Leadership Quote by Howard Coble

In the aftermath of Katrina, praise isn’t just praise; it’s a political allocation of innocence. Howard Coble’s line reads like a verdict delivered with careful hedging. “I think” softens the claim, a politician’s seatbelt. “May well have been” adds another layer of plausible deniability. Yet the conclusion lands with force: the Coast Guard “the only entity… free of fault and free of blame.” The repetition is deliberate, almost legalistic, as if exoneration needs to be stamped twice to hold.

The context is a national embarrassment where responsibility was both obvious and fiercely contested. Katrina exposed not only a failed response but a failed system of authority: fractured chains of command, bureaucratic paralysis, and televised suffering that made bureaucratic language sound obscene. Against that backdrop, Coble’s intent is twofold. First, it isolates a hero narrative the public can accept without argument. The Coast Guard’s rescues were visible, kinetic, and hard to spin into incompetence. Second, it quietly sharpens the knife for everyone else: FEMA, DHS, state and local leadership, even the broader Bush administration apparatus, without naming them and triggering partisan trench warfare.

Calling the response an “exercise” is the tell. It reframes catastrophe as a stress test the government failed, implying evaluators, lessons, and accountability rather than just tragedy. Subtext: someone has to own the collapse, but let’s start by agreeing on who doesn’t. In Washington terms, that’s how you build consensus on blame while sounding above it.