Mindful of how fumbling the U.S. response to natural disasters took a toll on George W. Bush's legacy, President Barack Obama scrambled on Wednesday to make sure Haiti's devastating earthquake would not become his public relations nightmare.
Obama, facing the biggest test of the government's international disaster response since he took office a year ago, swiftly mobilized a massive aid effort for Haiti even before the full magnitude of destruction was known.
The administration urgently sought to show it had learned from the mistakes of Obama's predecessor, who was criticized for the initial U.S. response to a tsunami disaster in south Asia in 2004 and for his handling of Hurricane Katrina's onslaught on the U.S. Gulf Coast in 2005.
The White House also took pains to show Obama was staying on top of events, in contrast to Bush, widely seen as detached as Katrina battered New Orleans for days more than five years ago.
It was also a chance for Obama to project an image of decisiveness after he was criticized for waiting three days before making his first public comment on the attempted Christmas Day bombing of a U.S. airliner.
This time, Obama stepped before cameras the morning after, promising a swift, coordinated response to what he called a "cruel and incomprehensible" tragedy -- a 7.0-magnitude quake -- that struck the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.
He also canceled a "green energy jobs" event outside Washington for Wednesday afternoon, sending the message that he was determined to stay engaged with more serious matters of life and death.
And the White House kept up a steady stream of e-mails to reporters detailing the regular updates Obama was receiving as well as his phone calls in the quake's aftermath.
"IN THEIR HOUR OF NEED"
Obama wasted little time in naming a U.S. relief coordinator, Agency for International Development administrator Rajiv Shah.
The U.S. government was also dispatching search teams, using military overflights to assess damage and working to rush emergency supplies to Haiti, where thousands were feared dead after a quake that destroyed schools, hospitals and shanties.
Though it was too early to judge the effectiveness of the U.S. relief effort, Obama sought to show his determination to assert U.S. leadership in helping a neighbor in distress. "We have to be there for them in their hour of need," he said.
That attitude could boost Obama's earlier promise to devote more attention to Latin America and the Caribbean, a region that felt neglected under the Bush administration and had not been high on the current president's policy agenda either.
Obama appeared determined to show he had learned a lesson from the previous administration's botched handling of Katrina, symbolized by Bush's oft-ridiculed remark to then-disaster chief Michael Brown: "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."
Yet at the time, floodwaters were breaching New Orleans' levees and many storm evacuees remained trapped in the Louisiana Superdome stadium, adding to the impression Bush was out of touch.
The government's Katrina response, which Obama as a U.S. senator had deeply criticized, hastened a decline in Bush's popularity and left a stain on his presidential record.
The year before Katrina, Bush had faced international complaints about what was seen as a sluggish response in both U.S. aid and manpower to the Asia tsunami that killed 226,000 people in 13 countries.
His administration's initial cash assistance of $35 million for tsunami victims was widely derided as paltry. What helped to salvage the U.S. image in affected countries was a goodwill tour then launched jointly by Bush's father, former President George H.W. Bush and former President Bill Clinton.
