(Cross-posted to Needlenose.)
You can bet that as the rebuilding of New Orleans progresses, the city will have to get a restraining order to keep Dubya away -- that's how desperate he is to put his face all over the "good news" of recovery after being AWOL when Hurricane Katrina struck.
There's not much hope of preventing the Orwell Bush administration from generating its own counter-flood of stage-managed positive images. But we can try to short-circuit their attempt to overwrite people's memories by connecting the current PR-driven courtship to the abdication of responsibility that preceded it.
I think one phrase captures it well: The fair-weather President. Stick that in the public consciousnessness, so that whenever people see sunny images of Dubya with his sleeves rolled up, they remember that when the storm came rumbling through, he was nowhere to be found. For example:
It's great that the president is showing his commitment to the reconstruction effort. But New Orleans deserved more than a fair-weather President. And America deserves more than a fair-weather President.