Both good and bad responses to successful terrorist attacks threaten government credibility, simply because they were successful. The key is for a government to prevent them from being successful in the first place.

Only bad disaster responses make administrations look pretty bad.

That would imply that it would only be worth trying to prepare for hurricanes, because work there would improve public reception, while terrorist attacks would go badly no matter what you did.

Unless you prevent them from being successful in the first place.

As a side note, I wonder if there's also a bias that human minds are more easily controlled than forces of nature. That may also come into play here.

It’s harder to convince people that your suppressing imaginary hurricanes

But FEMA can't prevent attacks, they only show up after something happens so there’a no incentive for the agency to focus on terrorism from that angle.

While this may be true, one is carried on a news cycle for a longer period of time. Weather events are a normal and predictable happening, so the "shock and awe" don't carry the ratings necessary for the news coverage, regardless of the human tragedy.

Unfortunately, our society's attention span for weather tragedy is short and it is very unlikely any federally funded memorials will be built for victims of wildfires, floodings or hurricanes.

I don't know about that. Katrina was in the news for a long time, as a bunch of people were in the Superdome. Then there was news coverage of people trying to recover and rebuild. Katrina is still in the public consciousness, even today. (I mean, so is 9/11. My point is, I think the claim "one is carried on a news cycle for a longer period of time" is wrong.)

People can’t disagree with and hate hurricanes the way they do other people.

Perhaps, but some apparently think they can with global warming.

> Bad disaster responses can make administrations look pretty bad.

Whether disaster responses are considered good or bad depends largely on which narrative the media select.

It doesn't last though.

Without doing the math with dates, do you intuitively remember what administration was in power during 9/11? How about Katrina? Benghazi? Hurricane Andrew?

actual guesses:

W Bush, Also W Bush, Obama, and...Clinton?

Pretty close on the last one. It was the end of HW Bush's term in '92.

Kind of was hoping no one would put an actual answer in print so everyone reading this comment could do this thought exercise without being biased. I should have stated so. Mind deleting your comment?

I do mind. I found your thought experiment to be patronizing.

Does it though? Can you point me to a free, western style Liberal Democracy where a bad handling of COVID has resulted in an appreciable drop in popularity?

Even Donald Trump, though people polled think he handled the pandemic poorly, his 538 approval on Jan 1st was 42.6% and his approval now is 42.2%.

I don't think it's done much for the Boris Johnson government here in the UK:

https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/trackers/boris-johnson-...

Note, though, that he went up to almost 46% which is the highest he has had since right after he took office, when COVID started becoming serious in the US and it briefly looked as if he might handle it somewhat competently.

But they often just blow over whereas terrorists can keep a lingering presence.