Garrison Keillor writes in the Chicago Tribune:
[George W. Bush’s] career was based on creating low expectations and then meeting them, but Hurricane Katrina was a blast of reality. The famous headline said, “Bush: One of the worst disasters to hit the U.S.” and many people took that literally. Poor black people huddled together in New Orleans’ Superdome were seen on national TV, people stretched out asleep between the goal lines, and a 911 operator broke into sobs telling what it was like to talk to little kids in flooded houses and two weeks later the president had become a New Deal liberal and was calling for a major anti-poverty program in the Gulf and hang the expense. The annual deficit is running around $300 billion, but the president says we can afford a few hundred billion in hurricane repair without a tax increase, even if we call it a “hurricane impact fee.”