WASHINGTON – The Obama administration claim that "the system worked" after a failed aircraft bombing wasn't quite as jolting asPresident George W. Bush's "Brownie, you're doing a heckuva job" when New Orleans was sinking under deadly Hurricane Katrina. Both raised disturbing questions about presidential response in a time of crisis.
Bush's praise for his beleaguered FEMA director, Michael Brown, came while storm evacuees remained trapped in the Louisiana Superdome and victims' bloated bodies floated in the flooded streets. It became a clarion call for all his administration did wrong during the 2005 calamity — and a larger symbol for all people disliked generally about Bush.
Obama is dealing with a crisis of a different sort, Friday's attempt by a 23-year-old Nigerian to blow up a Detroit-bound flight from Amsterdam. It ended with only a quickly extinguished fire, no lives lost and the man in custody.
Still, the close call prompted alarm.
• How did airport security, improved at much cost after the 2001 terrorist attacks, miss the bomber's concealed explosives?
• How did the terrorist watchlist system allow Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to keep his American tourist visa and avoid extra flight screening despite his father telling authorities his concerns about the younger man's radicalization?
• Why didn't Abdulmutallab's lack of luggage, and cash purchase for an international flight, raise suspicions?
• Why was the plot thwarted only by an apparent explosive malfunction and fellow passengers' quick action?
Amid those questions, administration officials' repeated statements that "the system worked" were jarring. They made it sound like the administration doesn't get it, like it is paying too much attention to political fallout and too little to public fears.
Officials insist the assertion, made by Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and White House press secretary Robert Gibbs Sunday on television talk shows, referred only to heightened security procedures scrambled into place after the incident.
They say it is being purposely taken out of context by partisans playing politics with near-disaster.
They note Obama ordered two reviews, of the nation's multilayered terrorist watchlist system and of airport security procedures, something he clearly wouldn't do if he believed there were no flaws.
Gibbs and Napolitano also were hoping, with the busy holiday travel season still in full force, to instill confidence in air safety.
"The system worked," Napolitano declared on CNN during questioning about the lapses. Gibbs used nearly the same language on CBS, saying that "in many ways, this system has worked," without elaborating.
Later that same day, Napolitano put it differently on ABC, saying "once the incident occurred, the system worked." She tried again on Monday, saying in a round of TV interviews that "our system did not work in this instance. No one is happy or satisfied with that."
But the damage was done.
Members of Congress — Republicans, but some Democrats too — were incredulous that "the system worked" was used in any context to describe what happened. "It is insulting that the Obama administration would make such a claim," Rep. Pete Hoekstra, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee — who is running for governor in Michigan — said in a campaign e-mail.
The other thing I find interesting about this story. After the Fort Hood massacre nobody from the Obama administration wanted to call it a terrorist attack. They seem so worried about offending someone by not being politically correct. They have tried to turn it into a non-story even though some of the Bush era policies that Obama changed when he took office may have contributed to the FBI not being able to prevent the attack. But on the Christmas day attack it was immediately called terrorism by the administration.
