Does Brown need to go down?

The Washington Post, enjoying the sensation of actually having teeth again which their new dentures provide, has taken a long look at the background, qualifications and performance of FEMA head and Bush patronage recipient Michael Brown. This is the guy, while NOLA was going under, to whom Bush actually said, "You're doing a heck of a job, Brownie." (He calls him Brownie... isn't that adorable?)

Michael D. Brown has been called the accidental director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, caricatured as the failed head of an Arabian horse sporting group who was plucked from obscurity to become President Bush's point man for the worst natural disaster in U.S. history.

Amid the swirl of human misery along the Gulf Coast, Brown admitted initially underestimating the impact of Hurricane Katrina, whose winds and water swamped the agency's preparations. As the nation reeled at images of the calamity, he appeared to blame storm victims by noting that the crisis was worsened by New Orleans residents who did not comply with a mandatory evacuation order.

By last weekend, facing mounting calls for his resignation, he told reporters: "People want to lash out at me, lash out at FEMA. I think that's fine. Just lash out, because my job is to continue to save lives." More broadly, the 50-year-old Oklahoma lawyer and the agency he leads have become the focus of a broad reappraisal of U.S. homeland security efforts four years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

In all fairness, Brown apparently does have some qualifications for the position. The press treatment has focused primarily on his last job with that sporting horse group (where he may or may not have been fired) but he has worked in other capacities. He chaired the Oklahoma Municipal Power Authority and served as a City Council member, examiner for the Oklahoma and Colorado supreme courts, and assistant city manager. So he has a background in civil management, though none of this speaks to his competency in any of these jobs.

What I found even more interesting, buried well down in the article, was an indication that perhaps his failures during Katrina were less his own fault than the fault of the Bush administration for gutting the power, influence and resources of FEMA in the name of the "war on terror." Check this out:

At a time when homeland security experts called for greater domestic focus on preparing for calamity, Brown faced years of funding cuts, personnel departures and FEMA's downgrading from an independent, Cabinet-level agency.

As recently as three weeks ago, state emergency managers urged Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and his deputy, Michael P. Jackson, to ease the department's focus on terrorism, warning that the shift away from traditional disaster management left FEMA a bureaucratic backwater less able to respond to natural events such as hurricanes and earthquakes.

So perhaps, even before New Orleans, FEMA was actually one of the earlier victims of the "war on terror."

I found this article initially through Betsy Newmark's blog. To her credit she does express a wish that Brown would stop saying that this disaster couldn't have been predicted when so many people had been predicting it for years. Unfortunately, she goes on to try to mount the now standard defense for Bush by blaming the local Democratic officials.