The Flack

He visited New Orleans on eight separate occasions. He had his picture taken with the National Guard. He donned work clothes and picked up a hammer for Habitat for Humanity. Did these media photo opps help President Bush deflect the criticism of his administration’s lackluster response to Hurricane Katrina? I’m not so sure.

It is therefore surprising that, in spite of his brother accepting responsibility for the slow response to Hurricane Wanda in Florida, the President will travel to the Sunshine State today for yet another photo op. Save the jet fuel!

This may be heresy coming from a career PR’ist, but Mr. Bush, forget the primping and posing for the cameras and do something tangible and substantive that will actually make a difference in the lives of the people affected by these natural disasters. All the photo ops in the world aren’t going to restore electricity or deliver potable water. It may even backlash. Just sample the blogosphere later today to gauge citizen reaction to the staged courting of this key swing state.

Coming back to Katrina given that the storm and its aftermath continue to flood the news and opinion pages. Take Frank Rich’s commentary in yesterday’s New York Times. He chastised FEMA for its solicitation of “community relations officers,” instead of experienced emergency services workers. To Frank’s point, I was told that FEMA posted on its website a call for volunteers specializing in crisis communications.

Rich writes: “The two top deputies at FEMA remaining after Michael Brown’s departure, one of them a former local TV newsman, are not disaster relief specialists but experts in P.R., which they’d practiced as advance men for various Bush campaigns.”

So while Frank Rich takes FEMA to task for emphasizing PR over substance, another opinionated blogger - Mark Cuban - chastises FEMA for not having an effective communications system in place for the disaster relief effort:

“FEMA needs to realize that we are a media centric culture. We look for information wherever we can find it. The wider spread the communication, the more people will receive it and the more assistance, of the type that is needed, can be offered. I can only speculate, but based on what I saw today, which I’m sure was repeated in cities around the country, but millions, if not tens of millions of dollars in timely support was lost because people, including me were uninformed.”

Talk about mixed signals!