Daddy

Here's an AP Wire story about Bush's visit to Florida in the wake of Hurricane Charley:

President Bush arrived two days after Charley hit and promised rapid disaster relief. His father had been criticized for responding too slowly following Andrew despite his quick visit to Miami-Dade County.
"Yeah, if I didn't come, they would've said we should have been here more rapidly," Bush told reporters during his tour.

It's good to know the president is so sincere and his motivations so decent.
Not only does this quote largely confirm that the trip to Florida was influenced by politics, it again reveals the kind of bizarre family dynamics that animate Bush. We have Bush practically whining that people might impute politics from his actions. But we also have him responding to the type of criticism that prevented his father's reelection. There are any number of things that sank GHW Bush's attempt at another term, but the perception that he was out of touch with the lives of ordinary Americans was probably the most important. The story that he didn't recognize, and was awed by, a supermarket scanner may have been a myth, but it fit. Bush was widely regarded as being unconcerned and inattentive to the domestic front in America. The recession of the early 90s was painful, and Bush was commonly seen as doing nothing about it.
The current President may not be his father, but he clearly has issues with how his father was perceived, and an intense desire not to make the mistakes his father made.
The media culture in this country is a currupt and cruel thing and worth rejecting, even when the object of its petty wrath is an ineffectual and uninspiring president. It creates stories for all of its players, and those stories are sometimes immune to facts. It likes things simple. Scott Peterson is a Killer who dies his hair, Michael Jackson is a wierdo, Al Gore is a serial exaggerator, Bush is "the candidate you'd want to have a beer with," even though he's actually a tee-totaler. The great media megaphone decided that Bush's father was a Wimp, Out of Touch, and someone who Breaks His Promises. Some of it was true, but a lot of it was bogus- the kind of Reader's Digest view of the world that issues forth from the pens of Maureen Dowd or David Broder.
So Bush the Younger apparently established his presidency as a mirror of his father's. The scion of a political dynasty, the fruit of Greenwich Connecticut, would paint his overeducated self as some dumb, plain-spoken hick. No one who with a ranch that manly, no one who pronounces the word nucular, could be out of touch. Instead of leaving it a smoking chaos like his father, George W would invade Iraq and turn it into a democracy. He would confirm he was no wimp by appearing in a photo op on an aircraft carrier, wearing a codpiece and a flight suit. Mission Accomlished! Instead of being a chilly secular northeasterner like his dad, he would pander to the religious right like no other president.
So you see moments like the one quoted above where the president's response to Hurricane Charlie has as much to do with avoiding his father's failure as it does the lives and livelihoods broken in the wake of this natural disaster. Sad, really.

On a lighter note, despite Bush's animating quest to outdo his old man, it is becoming clear that W has a diminishing chance of escaping his father's fate.