On TV, some politicians seem lost in Katrina's wake
In times of crisis, politicians are our stand-ins and our advocates, our cheerleaders and our pillars. We expect them to be unflappable; that's why so much has been made of George Bush's blank-faced response to the news of Sept. 11 and his defiant speech days later on the World Trade Center ruins.
So one significant measure of the crisis that has hit New Orleans and Mississippi this week is the politicians' shaken demeanors as they make the TV rounds.
There has been no St. Crispin's Day quality to their pronouncements, no sense of rallying the troops, of bucking up. Louisiana Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco has come across as the distraught grandmother that she is, choking up as she tries to describe the destruction. Mississippi politicians have resorted to clumsy analogies, from ''tsunami" to ''Hiroshima," that some have maligned for historical inaccuracy. (It seems just as fair to assume that they were trying to convey total devastation to a country that has seen little of it.)
And New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin has offered stark assessments of the damage, the way the situation has worsened by the hour, the dark triage process that has ensued. ''We do know there are dead bodies, there are dead bodies floating in some of the waters," he told CNN's Aaron Brown Tuesday night. ''The rescuers basically pushed them aside as they were trying to save individuals."
It came without hyperbole or heightened emotion. It was matter-of-fact. It was the truth.
It's worth wondering what people really need at a moment like this, whether unvarnished truth is as useful, as helpful, as false bravado. Surely, it will help influence people and companies to open their pocketbooks and coffers. But even to a population scattered on higher ground and looking for news of their flooded homes, there may be something refreshing about being told that, yes, it is that bad.
Perhaps it's just hard to refute the images streaming in from New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, the eerie, still-like quality of those shots of deep, gray water. The pictures evoke such post-apocalyptic visions as ''A.I.," the Kubrick/Spielberg fable of 2001, which imagined a submerged New York after polar ice caps melted. And the news reports contribute to the sense of doom; most notable, perhaps, was Jeanne Meserve's choked-up telephone report to CNN, which aired Monday and was replayed Tuesday during ''NewsNight With Aaron Brown."
Blanco, in particular, has embodied that sort of empathy; she is shaken, unpolished, and often on the brink of tears. Whether a male politician could get away with that, even today, is unclear -- though one male safety official in Jefferson Parish cried this week as he asked for disaster relief for his own emergency workers.
Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour has issued what is closest to a swagger; on NBC yesterday morning, he predicted that the state had reached a ''turning point," albeit an early one, and on CNN's ''Larry King Live" the night before, he predicted a bigger, better coastline in the future.
That may well turn out to be the case, but, as even Barbour had to concede, that future is a long way away. And, this being an act of God, not of terror, there is no quick, satisfying way to strike back, or to keep morale up during the rebuilding. No amount of practiced spin can change that reality -- something practiced politicians might instinctively know.
Joanna Weiss can be reached at weiss@globe.com. 