You need to add to it President Bush met with Blanco and Nagin on Sept 1 and Blanco asked for 24 hours to give her answer. Friday moring the troops and convoys arrived.
Well, I was trying to focus on some narrow issues, and I did not see any accounts of that meeting where the Convention Center or Superdome were specifically discussed. If you have, please feel free to post the source - it would be a good addition. By the 1st, people were already being evacuated, and the folks at the Convention Center were just beginning to be reported.
Here is a letter to the editor I sent to my local paper? Free to use.
By XXXX XXXXXXXXX
The President, 24 hours early not 24 hours late. Did the President’s early involvement save thousands?
Conventional wisdom among many pundits is that President Bush was 24 hours late getting involved in the Katrina rescues. As is often the case with conventional wisdom, it doesn’t stand up to the facts.
According to The Times-Picayune article published on 8/28/2005 [before landfall], President Bush personally called Gov Blanco and appealed for a mandatory evacuation. The relevant quote from the article is “Gov. Kathleen Blanco, standing beside the mayor at a news conference, said President Bush called and personally appealed for a mandatory evacuation for the low-lying city, which is prone to flooding.” Since this was posted to The Times-Picayune web site on the 28th, it is reasonable to assume that news conference was held on the 28th and the President’s call probably happen late on the 27th or early on the 28th.
According to Gov. Blanco, President Bush became personally involved well before landfall. In addition, according to a 8/27/05 The Associated Press report [again published before landfall], President Bush and his staff met on Friday evening [8/26/2005] to begin coordinating the relief effort. These meeting were held in Crawford while the President was still on "vacation".
The call from the President appealing for a mandatory evacuation is important in context because his call gave the Governor and Mayor political cover to make an earlier voluntary evacuation order mandatory. According to various media reports, the Mayor indicated that he had delayed the mandatory evacuation for legal liability reason. He said during earlier Hurricane evacuation orders the city had been sued by local businesses for loss of business.
So the call from the President and others such as Max Mayfield of the National Hurricane Center gave the Governor and Mayor the backbone they needed to make the evacuation order mandatory. We will never know for sure if the Mayor and Governor would have eventually called for a mandatory evacuation without the President's call. The only thing we can be sure of is that the president was not 24 hours late, he was at least 24-48 hours early and his personal involvement in what is a local and state matter might have saved thousands.