by JAMES TARANTO
Tuesday, September 6, 2005 3:23 P.M. EDT

A Political Tempest?
It was inevitable, we suppose. Less than a week after hurricane Katrina, the first poll came out to measure its political impact. The results, which ABC News released Sunday, will be highly disappointing to the Angry Left: 55% of those polled do not blame President Bush for the storm's devastation, and although 67% think the federal government wasn't "adequately prepared," 75% say the same thing about state and local government. John Podhoretz's interpretation is right on the money (capitalization his):

Once again we see the gigantic divide in this country--not between Right and Left, but between people who live and breathe politics and those for whom politics are only an incidental part. You need to look at the world through political glasses to assume that THE key aspect of a natural disaster is the response or lack thereof of the authorities--whether they be local, state or federal. The president doesn't MAKE hurricanes, therefore he will not be blamed FOR hurricanes. Nor do the governor and the mayor.

ABC also has an emotional breakdown by party: Democrats were far more likely than Republicans to describe themselves as "shocked" (68% to 42%), "angry" (63% to 27%) and "ashamed" (63% to 28%) at the response to Katrina, while Republicans were far more "hopeful" (80% to 50%) and "proud" (43% to 17%). Is there any doubt that those gaps would have been similar if the poll had been conducted after any other major event--or indeed at any other time--since President Bush was elected, other than immediately after 9/11?

Indeed, the experience of 9/11 shows how resistant political trends are to the influence of big events. The attack on America changed a lot, but not the electoral map: Only three states were carried by a different party's presidential candidate in 2004 than in 2000, the smallest such shift since 1924.

This is not to say 9/11 had no effect at the ballot box. At least one politician probably owes his election to the attack on America: New York's Mayor Michael Bloomberg. A beloved but term-limited Rudy Giuliani campaigned heavily for Bloomberg, who beat Mark Green, a deeply unserious man in a suddenly serious time.

Similarly, if Katrina has an electoral effect, it is likely to be local rather than national, especially since President Bush won't be running for re-election. (The Democratic Party and the left seem to have so fully absorbed the Clintonian doctrine of the "permanent campaign" that they've lost sight of the importance of actual elections.)

If Katrina's aftermath was, or is seen to have been, a government failure, state and local officials in the affected states--especially Louisiana--are likely to pay a price. And Katrina may change Louisiana politics for another reason: demographics. The storm forced a mass exodus from New Orleans and vicinity, and many residents surely will resettle out of state. The political effect will depend on whence the emigrants turn out to have come.

In the 2004 election, President Bush carried Louisiana by 281,870 votes, according to data from David Leip's election atlas. A breakdown by parish shows that the two candidates ran almost exactly even in the New Orleans area: John Kerry had a 109,763-vote margin within the city (Orleans Parish), while Bush beat Kerry by a combined 109,546 votes in the suburban parishes of Jefferson, Plaquemines, St. Bernard and St. Tammany.

Obviously if more New Orleans residents than suburbanites move out of state, Louisiana will become more Republican. Less obviously, the state will become more Republican even if flight from the suburbs equals that from New Orleans, since the evenly divided New Orleans region will account for a smaller part of the population than the heavily GOP-leaning rest of the state.

New Orleans's Mayor Ray Nagin is up for re-election in February 2006, Gov. Kathleen Blanco and Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu in November 2007, and Sen. Mary Landrieu in November 2008. All four are Democrats. When they point the finger at the federal government for whatever went wrong in the Katrina response, remember that they are fighting for their political lives.

Return of National Greatness Conservatism
New York Times columnist David Brooks sees hurricane Katrina as a "huge cultural moment":

Katrina means that the political culture, already sour and bloody-minded in many quarters, will shift. There will be a reaction. There will be more impatience for something new. There is going to be some sort of big bang as people respond to the cumulative blows of bad events and try to fundamentally change the way things are.

Reaganite conservatism was the response to the pessimism and feebleness of the 1970's. Maybe this time there will be a progressive resurgence. Maybe we are entering an age of hardheaded law and order. (Rudy Giuliani, an unlikely G.O.P. nominee a few months ago, could now win in a walk.) Maybe there will be call for McCainist patriotism and nonpartisan independence. All we can be sure of is that the political culture is about to undergo some big change.

Somehow this reminds of an op-ed by Bill Kristol that appeared in the Washington Post on Feb. 2, 2000, after John McCain won the New Hampshire primary. It began: "A new politics for the new millennium: That's the message the voters of New Hampshire, in unprecedented numbers and in both political parties, sent yesterday."

Kristol opined that "the conservative movement . . . is finished," and he added: "Has the Republican establishment ever been more thoroughly united than it was behind its favorite son, George W. Bush? And has the GOP establishment ever been more thoroughly repudiated than it was in New Hampshire yesterday?" His conclusion:

It is possible that either Al Gore or George W. Bush, or both, can come back to win their party's nomination. But if the party establishments save their candidacies, they will still be living on borrowed time. It is John McCain and Bill Bradley who each now have a chance that occurs only once a generation--to articulate a new governing agenda for a potential new political majority.

