All week, as Southern California's canyons have burned, the images of the orderly, well-coordinated evacuation effort have stood in sharp contrast to the chaotic memories of Hurricane Katrina, where evacuees, many of them poor and black, were trapped in the Louisiana Superdome in New Orleans for days without adequate food and water.

But now the Bush administration and its allies are using the California disaster, with its affluent victims and reverse 911 telephone-warning system, to revisit Louisiana’s handling of the 2005 hurricane — and, in the process, to rewrite the story of one of the Bush administration’s biggest setbacks.

There is no doubt that state and local officials were partly to blame for the slow and inefficient response to Hurricane Katrina. And people on all sides of the hurricane vs wildfires debate agree the storm, which put nearly an entire city under water, flooding evacuation routes and knocking out vital communications links, was a disaster of far greater magnitude, and thus California and New Orleans cannot be compared.

Yet the president drew the contrast in California when, appearing with Gov Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, he said, “It makes a significant difference when you have somebody in the Statehouse willing to take the lead”. The remark was widely viewed as a veiled swipe at Gov Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, a Louisiana Democrat, who says she resents it.

In interviews, allies of the administration have made much the same point; some have asserted that a Republican state administration, like that of Jeb Bush, the president’s brother, who was Florida’s governor when Hurricane Katrina hit, might have handled the situation better.

The people on the Gulf Coast say that even if the state and local response had been perfect, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina might not have looked much different. So far, there have been roughly 1,875 homes destroyed by the California wildfires; a White House report says 3,00,000 homes were destroyed or rendered uninhabitable by the storm. In California, fires consumed roughly 4,75,000 acres; more than 52 million acres were affected in the Gulf Coast, said Senator Mary L Landrieu, a Louisiana Democrat.

Bush’s remarks in California have clearly struck a nerve. Governor Blanco complained to The Times-Picayune of New Orleans that she had spent nearly a week as “the only game in town”, leading without the president’s help.
Bush administration officials have long believed that if Kathleen had immediately allowed the federal government to assume control of the military response in Louisiana, the outcome would have been different. That debate is playing out again and getting caught up in state politics.

With the election last week of Representative Bobby Jindal, a Republican, to succeed Kathleen, who did not seek re-election, Bush administration allies argue that the people of that state have rendered their own judgment.
Yet Pete Wehner concedes that the distance of time and history is not yet upon the Bush administration. He says the view of the hurricane as a federal failure is, for now, at least, the one that will stick in the public mind.
NYT