I wish we had leaders like this . . .

By CAL BEVERLY

Some thoughts, questions and a few opinions:

I wish we had a governor, a National Guard commander, a President, who said to the helicopter pilot on Tuesday after the levee broke, “Set me down there in front of the Super Dome. Then take off without me and go get everybody you can to come back and get me. Just one thing: I leave last, after all these people trapped in this city get rescued first.”

Do you suppose that might have made a difference? In my opinion, that defines the difference between a leader and a politician.

Until a nuclear bomb explodes in one of our major cities, Hurricane Katrina will be the defining disaster of the last 100 years.

Let’s talk about race, politics and responsibility. Nobody knew better the peril they faced than the mostly black, mostly Democratic leaders of New Orleans.

So why didn’t they do a better job of getting the city ready for the inevitable disaster? Why not pre-position buses on high ground, refueling stations on high ground, power generators on rooftops, not in basements? Why were there no boats pre-positioned by the city and parish and state for the inevitable levee breaks?

Why were there not more New Orleans police officers inside the Dome with the 20,000 evacuees? Inside the convention center where the other large contingent of evacuees fled? Were the chief of police and fire department head surprised about where people were ordered to gather? Did the chiefs have any plans?

How did the angry New Orleans mayor get caught so completely unprepared for any of the scenarios that he of all people would have been most familiar with?

Why did the Democratic governor of Louisiana delay so long in getting state-controlled National Guard troops into effective pre-positions for call-up? Why did they take so long to get into the city? They were under state control, so why didn’t the state get them going?

Why did not any local or state agencies roll their vehicles down an open highway into the heart of New Orleans, a highway that was never impassable?

Why does the governor to this day refuse to turn over control of the Guards to federal authorities?

Why did top federal officials, whose jobs are to respond to just such disasters, hold useless news conferences and spin platitudes for days while thousands of victims couldn’t even get plastic bottles of water dropped to them from helicopters?

Why did President Bush stay on vacation two days too long?

Why aren’t officials in positions of responsibility admitting that they screwed up big time? Everybody else in the U.S.A. knows they screwed up, from the police chief up to the president. But we keep hearing stupid platitudes and finger-pointing.

The residents of the Gulf Coast needed to see a lot more courage from their government officials, down to the chiefs and the captains and the lieutenants, and a lot less bureaucratic diddling and incompetence.

Somebody in some uniform somewhere needed to stand on the back of a truck or in the hatch of a helicopter and say, “To hell with the bureaucrats. I’m going in. Who’s with me?”

That’s America. Not what we saw in news conferences. (A detailed critique of stunning city, parish and state government failures is in the Sept. 6 Wall Street Journal.)

*** Thousands of Fayette County folks are opening their hearts, their homes and their wallets for hurricane relief and incoming evacuees.

Here at The Citizen, we’ve set up a daily, sometimes hourly, updating of our Web site, TheCitizen.com, to get the word out on needs of evacuees and how you can help in local relief efforts.

Contact us if you have information about folks needing help or about ways local folks can get involved in relief efforts. E-mail me: editor@TheCitizen.com.