Hurricane divides US

Finger pointing and blame games have replaced the images of stunned Americans rallying around President Bush and of members of Congress standing on the steps of the Capitol singing "God Bless America."

The two events are similar in terms of the amount of devastation wrought possibly thousands of deaths, billions of dollars in structural damage and many, many lives turned upside down.

But it's the differences, observers say, that explain why a majority of the public and some lawmakers rushed to criticise Bush's response to Katrina and the flooding and subsequent evacuation of New Orleans.

Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Centre for the People & the Press, says the post-9/11 sense of unity was mostly a response to Americans feeling attacked by an external enemy.

"The biggest difference here," he said, "is we don't have an enemy to focus our anger on."

Daniel Laufer, who studies the public's response to crises, said the desire to place blame is natural. But it's harder, he says, for people to scapegoat a faceless intangible like Mother Nature as opposed to a real person like Osama bin Laden, mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks.

"That's a face you can point to, bin Laden," said Laufer, who teaches marketing at the University of Cincinnati. "A hurricane, Mother Nature, the environment, that is not something people want to blame."

Two-thirds of the public, according to the latest Pew poll, and lawmakers of both parties blame Bush, who is one face of a federal government they say was too slow to respond. Another face is Michael Brown, the nation's disaster relief director who some lawmakers say should resign or be fired.

In turn, the federal government has blamed both state and local officials.