If Clinton were still president...

... what would he be doing?

First off, let me state that Clinton's statement that "nobody anticipated this" is asinine, and he knows it. My guess is that he is trying not to antagonize Bush at the moment so that he can get the money that Bush is begging for (given that he's sunk so much of the treasury into Iraq).

But whatever you feel about Clinton's current statements, think back to Clinton handled major disasters and how Clinton managed FEMA.

How did Clinton handle major hurricanes? How did he handle Hurricane Floyd? Clinton's excellent management of FEMA (which Kevin Drum cites at the Political Animal blog @ http://www.washingtonmonthly.com) wouldn't have gotten us into this mess. FEMA was a joke under Bush Sr. and it regressed badly under Bush who appointed a crony from Texas who had no disaster management experience to the head of the agency, cut its budget, relocated it to be under Homeland Security and refocused it towards terrorism at the expense of natural disasters.

Whatever you think about Bill Clinton's statement today, you know how he would have handled this. I'm not even willing to blame Bush for 9/11 (although I do think he didn't fully appreciate the threat and totally fucked up the aftermath of that), but Bush has an awful lot of responsibility for the disastrous response to this event, and thousands of people on the Gulf Coast, perhaps even tens of thousands, are dead because of his incompetence.

That's not something you could have said about Clinton. Or, for that matter, Gore or Kerry.

* I admit to not knowing how much better Kerry could have handled the situation - it would have been better, but given that he would only have been in office for a few months without enough time to fully fix all of Bush's messes, the response may still not have been great.

He can make real significant decisions in times of duress.
2) Clinton visited disaster sites and talked with people and took command. He came to the Midwest in '93 during the floods and made things happen.

I am through with them.