Katrina, of course, is a much bigger event than the New Hampshire primary--but then again, at least Kristol had some actual political results on which to base his conclusions. (Though if President Tsongas were still alive, he might have some interesting insights on how much of a bellwether New Hampshire primary voters are.)

Anyway, the reason we bring up Kristol is that he and Brooks were co-authors of a 1997 piece in The Wall Street Journal that argued for what they called "national greatness conservatism." Although Brooks doesn't mention NGC by name in his column, he does seem to be arguing now, as Kristol did 5 1/2 years ago, that the latest news means its time has come. Maybe he'll turn out to be right, though it strikes us that if government failed in the response to Katrina, it was for reasons more practical than ideological. In any case, political ideology carries with it the danger of wishful thinking.

Passive-Aggressive Liberalism
Former Enron adviser Paul Krugman actually manages to take his rage over Katrina beyond the usual Angry Left argument of blaming the devil Bush. He also blames the devil Reagan:

The federal government's lethal ineptitude wasn't just a consequence of Mr. Bush's personal inadequacy; it was a consequence of ideological hostility to the very idea of using government to serve the public good. For 25 years the right has been denigrating the public sector, telling us that government is always the problem, not the solution. Why should we be surprised that when we needed a government solution, it wasn't forthcoming?

The obvious objection is that Krugman has a cartoonish view of conservatism, which is anything but uniformly antigovernment (the Brooks/Kristol piece cited in the previous item elaborates this point). And while it's true that Reagan described government as the problem, not the solution, 25 years ago, those words would be shockingly out of character if George W. Bush were to utter them.

The more interesting point is that Krugman's implicit view of liberalism is about 35 years out of date. To put it bluntly, American liberals no longer believe in activist government. Oh, they believe in big government, but that's a matter of feeding existing bureaucracies and interest groups. But suggest doing things differently--welfare reform, Social Security reform, the Patriot Act--and they have nothing to offer but fear, anger and hate.

Among the first complaints we heard when Katrina struck was that the government failed to respond because of (a) Iraq and (b) tax cuts. This is passive-aggressive politics, not activist government. Lyndon B. Johnson cut taxes and waged war both in Vietnam and on poverty. To be sure, LBJ's administration was far from an unqualified success, but the point is that in those days liberals were confident--arguably overconfident--in the power of activist government.

By contrast, consider some of the dour and whiny Democratic campaign slogans of the past two presidential campaigns: Lockbox. Risky scheme. Miserable failure. Two Americas. Wrong war, wrong place, wrong time. Let America be America again.

The only one we can remember that on the surface has anything like a can-do sound is John Kerry's "Bring it on." But this was not original; it was a variation on an utterance of President Bush's that was widely criticized as too activist. What's more, the "it" Kerry wanted to "bring on" was not some great challenge facing the nation. Kerry's use of the phrase was an exercise in narcissism, not civic-mindedness; he simply was threatening to become belligerent over personal slights. And even at that, it was an empty threat!

By the way, the one thing no one has had the audacity to say about the Katrina response is that Kerry would have done better. President Kerry would have faced this disaster with a grand total of 7 1/2 months' administrative experience in his lifetime, and as someone once said, "This ship of state does not come with training wheels."

The Book the Angry Left Loves to Hate
When we wrote our defense of the religious right a few months ago, we treated somewhat dismissively the claim that the secular left is guilty of "antireligious bigotry." Blogger Bob Krumm calls our attention to something that gives us second thoughts.

Michael Hyatt, CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers, a Christian House, decided to do his part to help Katrina victims, and he described the effort in a post on his own blog:

This morning, I started getting e-mails from our employees with ideas for how our Company could help. Everyone feels the need to do something. I know I do. You can only watch the images for so long before you feel compelled to take action.

Realizing we need to act quickly, I asked Jim Thomason, our HR Director, to form a "Disaster Relief Committee" and make a recommendation to me by the end of the day. He and his team met and then made two proposals. . . . I immediately approved both.

First, we will donate 100,000 Bibles to the relief efforts. Why Bibles? This afternoon, an official in Baton Rouge said on Fox News, "We need water, food, . . . and Bibles." This is something I knew we could help with. Samaritan's Purse, an organization headed by Franklin Graham, one of our authors, has agreed to distribute these for us. We will begin shipping them to Louisiana as soon as we get instructions from Samaritan's Purse.

Second, I have approved a matching contribution program for our employees. We will match dollar for dollar any contribution our employees make to Samaritan's Purse up to [a total of] $50,000.

Here are some of the comments that readers submitted to Hyatt's blog; we're quoting them verbatim and running them together:

100,000 Bibles. That is the most asinine thing I have heard in years (and I've heard a few) You are fool of the first order. You sending bibles to people who need food, water, medicine, blankets, clothes and shelter. I shake my head in wonder and dismay.

