashcroft had resigned as Attorney General in February of 2005, after suffering through a very severe bout of pancreatitis in the spring of 2004. He was much more conservative than I was, and a whole lot more religious, but the man had integrity, and he fiercely protected the Constitution. During the remainder of 2004 he and I spoke frequently, and he told me he would resign right after the Inauguration. He liked my idea of Frank Keating as a replacement, and between the two of us we got Frank on board. Frank had been out of office since the start of 2003 and had taken a couple of positions on boards of various companies. He accepted my offer and we managed to get him confirmed as the new Attorney General in 2005.

That’s not to say it was easy. There was a lot of rancor coming out of the Senate at this, and they delayed his confirmation for over a month. It wasn’t that Keating was all that controversial a fellow, or that he hadn’t been a decent Governor of Oklahoma. It was that it was a way for Harry Reid to be difficult with me without spending a lot of his influence doing so. It cost me more to confirm him than it cost Harry to slow things down. Harry also slowed down a few Federal judgeships as well, again, at very little personal cost. Worst of all, we now had two empty seats on the Supreme Court. Sandra Day O’Connor had stepped down and William Rehnquist had died, and the Senate Judiciary Committee had my nominees (one male, one female, both moderates) on hold.

By 2006 I was getting extra pissed at this, so I simply decided to say, ‘Screw you!’ to the Senate. On Monday, February 20, the Senate recessed for a week. On Thursday morning, February 23, I went down to the Press Room during the morning Daily Press Briefing and made a statement. In part, it read:

“The nation’s business does not end when the Senate is in recess. Crime still occurs when the Senate is in recess. The police still catch criminals when the Senate is in recess. The courts still function when the Senate is in recess. If the Senate decides to hold up all Federal appointments to the Justice Department, that is their right to do so. I have put forth names of qualified men and women to fill vacant positions throughout the Justice Department, and the Senate has put these names on hold, in some cases for many months. We can no longer wait and hope that crime will diminish during this period. Later this afternoon I intend to swear in, as recess appointments, the following people...”

With that I named an Associate Attorney General, a Deputy Solicitor General, two U.S. Attorneys, and ten Federal Judges. (A recess appointment of a Supreme Court Justice might well be unconstitutional; the Senate had officially expressed their displeasure after Eisenhower did it three times; I didn’t dare try that one!) I had spoken to all of them beforehand, and all were stashed in hotels in Washington, waiting for this moment. There was no way for the Senate to reconvene in time to stop this. I did, however, warn each of the people involved that the Senate might well refuse to confirm them, and that some, if not all of them, might be out of a job in a year’s time. While most of my nominees were Republican, as a bipartisan gesture I had named three Democrats as Federal judges, and they had all grinned and said they were the safest of the bunch.

Well, there’s nothing quite like throwing bombs into a packed crowd to get the adrenaline pumping! The Democrats in the Senate were foaming-at-the-mouth mad at me for being so presumptuous to deny them their Constitutional duty to advise and consent. How dare I act so illegally! This was worthy of impeachment!

Despite it being a recess, Harry Reid and Arlen Specter, the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which was where all the nominees were bottled up, managed to make it onto television that night. Unlike Harry, Arlen and I got along okay, but he was under orders from Harry to put a cork in the bottle. Both men were in full blown high dudgeon and demanded that I cancel these illegal and ill-considered appointments and promised a court fight when they got back from recess.

They might be right. The idea of a recess appointment dated back to the 18 ^th Century, when the Senate was out of session more often than not, and a President couldn’t afford to wait months to appoint somebody. In theory, he could appoint somebody as needed, and they would stay in office until the end of the current Congressional session, at which point they would need to be confirmed by the Senate to keep their job. This worked up until the 20^th Century, when travel speeds had increased to the point the Senate could stay in town longer. Theoretically the Senate was in recess whenever they were out for more than three days, which is why I waited until Thursday to do this. On the other hand, ever since Clinton had been President, the Senate had begun having sham sessions. They would go away, and every third day some Senator, whoever was in town, would show up, bang a gavel, say they were in session, bang the gavel again, and go back into recess. It was total fakery.

Screw it. I threw it back in their laps. I claimed the sham sessions were just that, fakes, and dared them to push me on it. It would take a court challenge to throw the nominees out, or they would simply have to stop taking so many recesses and get some work done once in a while. They could scream all they wanted, but in the meantime, the Justice Department was fully staffed. When the Dems started screaming on the Sunday morning news shows, our response was always that these were perfectly qualified people, most of whom had previous experience in the Federal justice system, and that the delays were nothing more than political gamesmanship by the Democratic Party. What was the real problem? That I had candidates that weren’t qualified, or that I was calling a halt to their little game of sham sessions? In the meantime, the President was giving this tempest in a teapot the consideration it deserved, which wasn’t much. He was going to keep on serving the people of the United States, even if the Senate refused to.

It was a hullaballoo, all right. Not all the Republicans liked my stunt, since one of these days they would have the whip hand over a Democratic President, and besides, this was saying that they weren’t that important, either. I sort of apologized to them, but held firm, and suggested that they start beating on the Dems about this. Push the bipartisan nature of what I was trying to do. Push that we needed a full Supreme Court. Push that it was costing the American taxpayer by delaying court proceedings. Wrap these appointments in an American flag and fly the damn thing!

By March, Reid caved in. We allowed a token Democrat and a token Republican judge to be non-confirmed, after negotiating with them (they both found lucrative positions in the private sector), confirmed everybody else, and scheduled confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court nominees. Harry Reid and I kissed and made up on television, in a wonderful bipartisan show of support. As I stood next to him, I wondered if I should have worn body armor.