Peggy Noonan on 9/11, Katrina and Bush

I don't always agree with Peggy Noonan's opinions or takes on policy issues, but is there anyone more able to capture certain impressions or emotions more accurately in words? I'm frankly not sure if there is. In today's Wall Street Journal, Noonan writes about Katrina and her impacts on the Bush presidency.

She introduces the piece with this description of her emotional reaction to 9/11, which resonates deeply with me. I couldn't think of a better way of describing it.

If you lived through 9/11 in New York you have nothing worthy of the city, its people, and the event worth saying that has not already been said, or, if you do opinions for a living and are relatively sane, has not been said by you. I will tell you only this. For something like four years 9/11 was for me a bruise in my heart. Someone would refer to it or I'd see a picture in a newspaper and I'd experience it as a pressing on the bruise, and I'd hurt. My feelings were immediately accessible and immediately there. This year for the first time it is not a bruise but a scar--jagged, less open to remedy, comparatively numb. My heart has healed and is ever altered.

Noonan goes on to write about the political impacts of Katrina on Bush. Her analysis of these issues seems to me to be very astute. She begins with a truism which is generally troubling, but is in fact a positive for Bush:

George W. Bush still enjoys a bright spot in terms of his foes. Liberal politicians continue to respond to the calamity with delighted anguish. Their critiques are attacks and their attacks are opportunistic. Hillary Clinton, Ted Kennedy and Nancy Pelosi have come across as pols coolly using the suffering of others to club the opposition. As for liberal pundits, some of them have taken on the ways of mere party operatives: Every event exists to be used.

She then goes on to clearly and honestly enunciate how Bush failed to meet the challenges posed by Katrina:

But the White House made two big mistakes. The first was not to see that New Orleans early on was becoming a locus of civil unrest. When an American city descends into lawlessness, and as in this case that lawlessness hampers or prevents the rescue of innocents, you send in the 82nd Airborne. You move your troops. You impose and sustain order... Second, lame gazing out the window is mere spin, not action. Soulful looks from the plane are spin. The White House was spinning when it should have been acting. I do not agree with the critique that Mr. Bush should have done a speech with a lot of "emoting." This is the kind of thing said by clever people who think everyone else is dumb. Bill Clinton felt everyone's pain, and that is remembered as a joke.

The rest of the piece speaks to Bush's other failings in response to this crisis and of opportunities the president may have before him. Worth a read.