Four Years and One Department of Homeland Security Later...

There's a reliable principle in political communications that, if you don't acknowledge what your audience is thinking, they won't hear what you have to say. President Sluggo neglected this principle, according to one critic of his speech last night:

"He was giving a speech as if the nation were disheartened and worried and had lost its spirit, but that's not what people were thinking," said Mickey Edwards, a former Republican congressman from Oklahoma. "They were thinking, why did the government screw up?"

Dan Balz in the Washington Post is hardly alone in pointing out that these are the people who said they would keep us safe:

Hurricane Katrina struck at the core of Bush's presidency by undermining the central assertion of his reelection campaign, that he was a strong and decisive leader who could keep the country safe in a crisis.

Four years after 9/11 and one Department of Homeland Security later, our leader wants to review emergency planning in our cities:

"In a time of terror threats and weapons of mass destruction, the danger to our citizens reaches much wider than a fault line or a flood plain. I consider detailed emergency planning to be a national security priority. And therefore, I have ordered the Department of Homeland Security to undertake an immediate review, in cooperation with local counterparts, of emergency plans in every major city in America. I also want to know all the facts about the government response to Hurricane Katrina."