Hillary vs. Rudy - Katrina Shifts the Focus

When I visited him in the hospital this morning, my brother, (amazingly sharp despite months of chemo), remarked that Katrina will be a boon for Rudy Giuliani's presidential candidacy. Good call. I suspect he's right, (a theme Peggy Noonan touched on last week in her WSJ column.)

Without having to do anything overtly, the question is poised in many peoples' minds: "who would have made this much better in a big hurry?" Like him or don't, Rudy G occupies what marketers would call a clear, common brand position in virtually every voter's mind. This disaster - arguably of greater scope than 9-11, (all the data isn't in, so it's hard to call) - makes Rudy a natural to step strongly onto the national stage. It doesn't even have to be right away. If he's smart, it won't be.

Even a year from now, it will be a lot easier for Rudy to simply raise his hand and expect to rise to the top. The common response: "Oh, of course... Katrina... 9-11... Rudy... makes sense... let's hire him." None of the other Republican's have that.

That said, someone else figured all this out looong ago, and already has her angle:

Sen. Hillary Clinton called yesterday for a 9/11-style probe into how the federal government responded to the crisis. "It has become increasingly evident that our nation was not prepared," Clinton (D-N.Y.) said in a letter to Bush asking him to set up a "Katrina Commission."

All of which sounds fine as far as it goes. I.e., big crisis deserves study. Except for two things:

1) She's defining this from the outset as a purely national problem - subtly taking the spotlight off local Democrats who screwed up both tactically, (the 250 school buses not deployed that the MSM doesn't want to talk about), and strategically, (i.e., refusing over many decades to invest in measures that would have mitigated some of the effects of the well known hurricane risk.)

2) She's already decided what to do, begging the question of why she needs a commission - other than to gain attention for herself.

Clinton has decided at least one thing without waiting for any commission reports. She said she plans to introduce legislation to split the Federal Emergency Management Agency out of the Department of Homeland Security and give it back a cabinet-level director like it had in her husband's administration.