What is it about Katrina that made Bush so inept?
Comparing his actions to Clintons durring hurricane Andrew you will see bush followed standard presidential response.
Katrina was a failure of local leadership.
It was politicized by Democrats purely for gotcha.
CNN didn't help with the perception either. I got there 2 days after the levee broke (can't not think of Led Zepplin) and all of the bodies had been cleaned up. CNN ran the loops of bodies floating for 8 days.
The hospital I was helping out was not in the evac zone, they were where people were being sent to. Workers from the hospital went and picked up people from a stranded nursing home. That nursing home was less than a mile from a school bus yard that was full. The mayor could have used those buses to get people to hospitals or the superdome but instead he chose to not use the buses and say Bush hates black people.
Locals were showing up in boats to help and were being turned away by officials because they may have had an expired tag and for "insurance purposes" (most went around them and helped anyway).
Katrina was a complete failure of local and state officials that the residents saw even if the rest of the country didn't. The mayor and gov were voted out in landslides.
Now let's compare the handling of Katrina by the gov and the press to the handling of the BP spill. The governor was pleading Obama to let him do something, yet it took over a month before He would allow it. Volunteers were ready in the first week with ships that scrubbed the oil but was only 99% effective. The EPA would not allow those ships because their standard was 99.8%. So the oil sat for over a month... CNN did not run clips of people blaming Obama the entire time.
I agreed with the governor who said let us put out (what were those float things called?) today! Unfortunately, they didn't have enough and asked for help from the east coast supply. FEMA wouldn't allow it in case something happened off the east coast... So the oil sat.
In one case, we bitched because the president took 2 days to get the federal government involved while the locals sat around placing blame. In the other case we had local officials begging the feds to get out of the way and were stonewalled for a month.
Which situation would you deem was handled worse by who?