Bear with me while I make the case for doubting
whether Mr. Bush will make good on his promise.

First, Mr. Bush already has a record of trying to
renege on pledges to a stricken city. After 9/11 he
made big promises to New York. But as soon as his
bullhorn moment was past, officials began trying to
wriggle out of his pledge. By early 2002 his budget
director was accusing New York’s elected
representatives, who wanted to know what had happened
to the promised aid, of engaging in a ”money-grubbing
game.” It’s not clear how much federal help the city
has actually received.

With that precedent in mind, consider this: Congress
has just gone on recess. By the time it returns, seven
weeks will have passed since the levees broke. And the
administration has spent much of that time blocking
efforts to aid Katrina’s victims.

I’m not sure why the news media haven’t made more of
the White House role in stalling a bipartisan bill
that would have extended Medicaid coverage to all
low-income hurricane victims — some of whom,
according to surveys, can’t afford needed medicine.
The White House has also insisted that disaster loans
to local governments, many of which no longer have a
tax base, be made with the cruel and unusual provision
that these loans cannot be forgiven.

Since the administration is already nickel-and-diming
Katrina’s victims, it’s a good bet that it will do the
same with reconstruction — that is, if reconstruction
ever gets started.

Nobody thinks that reconstruction should already be
under way. But what’s striking to me is that there are
no visible signs that the administration has even
begun developing a plan. No reconstruction czar has
been appointed; no commission has been named. There
have been no public hearings. And as far as we can
tell, nobody is in charge.

Last month The New York Times reported that Karl Rove
had been placed in charge of post-Katrina
reconstruction. But last week Scott McClellan, the
White House press secretary, denied that Mr. Rove —
who has become a lot less visible lately, as
speculation swirls about possible indictments in the
Plame case — was ever running reconstruction. So who
is in charge? ”The president,” said Mr. McClellan.

Finally, if we assume that Mr. Bush remains hostile to
domestic spending that might threaten his tax cuts —
and there’s no reason to assume otherwise —
foot-dragging on post-Katrina reconstruction is a
natural political strategy.

I’ve been reading ”Off Center,” an important new
book by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, political
scientists at Yale and Berkeley respectively. Their
goal is to explain how Republicans, who face a
generally moderate electorate and have won recent
national elections by ”the slimmest of margins,”
have nonetheless been able to advance a radical
rightist agenda.

One of their ”new rules for radicals” is ”Don’t
just do something, stand there.” Frontal assaults on
popular government programs tend to fail, as Mr. Bush
learned in his hapless attempt to sell Social Security
privatization. But as Mr. Hacker and Mr. Pierson point
out, ”sometimes decisions not to act can be a
powerful means of reshaping the role of government.”
For example, the public strongly supports a higher
minimum wage, but conservatives have nonetheless
managed to cut that wage in real terms by not raising
it in the face of inflation.

Right now, the public strongly supports a major
reconstruction effort, so that’s what Mr. Bush had to
promise. But as the TV cameras focus on other places
and other issues, will the administration pay a heavy
political price for a reconstruction that starts
slowly and gradually peters out? The New York
experience suggests that it won’t.