Hurricane Katrina’s devastation may help to define the Bush administration in history as incompetent and callous. Hurricane Katrina provided the world with a case study of the administration’s attitude toward the poor, people of color in general and African-Americans in particular.

The president’s initial tour of the area in Air Force One and his now famous statement, "you’re doing a heck of a job Brownie," illustrated how out of touch he was with what was happening on the ground.

Neglect has been a tactic of the Bush administration when it comes to people who disagree with administration domestic and foreign policies. The Katrina disaster is just one example. His snubbing of black leadership is another.

In 2005 President George W. Bush met with the Congressional Black Caucus for the first time as a group in nearly four years. But what CBC members said stood out the most was the president’s declaration that he was "unfamiliar" with the Voting Rights Act of 1965, one of the most significant pieces of legislation passed in the history of the United States.

In July of this year Mr. Bush ended his five-year boycott of the NAACP. In a speech before the organization he admitted that he and his party had a credibility problem with African-Americans. He said, "For too long my party wrote off the African-American vote, and many African-Americans wrote off the Republican Party." This line in his speech received a large and sustained ovation from the crowd of 2,000.

With this as a backdrop to the federal government’s slow response to Katrina, it is easy to see how Chicago rapper Kanye West, after days of viewing African-American stranded and dying in New Orleans, went off script during a live concert fund-raiser for victims of Hurricane Katrina and declared, "President Bush does not care about black people".

In foreign affairs Bush has employed the same tactic of neglect of countries that have differences with his foreign policy. This tendency allowed him to disregard the United Nations as a vehicle for developing an international consensus around Iraq.

This tendency has contributed to the exacerbation of tensions in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and we saw the same approach in the conflict between Hizballah and Israel in southern Lebanon. The result has been the sacrifice of any pretense to being an honest broker of the issues in that region of the world.

The slow response to the threat posed by Hurricane Katrina and the painful recognition one year later that not enough has been done to bring meaningful recovery to the region speaks volumes to the priorities of the Bush administration.

The November elections will give Americans an opportunity to do something about this situation at home and abroad.