Erick-Woods Erickson
Democrats blasted George W. Bush not just for FEMA’s operations, but also because he flew over New Orleans after Katrina, choosing not to land and be a distraction.
Now, Joe Biden is at the beach.
People are dying in the mountains of North Carolina and Joe Biden can’t even be bothered to get off the beach and back to the White House. He claims he’s working the phones.
At times like this, it matters as much that Presidents look like they’re engaged, not just that they are engaged. Hanging out on the beach does not look very engaged.
For Democrats, this is a swing state with a Republican gubernatorial candidate in scandal. They could win it. But the President embracing the salt life as some people are just trying to stay alive is going to resonate. The pictures will matter. Yes, the optics matter.
Beyond that, Joe Biden’s National Weather Service got its projection wrong.
People who believed the private sector modeling were informed, but most news networks relied on the National Weather Service, which projected the eye going up I-75 through Macon, Georgia, where I live.
In fact, the National Weather Service projected the center up the eye would go straight up my street. But other, better weather models showed the storm moving East. Private sector services, like power companies, relied on those better models to position resources anticipating the storm.
Individual and the government, relying on the National Weather Service, expected a storm much further west than it was. The National Weather Service is controlled by the Biden Administration. It may be non-partisan, but it is under the President’s control.
While the President was living his best life on the beach, the National Weather Service modeling got the track of the storm wrong and a whole lot of people died because of it. Below is a representation of the NWS data that was put out and that a lot of local television weather forecasters used. It was not accurate. The path of the storm went east.
Tracking a massive hurricane is not precise. But others provided better insight and predictions than the National Weather Service. Private sector and other government models showed that it would go east, over Augusta, Georgia, and into North Carolina.
Sadly, those who relied on the government data to position their resources could not then get into North Carolina to help because the roads washed away. Better public data would have allowed more accurate resource positioning before the storm hit.
Does Joe Biden, on the beach, even care?