This president, who flew away on Monday to fundraisers in the west while the hurricane blew away entire towns in coastal Mississippi, is very much his father's son when it comes to the kinds of emergencies that used to call forth immediate White House action before its Bushite captivity. When he was president, his father did not visit Miami after Hurricane Andrew, nor for that matter, did he mind being photographed tooling his golf cart around Kennebunkport while American troops died in the first Iraq war. Now the younger Bush seems determined to show his successors how to holiday through an apocalypse. Consider the visible federal leadership presence in Louisiana on the day that the levee broke, a full day after the hurricane first hit. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, the US government department charged with disaster preparation and response, issued the usual promises. Bush, for his part, urged people not to stay where they were, even if their evacuation residence might be the roofless, toilet-clogged Superdome.

Meanwhile, in Baton Rouge, an army colonel seemed to be the most senior federal official at a televised news conference called to announce a Corps of Engineers plan to drop sand bags into the raceway of the broken levee. The proposed drop did not take place because the shortage of helicopters was such that the aircraft had to be diverted to rescue work. Twenty-four hours later, on Wednesday, as Bush met by intercom with his emergency team and considered a return to Washington, as Pentagon and Homeland Security promised relief by the weekend, intensive care patients were dying at Charity Hospital in New Orleans. They had languished for two full days because the overworked coast guard helicopter crews available in New Orleans did not have time to reach them. As for the Superdome refugees, it finally fell to the governor of Texas to announce that they could come to Houston's Astrodome. What other American president, one wonders, would fail to house these people in the decent barracks available at the closed and active military bases scattered throughout the South? The plain fact is that Jimmy Carter did a better job of housing the Mariel refugees from Cuba than Bush has done with the citizens of New Orleans.