Stand by for the political maneuvering over the flooding along the Mississippi. “If I lived in the Midwest, I’d be really annoyed; I’d be outraged,” Gerald Galloway, an engineering professor at the University of Maryland, told our Adam Rowe yesterday. After the Mississippi flood in 1993, Mr. Galloway was the director of a committee that issued a report about how to avoid a similar disaster in the future. The recommendations had little impact. “The half life of a memory of a flood is pretty short,” Mr. Galloway said.

Comparing the failure to protect New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina with that which has left the areas along the Mississippi without a decent flood management program, Mr. Galloway said the two were of a piece. “The systemic failure is the same,” he said, though in the Midwest, “the actual failures are fewer.” In the case of Katrina, many of the levees failed to do what they were designed to do. The levees along the Mississippi technically did not fail because they were never intended to succeed in a flood as serious as the one that just took place.

No doubt this distinction will do little to salve the tempers of homeowners and farmers who saw their property destroyed this week, especially because little, if any, effort was ever made to inform them of the dangers they faced. “People thought they were safe because they looked out their window and saw a levee,” Mr. Galloway said. This false comfort prevented many families from independently seeking out the necessary precautions, including flood insurance.

Although it appears the worst is over, more flooding threatens some areas. Disease, which is always a danger in the aftermath of a flood, looms. The ruined crops mean already high food prices in some parts of the world will be pushed even higher. There’s no sense in pretending that even every conceivable precaution, implemented with perfect foresight, could have entirely prevented this unfolding tragedy. Yet, as with Katrina, we can expect a debate about how negligence worsened the extent of the catastrophe.

So why has the political outrage that erupted over the incompetence exposed by Katrina been missing, at least so far, in the current crisis? The loss of life at Katrina was higher, to be sure, but the difference in the reactions remains puzzling. Why has the government’s failure to protect citizens along the Mississippi elicited so little response in comparison with Katrina, even allowing for the difference in scope between the two disasters?

Part of the answer lies in the political circumstances in which the two tragedies occurred. Controversy surrounding Katrina was inflamed by a preexisting political angst that does not apply to the present disaster. Though the New Orleans disaster, like the floods along the upper Mississippi, was caused by longstanding bureaucratic fecklessness, opponents of the president framed their criticism of the Katrina response in starkly partisan terms. Government bungling was cast as a product of President Bush’s incompetence or, some claimed, racism.

Today, the political focus has shifted to the two candidates vying for the presidency, neither of whom can credibly be blamed for government failures exposed before they’ve even become their parties’ official nominees. As a result, the criticisms that come out of the government’s failure to rescue or to protect adequately Americans living along the Mississippi promise to be less partisan and sensational, and, we’d like think, more productive.