Mayor Ray Nagin (WWL-TV, New Orleans)

As debate continues to rage over government response to Hurricane Katrina, the public clearly thinks New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin – not President Bush – is the one to blame, according to a new online poll by America Online.

With more than 589,000 responses in today's unscientific survey, 65 percent of participants rate Nagin's handling of the Katrina disaster as "poor."

Only 10 percent of AOL users said Nagin's response was "excellent," 13 percent called it "good," and 12 percent termed it "fair."

When asked who has done a better job during the crisis, 67 percent named President Bush, and only 33 percent chose Nagin.

AOL calls Nagin "a compelling figure at the center of the storm – literally and figuratively," and says it decided to do its poll now because "there seemed to be critical mass: he reversed his controversial decision to reopen parts of his city; he's offering yet more criticism of federal officials; and he's bracing for another possible strike from a hurricane."

A WorldNetDaily poll from Sept. 12 asked, "What's your opinion of New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin?"

With close to 6,000 responses, over 40 percent said he was "obviously not qualified or competent to hold such an important position;" 22 percent called him "the quintessence of a public hazard responsible for many hurricane-related deaths;" and 14 percent said "he's everything New Orleans deserves, since citizens voted him in."

The New Orleans mayor, a Democrat, is now forever linked to images of flooded school buses – vehicles not deployed by him despite being part of the city's plan for evacuation in case of a disaster.

Oil slick emerges from hundreds of flooded buses never used to evacuate New Orleans residents from Hurricane Katrina

Just three days after Katrina struck the Crescent City, Nagin referred to the buses during an interview with radio station WWL, stating:

I need reinforcements, I need troops, man. I need 500 buses, man. We ain't talking about -- you know, one of the briefings we had, they were talking about getting public school bus drivers to come down here and bus people out here.

I'm like, "You got to be kidding me. This is a national disaster. Get every doggone Greyhound bus line in the country and get their a--es moving to New Orleans."

This past Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press," Nagin again addressed the issue of buses, noting, "Sure, there was lots of buses out there. But guess what? You can't find drivers that would stay behind with a Category 5 hurricane, you know, pending down on New Orleans. We barely got enough drivers to move people on Sunday, or Saturday and Sunday, to move them to the Superdome. We barely had enough drivers for that. So sure, we had the assets, but the drivers just weren't available."

Hundreds of scathing comments from AOL users have been posted in connection with the poll, including: