I COMPLETELY AGREE WITH BRAD DELONG’S TAKE on New Orleans’ hurricane plan. Read the whole thing, but here’s the clincher:

They were going to make a DVD. A DVD saying, “you all are on your own.” They didn’t even care enough to make the DVD before the hurricane season began.

No. New Orleans did not have a functioning government as of the summer of 2005. This is a catastrophic failure of local governance–much worse than FEMA’s failures.

You would think that somebody–somewhere–would have called Washington and said, “You know, New Orleans doesn’t have its act together enough to have a hurricane evacuation plan.” And that somebody, somewhere–in Washington or in Baton Rouge–would have cared.

I’m not sure, but I assume this was the hurricane plan that James Lee Witt was involved with.

But lest you think the problem is solely New Orleans, there’s this take by Mark Steyn:

“One of the things that’s changed so much since Sept. 11,” agreed Vice President Dick Cheney, “is the extent to which people do trust the government — big shift — and value it, and have high expectations for what we can do.”

Hard to see why he’d say that. Sept. 11 was an appalling comprehensive failure of just about every relevant federal agency. The only government that worked that day was local and state: The great defining image, redeeming American honor at a moment of national humiliation, is those brave New York firemen pounding up the stairs of the World Trade Center. What consolations can be drawn from the lopsided tango between slapdash bureaucrats and subhuman predators in New Orleans?

To be fair, next door, Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi has been the Giuliani of the hour, and there are many tales of great courage, like the teams from the Children’s Hospital of Alabama who’ve been helicoptering in to New Orleans to rescue newborn babies.

The comparison with Sept. 11 isn’t exact, but it’s fair to this extent: Katrina was the biggest disaster on American soil since that day provoked the total overhaul of the system and the devotion of billions of dollars and the finest minds in the nation to the prioritizing of homeland security. It was, thus, the first major test of the post-9/11 structures. Happy with the results? . . .

Oh, well, maybe the 9/11 commission can rename themselves the Katrina Kommission. Back in the real world, America’s enemies will draw many useful lessons from the events of this last week. Will America?

Will we? Read the whole thing. You can argue about the details, and God knows people are. But it’s clear that we’re nowhere near ready for primetime on this stuff — and unfortunately, it’s primetime already.

UPDATE: While not minimizing Katrina, Daniel Drezner reminds us that the Bush Administration has other balls in the air that shouldn’t be neglected.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Micah Sifry (whose permalinks are buggered for some reason) isn’t happy with the Bush Administration, but doesn’t trust the Democrats, either:

But here’s the deeper problem. Democrats have to stand for something other than “not Bush”–and there are many reasons to doubt they can. The dirty little secret of Washington insider politics is that both parties benefit from the game. I hardly trust the Democrats to clean up the mess left by the Republicans, do you? . . .

Nita Lowey, was just in my local paper bragging about $2 million she got for revamping a highway overpass nearby in Ardsley. Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu, another Democrat, loved the highway bill, proudly citing the 30% increase in transportation funding that she secured for her state. Where was she when the Army Corps funding request was turned down? (Thanks to the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner for noticing that bit of news.)

Why should we trust these Democrats to fix our broken government? They’re part of the problem too.

Lots of things are broken. It’s up to us to see them fixed. It would be easier, of course, if one of the things that was broken wasn’t the political system. As I write in tomorrow’s TechCentralStation column, “I wonder if our political classes possess the requisite maturity and self-discipline to take constructive action.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Mickey Kaus has more thoughts, continuing his anti-federalism theme. I don’t think that structural issues are the most important here, though. You can have management failures under any sort of governmental structure. Kaus writes, correctly, that “Anyone who knew anything about New Orleans would know that they wouldn’t get it together.” But that’s not a problem of federalism, really. And federalism compartmentalizes the problem — Louisiana may have done badly, but Alabama and Mississippi seem to be doing better. A hierarchical, unitary system opens the possibility of blowing it everywhere at once. On average, the feds are arguably more competent than state and local governments, but the difference isn’t all that drastic. Norm Mineta, after all, is a fed.

MORE: Reader Tom Brosz emails that James Lee Witt is disavowing any connection with the New Orleans hurricane plan, and notes that the IEM press release from last year has been updated to read: “James Lee Witt Associates was a member of the original team, but did not participate in the project.”