Daily Inspiration Quote by Michael Chertoff

The sentence is engineered to sound like accountability while quietly distributing it. Chertoff frames the failure as an "idea" rather than a decision, a bureaucratic sleight of hand that turns policy into weather. "You can go this alone" is intentionally vague: who is "you" - the city, the state, FEMA, the Bush administration? That ambiguity is the point. It widens the target area of blame until it becomes everyone and no one, a soft-focus critique that avoids naming the actors who had the power to act.

The tense shift - "is - was" - is another tell. It captures the live-wire pressure of speaking after catastrophe: he wants the moral clarity of present condemnation, then retreats to the safety of past error. The phrase "huge mistake" carries the cadence of confession, but it stops short of culpability. Mistakes happen; negligence is committed.

Then comes the human cost, but even that is packaged in passive construction: "there was a price paid". Paid by whom? Not the agencies, not the officials, not the planners. The "price" lands on "people in New Orleans", a final clause that acknowledges suffering while keeping the speaker institutionally clean.

In the Katrina context - a disaster that exposed how federalism can become an alibi and how race and poverty shape whose emergencies count - the line reads as an attempt to recalibrate the narrative: yes, coordination failed, yes, people hurt, but the failure was structural, not personal. It's a statement built to calm outrage without conceding liability, a public servant's version of remorse with guardrails.