Success Quote by Kathleen Blanco

The sentence tries to do two incompatible jobs at once: reassure and mourn. Blanco reaches for a comparative win - fewer deaths than predicted - then immediately undercuts it with the grim administrative reality that the count is unfinished. That whiplash is the point. In a crisis, leaders are expected to project competence in numbers while also speaking to human loss. Here, the numbers refuse to stay put, and the language exposes the trap.

The first clause is bureaucratic optimism, the kind that signals control by invoking forecasts, models, and expectations. It frames survival as a benchmark, quietly shifting attention from what happened to what could have happened. The second clause yanks the listener back into the floodwater: bodies unaccounted for, families waiting, a disaster still unfolding. "In the process of finding" is intentionally procedural, a phrase that pads the horror with paperwork. It buys time, acknowledges uncertainty, and avoids saying the blunt word "dead" twice.

Context matters: Blanco was Louisiana's governor during Hurricane Katrina, speaking into a media storm where every statement became evidence of leadership or failure. The line reads like a politician's tightrope walk between empathy and liability. Celebrate too early and you look callous; emphasize death and you look overwhelmed. By pairing tentative relief with ongoing search, she attempts to claim a sliver of success without denying the catastrophe - a rhetorical compromise shaped by catastrophe management, not eloquence. The subtext is also defensive: if the final number rises, the groundwork is laid that it was always provisional.