IT IS IN bad taste, I know, to speculate on the likely winners from events such as Hurricane Katrina so soon after they have struck. While the flood waters are still yielding up their grisly toll it seems insensitive to dwell on the question of who is on the up.

But it would be churlish to pretend that there are not, even now, men and women doing their level best to suppress a rising thrill at the prospect of huge contracts, enhanced international status, Pulitzer prizes. Politicians not being immune to these sentiments, it is fair to say that calculations are being made about where all this puts them in their ascent of the greasy pole.

So far, at least, the single principal political beneficiary of the disaster and its aftermath appears to be Rudolph Giuliani.

The absence of real leadership at any level — city, state or federal — after Hurricane Katrina stands in dismal contrast to the performance of the New York Mayor after September 11. The moaning Mayor of New Orleans and the lachrymose Governor of Louisiana have reminded Americans how much the city — and the nation — needed Rudy four years ago, and how they could do with him now.

Mr Giuliani’s impediments — a slightly complex personal life, views on abortion and gay rights that are way too permissive for most Republicans — crumble away when voters focus on who would be most likely to save their lives in another disaster.

Americans are angry and shamed at what has happened in the past week. If the presidential election were held tomorrow, the reassuring figure of “America’s mayor” would surely win easily. It is early, I reiterate. The next election is three years away; much could change. But it is hard not to be struck by the odd sense of irony that a putative Republican presidential candidate should look like the big winner from this tragedy.

For Democrats it is especially cruel. It was a strange twist of fate that the disaster that struck New York occurred during the term of the city’s first Republican mayor for three decades. New York gets hit by terrorists and the city’s one prominent Republican turns out to be the hero.

But at least there seemed something natural about the idea that Republicans would be favoured in times of national insecurity. Democrats spent an awful lot of the 1960s and 1970s destroying the party’s hard-won national security credentials. It was not surprising that, when the issue returned to the forefront in 2001, it was the Right that benefited. It was this, above all, that helped President Bush to win re-election.

Yet the groundwork of American politics may be shifting in ways that ought to make Republicans distinctly uncomfortable. When a nation seeks a more expansive role for government to protect it from man-made or natural challenges, Democrats are generally viewed as better equipped for the task.

But what do we have? New Orleans gets hit by a hurricane. The aadministration of an already beleaguered Republican president gets much of the blame for the mayhem that follows, even from its own supporters. And then a Republican former mayor is immediately anointed the national saviour. What do the Democrats have to do to catch a break?

Mr Giuliani, of course, is sui generis; some conservatives would mutter that he is not really one of theirs, only a liberal with a tough attitude. Republicans as a party won’t necessarily benefit. But it is striking how the terms of political debate in the US have changed already in the past few years, and it doesn’t seem to have done the Republicans much harm.

In 1995, President Clinton declared the era of big government over, and he was right — for about ten minutes. Since 2001, the era of big government has come back with a vengeance. For the past four years Washington has been pouring money fondly into great public works projects — not only the military, but also grand highways and education and health programmes.

Yet, in another cruel irony for the Democrats, it is a Republican Congress and a Republican White House that have been presiding over this fiscal profligacy — building roads here, creating new bureaucracies there, trying to construct whole new nations over yonder.

Why aren’t the Democrats benefiting from this apparent discovery that government is fun again? Maybe it is a personality problem. Democrats have not been blessed with leaders in the mould of Mr Giuliani, John McCain, Arnold Schwarzenegger or even George Bush. When the two men who emerged from your last extensive executive job search were Al Gore and John Kerry you know you have a problem. The only thing that can be said in these men’s defence is that they were not Bill Bradley or Howard Dean.

Many are counting on Hillary Clinton to unlock the door to all those potential Democratic voters. I wouldn’t bank on it. It is not that Mrs Clinton hasn’t done a terrific job in repositioning herself to be more acceptable to the voters of Missouri and Ohio. It is that she is still, despite having tried really hard, unappealing as a person. A recent poll asked Americans whom they would like to take with them on a cross-country drive — Mr Bush fared well, even Ted Kennedy was popular (on the assumption, one imagines, that he would not be driving). The thought of being lectured and patronised by Mrs Clinton in such confines would send most Americans to Chappaquiddick.

Maybe all this Democratic despair will pass. Maybe the long era of conservative dominance is really coming to an end. Maybe voters will decide that, if they are going to have big government programmes it would be better to have people in power who believe in them rather than the current free-riders who are insisting that it can all be done with borrowed money.

But Democrats are in a strange and difficult spot. When government, big or small, seems to fail them, whether at home or overseas, voters still aren’t convinced that the party of big government is the answer.

gerard.baker@thetimes.co.uk

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