Time & Perspective Quote by Ellen Tauscher

Tauscher’s statement does the careful political two-step: lead with compassion, pivot to scale, and land on the safe certainty of history. “My heart goes out” is the standard-issue language of solidarity, meant to signal human closeness without promising anything measurable. It’s a sentence designed to travel well on television: tender, brief, and hard to argue with.

The second line does heavier work. By calling Katrina “one of the largest natural disasters in U.S. history,” Tauscher frames the event as an act of nature first and foremost. That framing matters. In 2005, the country wasn’t only grappling with wind and water; it was watching the consequences of brittle infrastructure, policy failure, and the uneven value placed on different American lives. “Natural disaster” can function as a rhetorical solvent, washing away the human decisions that intensified the catastrophe and the slow-motion governmental response that followed.

The phrase “will go down in history books” is a subtle claim to seriousness and a bid for consensus. It recasts a live, politically radioactive crisis into a future lesson already agreed upon, a move that can mute immediate accountability. At the same time, it’s an appeal for urgency by way of magnitude: if history will remember this, officials should act as if the cameras are permanent.

The intent, then, is empathy plus legitimacy: to mourn publicly, to mark the moment as extraordinary, and to do it in language broad enough to unite constituents while sidestepping the sharper question Katrina raised in real time - not only what happened, but who let it happen.