How it all went wrong

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As he prepares to leave America, Michael Gawenda reflects on a changing political landscape during his 2½ years as the Herald's Washington correspondent.

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Travelling around the country, the contradictions and paradoxes were vivid and you felt, in the words of the poet and songwriter Leonard Cohen, that America really was "the cradle of the best and of the worst".

The worst was there for the world to see when New Orleans drowned in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in late August 2005. The suffering of the city's poor and mostly black population - abandoned in their flooded houses, their dead floating unnamed and unrecognised in the toxic floodwaters, with thousands of people crammed into a football stadium and a convention centre without food or water; old and sick, some of them, mothers with babies and small children - was all played out in endless hours of television coverage. It horrified and shamed Americans.

And what horrified them, too, was that Bush stayed on holiday at his ranch in Texas, and the man whom he had appointed to run the national emergency organisation, a crony who had previously run a horse show, worried about the clothes he should wear in television interviews during which he displayed a sort of grumpy bewilderment about what was happening in New Orleans.

It was the drowning of that city rather than the growing fiasco in Iraq that marked middle America's disillusionment with Bush. Katrina and its aftermath convinced a majority of Americans that Bush was incompetent. They concluded that an incompetent president, one who had appointed cronies totally unqualified for the jobs he had given them, was fighting a war that he had no idea how to win.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/how-it-all-went-wrong/2007/05/25/1179601668641.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap2