IMAGE: The White House
BY BLAKE HANSON
You're watching multisource politics video news analysis from Newsy.
It’s the politics of natural disasters...
As many on the East Coast hunker down for Irene, politicians are on their tippy toes.
The Christian Science Monitor explains...
“For elected leaders in the US, it is now an axiom of post-Katrina politics that they must either be prepared for a major storm or suffer voter wrath afterward.Given all the smart preparations for hurricane Irene along the Eastern Seaboard, the axiom seems to have sunk in.”
Whether it’s an agency director, the President or a lawmaker -- no one is left out of the storm’s path. After House Majority Leader Eric Cantor commented on the economics of Irene, a Fox News roundtable sounds off...
“I have a friend, who, wherever we go, no matter what we do, he talks about girls. Doesn’t matter, he’s going ‘Did you see this girl? I’m seeing this girl.’ We’d be at a funeral. It’s the same thing with politics. At some point you gotta stop with the politics. It was the right time to bring up some, whether it’s true or not. It’s like people have other things to worry about.”
While many flee the storms path, MSNBC’s “Daily Rundown” discusses the importance of getting a head of the storm.
REPORTER: “We saw that with Joplin Missouri, we saw that obviously you know with a whole other set of things, you know the snow storms in New York and New Jersey, you know, where Mike Bloomberg saw his approval ratings drop, Chris Christie being criticized for being in Disneyworld at the time.”
HOST: “And that iconic image, we’ve talked about it, George Bush kind of looking down out of the plane at Hurricane Katrina, that in some ways kind of encapsulated for some people what they didn’t like.”
REPORTER: “That’s why we are going to hear Obama speak about it today, because he has to show he’s in front of something.”
While politicians try and find middle ground between keeping mum and politicizing the issue -- GOP Presidential Candidate Ron Paul is going all in.
Salon reports...
“...Ron Paul slammed the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, and said that no national response to Hurricane Irene is necessary....it's very old news that Ron Paul thinks we should abolish FEMA, it's just rare that you hear anyone say we should go back to the good old days of disaster response and management. ‘We should be like 1900’ is a very illuminating statement.”
Transcript by Newsy.
