Barack Obama received perhaps his greatest endorsement yet for his handling of Hurricane Sandy when former head of FEMA Michael Brown, the man who botched the emergency relief for Hurricane Katrina, criticized Obama for acting too soon in dealing with the storm.
Obama must be doing cartwheels over this one. I had not realized that Brown had crawled out from under the rock he's been hiding under since resigning in shame from his post at FEMA, but apparently he's still out there, and now considers himself a leading voice on Hurricane preparedness.
Here's more from Salon.com:
Do you remember Michael “heckuva job” Brown? Brownie was the former stewards and judges commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association who rose to become head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency under President George W. Bush. Yeah, he’s the same Michael Brown whose name became shorthand for the Bush administration’s blasé incompetence following Hurricane Katrina. Well, Brown has some advice for the president on how to manage natural disasters: Take your time.
Yesterday, before Hurricane Sandy turned lower Manhattan into a wading pool and put millions out of power, Brown gave an interview to Westword, the alternative weekly in Denver:
Holding a press conference at FEMA yesterday might have been a bit premature, given that the most serious impacts of the storm are not expected until later today, he feels.
“Here’s my concern,” Brown says. “People in the northeast are already beginning to blow it off…. [New York City Mayor Michael] Bloomberg has shut down the subway…[launched] evacuations…. I don’t object…they should be doing all of that. But in the meantime, various news commentators…[and others] in New York are shrugging their shoulders, saying, ‘What’s this all about?’ It’s premature [when] the brunt of the storm won’t happen until later this afternoon.”
Brown says he understands why the president might have chosen to have a news conference earlier rather than later.
“My guess is, he wants to get ahead of it — he doesn’t want anybody to accuse him of not being on top of it or not paying attention or playing politics in the middle of it,” he says. “He probably figured Sunday was a good day to do a press conference.”
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