By Jean Casella and James Ridgeway, Mother Jones
In those first emotional days after Katrina laid waste to the Gulf Coast, widespread predictions of a political sea change arrived from liberal and even some conservative commentators. “Americans are ready to fix their restless gaze on enduring problems of poverty, race, and class that have escaped their attention,” Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter wrote in a September 2005 cover story. Some went so far as to forecast the dawn of a new America, one stunned out of both complacency and conservatism by the images of suffering on the Gulf Coast. Katrina, one commentator suggested, would permanently “redefine the political landscape.”
But within just a few weeks of the hurricane, something had changed in the press coverage and the public response: As the floodwaters receded, so, too, did the powerful images – the portraits of racially segregated suffering, of death by poverty. America’s – even liberal America’s – focus appeared to be moving away from the experiences of Katrina victims and the deep, systemic problems they revealed. In the end, the leap from pathos to policy was never made. Instead, a narrower lens was focused on the foibles of the Bush administration – for instance, its hiring of a political crony, Michael Brown, to head FEMA (and, later, Brown’s infamous emails about wardrobe choices and dinner plans as New Orleans residents were literally drowning in their homes). Democrats were quick to attack President Bush, but when it came to advancing meaningful policy changes, they came up short on momentum.
It quickly became clear that the public “meaning” of Katrina, which had initially seemed so obvious to so many, was actually up for grabs – and so, too, was its impact on U.S. politics.
(Original Article)