GOP report blasts Bush for Katrina; but to what end?

[Chris just returned from a 4-day trip to New Orleans and Mississippi for Gulf Coast Reconstruction Watch. Stay tuned for more reports from the trip about the rebuilding -- and lack of rebuilding -- the Gulf.]

The headlines today aren't good for the Bush Administration and its attempts to shake off blame for the disasterous relief response to Hurricane Katrina.

Drafts of a report being prepared by the all-Republican, 11-member House committee investigating Katrina -- which many Democrats assumed would be a sham -- have been released. And it's clear that the final report, while finding "fecklessness, flailing and organizational paralysis" at all levels of government, saves most of its criticism for Bush officials and their role in over 90 government failures it documents.

The question is this: While report is refreshing for its clarity, what good can come out of it now, 160 days after Katrina hit?

The report covers a lot of ground. Here's a UPI clip this morning:

A congressional report on Hurricane Katrina blames local, state and federal officials for inaction but heaps the most criticism on President Bush.

A draft of the report from a Republican House committee, due Wednesday, said Bush and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff disregarded the lessons of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, ignored warnings of New Orleans devastation and were lax on putting evacuation and relief efforts into motion.

Particularly devastating are the revelations that the Bush team knew the city's levees had been breached, but failed to act, as the NY Times reports:

A draft of the report ... says the Bush administration was informed on the day Hurricane Katrina hit that the levees had been breached, even though the president and other top administration officials earlier said that they had learned of the breach the next day.

That delay was significant, the report says, rejecting the defense given by the White House and the Department of Homeland Security that the time it took to recognize the breach did not significantly affect the response.

"If the levees breached and flooded a large portion of the city, then the flooded city would have to be completely evacuated," the draft report says. "Any delay in confirming the breaches would result in a delay in the post-landfall evacuation of the city." It adds that the White House itself discounted damage reports that later proved true.

Aside from a moral victory for those who blamed the White House all along, what good will this report do?

Congressional leaders hope it will prepare us for future disasters. But I doubt that's good enough for those in New Orleans, where I just spent a few days meeting with community leaders who still have unsettled business with last year's hurricanes.

It's now clear that two of the most critical problems in New Orleans from Katrina resulted largely from federal failures: 1) bad levees, which caused the flooding responsible for most of the city's devastation; and 2) the bad post-storm response, which condemned many to hardship or death.

As I pointed out last week, a common argument in New Orleans is "if our homes were destroyed because of shoddy federal levees, the federal government is responsible for making things right." This week's house report adds another layer of federal responsibility for "making things right."

But the White House has recently shown less interest in helping the Gulf, not more. In Bush's 69-paragraph State of the Union speech two weeks ago, the Gulf Coast tragedies of 2005 didn't clock in until paragraph 63. His 161 vague words devoted to the subject were 47 less than the section exclaiming the need to cut "entitlements" to the elderly and poor.

As for content, his claim that "the federal government has committed $85 billion to the people of the Gulf Coast and New Orleans" used funny math that pundits in the Gulf didn't appreciate.

People in the Gulf don't care about the blame game -- they're past that. What they do care about is getting on with their lives and seeing a better future in the Gulf.

It's clear that a real rebuilding of the Gulf will only happen with federal resources. Now Gulf advocates have more ammunition in their claim that the White House has a responsibility to make it happen. So the question is, is there political will inside Washington -- and enough outrage outside the beltway -- to make the government live up to its responsibility?