Bibles !!!! Unbelievable...... In my eyes you are a moron! Unbelievable.... there are people DYING and babies and old people suffering indignities beyond any comprehension and you send them BIBLES - aaaaggggghhhhh - America IS nuts - no doubt about it.

If I were starving, thirsty, homeless, and in need of medicine, and someone handed me a bible, I would spit in their face. This is the most ridiculous, useless, self-serving thing I've ever heard, and anyone who gives money to this cause is going to hell.

Yeah, sure, Bibles, you f***in Moron!!! In order to support this neo-con creationist ideology that got these poor people in this situation. One of the posters here got it right, these people are about to die - shot by our own soldiers when trying to get some grocieries in order to survive! BY OUR OWN SOLDIERS, GOT IT???

There are positive comments too, but it's quite astonishing that the Bible would inspire such hatred, especially from people who supposedly don't believe in it.

'Message: I Care'
"The George Bush Presidential Library and Museum will waive admission fees for anyone stranded in the Bryan-College Station area by Hurricane Katrina."--Byran-College Station (Texas) Eagle, Sept. 5

Oh Where (Will) the Saints Go Marching In?
For football fans, here's an update on the New Orleans Saints. The displaced team will play the New York Giants in the Saints' first "home" game on Monday night, Sept. 19, at Giants Stadium in New Jersey. (They couldn't play the previous day as scheduled because there's a Jets home game.)

As for the rest of the season, three options are under consideration: the LSU's Tiger Stadium in Baton Rouge, La., the Alamodome in San Antonio, or their opponents' home stadiums. In the last case, no more reschedulings should be necessary. The Giants and Jets are the only teams that play in the same home arena, and the Saints-Jets tilt on Nov. 27 is already scheduled for Giants Stadium.

Brendon Was in the Doghouse With Becky
A lovely correction from today's New York Times: "An article in Business Day about Brendon Loy, the Notre Dame student who was one of the earliest to sound the alarm about the potential threat to New Orleans from Hurricane Katrina, misstated the name of Mr. Loy's dog. It is Robbie, not Becky (which is his fiancée's name)."

Chief Justice Roberts
Well, our dream did not come true. President Bush announced yesterday that Judge John Roberts, originally his nominee to replace Justice Sandra Day O'Connor is now his nominee to replace the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist. The Senate delayed Roberts's hearings from today until next Monday, in part to allow for Rehnquist's funeral, which is tomorrow.

This means the Supreme Court will live to see another Day, as O'Connor's retirement does not become effective until the Senate confirms her successor, which almost certainly won't happen before the court's term opens in October.

Democrats are worried. "Before the Senate acts on John Roberts' new nomination, we should know even more about his record, and we should know whom the president intends to propose to nominate as a replacement for Sandra Day O'Connor," Reuters quotes Sen. Ted Kennedy as saying.

Mary Jo Kopechne could not be reached for comment.

The conventional wisdom is that the president will appoint a woman or a member of an ethnic minority. We have a favorite or two who would qualify, but we won't mention them for fear of jinxing the thing.

Stop the Presses
"Next Bush Nominee May Be a Conservative"--headline, Associated Press, Sept. 6

Other Than This Weekend, He's Done Pretty Well Since
"Chief Justice Last Died in Office in 1953"--headline, Associated Press, Sept. 4

Not Too Quickly, We Hope
"Roberts Follows Rehnquist's Path"--headline, CNN.com, Sept. 4

Talk About Chutzpah!
When we heard Alan Dershowitz's hateful Fox interview about Chief Justice Rehnquist in the wee hours of Sunday, we thought that maybe, like us, he was up too late and had had a few drinks. Apparently not. Later Sunday he weighed in with another attack on Rehnquist, this one on the Stuffington Roast. Amazingly, Dershowitz opens with an attack on his own mother:

My mother always told me that when a person dies, one should not say anything bad about him. My mother was wrong.

We think Dershowitz's mother was right, and to prove it we're going to refrain from speaking ill of her--even though she inflicted Alan Dershowitz on the world.

(Carol Muller helps compile Best of the Web Today. Thanks to Brian Rom, Charles Sullivan, Andrew Robinson, C.E. Dobkin, Michael Segal, Brent Silver, William Katz, Charles Coffin, Skip King, David Gail and Richard Watson. If you have a tip, write us at opinionjournal@wsj.com, and please include the URL.)

Today on OpinionJournal:

• Review & Outlook: Amid a political hurricane, the president must reassert his leadership.
• Brendan Miniter: Hurricane Katrina offers New Orleans public school students an opportunity.
• Manuel Miranda: The Rehnquist court was among the greatest legacies of the two presidents who appointed him.
• Arthur Chrenkoff: A roundup of the past month's good news from Afghanistan.