Katrina to be a polls issue

President George W. Bush's administration has drawn fire from both sides of the political divide for its early failure to speed troops and relief supplies to stricken areas where thousands were feared dead.

Even Senate majority leader Bill Frist, a likely contender for the 2008 presidential nomination from Bush's Republican Party, has jumped on the issue, calling for congressional hearings on the government's performance.

Clinton, widely expected to seek the Democratic nomination, entered the fray Sunday with a proposal for a "Katrina Commis-sion" along the lines of the 9/11 panel appointed by Bush to probe the 2001 terror attacks.

The New York senator and former first lady said in a letter to the president that "it has become increasingly evident that our nation was not prepared" for the hurricane's devastation.

She added that the slow pace of relief efforts along the stricken US Gulf Coast "seems to confirm that our ability to respond to cataclysmic disasters has not been adequately addressed."

The next presidential election is more than three years away, but Democrats could raise Bush's handling of Katrina in their drive to wrest back control of Congress in the November 2006 legislative polls.

Local officials as well as newspapers in the United States and abroad have accused Bush of failing to take the crisis seriously enough at the start to avoid heart-breaking scenes of chaos and neglect.

But a Washington Post-ABC News poll published Sunday indicated that the issue, like so many others in the United States, had split the country along party lines.

Fifty-one percent of those surveyed thought the federal government was not doing a good job dealing with the aftermath of Katrina, compared to 48 percent who were satisfied.