Katrina has given President Bush and his party a case of political whiplash that could very well be their undoing. Anyone who has suffered whiplash from a car accident knows its delayed effects and the lingering pain that, in some cases, never goes away.

Who knew that a hurricane’s wrath could threaten the president and the Republicans with such a grinding pain in the neck? The trouble for the GOP is how Katrina exposed to the bone what many consider Bush’s true persona. We’ve seen it all in the two weeks since her mighty winds decimated the Gulf Coast: his patrician instincts, the seemingly disingenuous posturing and a stubborn refusal to fully take responsibility for what goes wrong.

The more frantically Bush now tries to compensate for early mistakes, the more serious those initial failings seem.

Bush could throw a trillion dollars into the Mississippi Basin, dispatch hundreds of spinners to shift the blame — even fly to the region every other day until he is out of office — but to many Americans none of that would undo their first impressions of his above-it-all response to Katrina. Not because they think he’s personally responsible for the hurricane’s disastrous aftermath. Only his most partisan foes take that stand.

The president’s handling of this disaster reveals a part of his nature that explains so much more than the arguably preventable extent of Katrina’s unprecedented wreckage. It explains such things as his refusal to back down on Social Security revisions that even his own party leaders don’t want anymore. It explains how the “compassionate conservative” proclamation of his first presidential campaign translated into little of significance, especially for the urban poor. And it explains why he hasn’t gone to one funeral for an American soldier killed in Iraq.

In short, rising numbers of Americans perceive Bush as someone who thinks he’s always right, who believes his critics are know-nothing wimps, and who considers the little people as mere tools for the rich and powerful to do what he considers right for America.

Of course, plenty of people see him much differently and quite positively. But even if this harsh view of him is completely wrong, Republicans cannot afford to let it expand to include the party as a whole. Perhaps that is why none of the 2008 Republican presidential contenders stepped forward to defend Bush or his administration in the early days of Katrina’s aftermath.

Watching the president in his most unguarded moments of hurricane damage control, you had to wonder if he really gets it — if he really cares about average people unless their suffering threatens his political power. His priorities became suspect almost as soon as he landed for his first on-the-ground inspection tour after the hurricane.

Hoping to show empathy for the victims, Bush chose Sen. Trent Lott, the Mississippi Republican whose home was washed away, to be his prime example for demonstrating how he would fix things. “Out of the rubble of Trent Lott’s house — this guy lost his entire house — there’s going to be a fantastic house and I’m looking forward to sitting on the porch.”

There is no way that anyone with a brain in Bush’s inner circle would have scripted those remarks, at least not at this critical opening juncture of the president’s first ground tour. That is why it was so revealing. Bush’s world view seems mostly about the life experiences of his rich and powerful friends. He did not have a clue that in this widespread human tragedy, most Americans do not give a damn whether Lott gets his porch back or not.

A few days later the president’s mother demonstrated quite clearly where his patrician instincts come from. Former first lady Barbara Bush said the Houston shelters she toured were “working very well” because the evacuees “were underprivileged anyway.”

Bush sympathizers and Republican loyalists might deride claims that his arrogant ways threaten them politically, but they would do so at their peril. Enough Americans — it wouldn’t take that many — could soon decide that the Republican Party is so out of touch with the masses that it no longer deserves to control every branch of government. Katrina already threatens key parts of the agenda that Republicans hoped to take to the polls in the midterm election. They scrapped plans to vote on more tax cuts. And the staggering price tag for rebuilding the Gulf Coast will certainly galvanize those who are demanding to draw down or pull out U.S. troops in Iraq.

What Katrina unleashed in our politics could well move voters in November 2006 to conclude that the president’s party cannot be trusted to look out for average people, or at least not for those who are “underprivileged anyway.”

Such is the nature of political whiplash. You don’t always feel it right after the initial injury. The pain often comes much later.

Contributing Editor Craig Crawford is a news analyst for MSNBC, CNBC and “The Early Show” on CBS. He can be reached at ccrawford@cq.com.