They evacuated the city of New Orleans. Refugees (refugees!) from the city of New Orleans are being taken to Houston (Houston! Texas!) and I'm watching on TV. Amidst helicopter footage of residential neighborhoods flooded attic-deep, the TV cuts away to Air Force One landing in Biloxi; then they have flashbacks to this morning: the president speaking on a sunny day in Washington.
"I'm headed down there right now," he says. Right now! As if we had suggested he were running to fetch an umbrella first.
"The response hasn't been good enough," he says, "And we're going to work with the authorities there, and FEMA, to work out a strategy to solve this thing. And get help where it needs to go." He has nothing to add to the situation, so he speaks vaguely. Later, the authorities in Biloxi have more generalities to give back to the president: "This is the worst natural disaster in American history," says one of the governors. "Right now we're at a ground zero, and we've got a long way to go but we will get there and we will build back." I'm reminded how much fluffy nothing there is in the job of the most powerful man in the world.
[Now, an inset picture! While the president is consoling the governors, and dealing his general pap for the cameras, a woman in a white shirt is carrying bottles of water from a helicopter! Where is she going? Will she make it? The camera pans! She's going to set the bottles down on the lawn! She's hugging someone on the lawn! The milk of human kindness! Now wipe away the inset.]
A young man from the Coast Guard is telling the president how, looking down from a helicopter, he sees “stars”—flashlights of people stranded on rooftops—there's no better time for sentimental metaphor, I guess, than when you're briefing the president on the worst natural disaster in American history—this man, this young man from the Coast Guard, he chooses which stars to pick up, flies them away, returns for more.
"I'm headed down there right now." The most specific thing, the most active thing, the president said all morning.