New Years 1979 in Chicago was one for the books. While revelers were still out partying, a heavy snow began to fall that eventually blanketed the city and suburbs with 10 inches of the white stuff. “The City that Works” shrugged off the blizzard and went about its routine, bragging as only Chicagoans can brag that no force of nature will keep Chicagoans from going about their business.

The city was to eat those words less than two weeks later.

On Friday night January 12, the snow began to fall. It fell all day Saturday. It fell all of Saturday night and into Sunday afternoon until 22 inches had piled up on the streets of Chicago. Mayor Michael Bilandic, confident that the city snow removal department could handle the crisis, ducked out of the city for 24 hours to attend a function in Florida. By the time he got back, all hell had broken loose.

Plows had broken down. His suggestion that residents move their cars to school parking lots so that side streets could be cleared had gone unheeded because the school parking lots themselves were buried under nearly 30 inches of accumulated snow. De-icing the electric rails with tons of salt resulted in interrupting the current so that the “L” train system was almost totally shut down.

But that wasn’t all. Bilandic ordered CTA buses and whatever trains that were running to bypass inner city neighborhoods so that white sections of the city could keep working. Another storm dumped 18 inches of snow on the city at the end of January adding to the misery. The city ran out of salt. The side streets still weren’t plowed. Uncollected garbage piled up to impossible heights. Those side streets that were plowed had buried people’s cars under 10 feet of snow in some case (many were not able to get the cars out until spring).

The press had an absolute field day. It was discovered that one of Bilandic’s cronies had gotten a $90,000 contract to come up with a study on snow removal needs for the city – a study that nobody could seem to find. Bilandic himself seemed to become unhinged. His sessions with city hall reporters became a series of rambling, incoherent defenses of his actions during the weather crisis.

Meanwhile Bilandic’s primary opponent, a little know politician named Jane Byrne, was making huge amounts of political hay at the hapless Mayor’s expense. Her media-savvy staff never had a photo-op without a pile of snow 10 feet high in the background. She was seen commiserating with snow victims. She had one famous confrontation with a city official who claimed that things were going well. For the rest, she let the Chicago media take over.

Columnist Mike Royko wrote a series of articles on the Mayor’s leadership that that were absolutely devastating in their impact. This was in a time when simply everyone read Royko. He was the Chicago version of Art Buchwald, a cynical, hysterically funny, grumpy watchdog whose book Boss, which told the story of the original Mayor Daley’s shenanigans was a runaway national bestseller. People were now not only mad at Bilandic, they were laughing at him at the same time.

The story’s end was predictable. Bilandic lost to Byrne in the Democratic primary in February (following another 15 inch snow storm) and Byrne went on to become the first female mayor of Chicago.

A study carried out by the city following the crisis – a study done at the behest of the new mayor – showed several major flaws in the city’s snow cleaning efforts, the biggest of which was a decision not to tow cars parked on side streets that failed to clear the curbsides to make room for plows. In addition, Bryne spent millions of dollars on new snow removal equipment, doubling the city’s snow removal capacity.

Every mayor since has silently thanked her.

Lost in all of this drama was the fact that the city actually responded to the best of its ability during the snow crisis. The snow removal plan worked quite well for the 8-10 inch storm that fell on New Years. The breakdown occurred during the once-in-a-century snow fall that followed. There was very little the city could have done differently that would have made the situation any better.

Now, before I hear howls of rage from most of you about trying to compare a snowstorm with the unmitigated disaster being experienced by the people along the Gulf Coast, let me assure you that it’s not my intention to belittle or minimize in any way the suffering of the people in New Orleans and elsewhere. Nor is it really my intent to excuse the government of any failures in planning for the disaster. Rather, I believe there are certain parallels between what the press and the left is trying to do to the President and what the press and Jane Byrne did to Michael Bilandic.

For what ever reason – and I believe that reason has less to do with ideology and more with a genuine feeling of helplessness felt by people who are watching what is going on in New Orleans – the press has pretty much decided that there has been a monumental failure of leadership by the Administration in responding to the disaster.

The President’s political enemies are moved by more partisan emotions of course. But perhaps the scope of the tragedy has blinded them as well to the fact that quite simply, no government on earth could have been prepared in any way, shape or form for the mammoth problems faced by city, state, and federal officials in the aftermath of Katrina. You can plan until you’re blue in the face but what faced government officials starting on Tuesday afternoon was something never before confronted by any government anywhere.

In effect, government officials have had to create an entirely new city on the fly; a city of 100,000 people. A city that not only had to feed and shelter those people, but supply medical services both for the injured and those already sick – even those near death! It had to supply maternity wards for hundreds of women. It had to create out of whole cloth a distribution system to supply those 100,000 people with food and water. And it had to carry out rescue operations that have already saved the lives of nearly 5,000 people. It had to do all this and much, much, more with access to few vehicles and travel on roads that for the most part were underwater.

And to make matters even worse, in the middle of creating this new city, it was decided that those 100,000 people would all have to leave New Orleans and go…somewhere. So the relief effort went from being an attempt to create an entirely new city to the even more difficult task of rounding up and transporting 100,000 people as well as necessitating the finding of shelter for them – many thousands of whom are old and infirm and have special medical needs.

These facts are not being recognized by the press and are being ignored by the President’s enemies. And because of that, Bush is quite simply being “Bilandicized” – he is being set up to take the fall for something that is essentially beyond his or anyone else’s control.

In the end, it may not matter. The Democrats seemed poised to blame the natural disaster on Bush and the Republicans regardless of what the facts are. If that’s the case and if the left’s allies in the press succeed in spinning the story that way, the Republicans are in trouble in 2006.