Do Democrats know what it means to miss New Orleans?

Watson's got a good point.

The Democrats should be running hard with this one.

Hurricane Katrina and the drowning of New Orleans marked the end of the Bush Presidency.  More than the failures in Iraq, the President's rushing off in the opposite direction from the disaster areas to play air guitar while one of the great American cities disappeared and giant swaths of the coastal south sank from view opened the nation's eyes to the Bush Administration's incompetence, fecklessness, and sociopathic disinterest in the lives, and deaths, of average Americans.

The Democrats don't need to harp on Bush's personal failure at the end of the summer of 2005, but they can and should be promising to end the continued failure of the government to rebuild the city and other devastated areas and bring people home by giving them something worth coming home to.

If there is one thing Democrats have proven over the last 70 odd years that they can do better than Republicans, besides balance budgets, protect the environment, see that basic goods and services are delivered, encourage economic growth, and resist politicizing the criminal justice system, it's build things.

They can also point out that a major reason state and local response to the disaster was so inadequate is that large numbers of National Guardsmen and their unit's equipment were over in Iraq.

Kansas is now having the same problem.

Comments

[BOSSY]

True dat! Bossy thinks this may be the year for some Offensive action, instead of the usual ill-conceived defense.

[Chuck]

The governor of Kansas was all over this issue. But, yes, you're absolutely right here. Back when Katrina first hit, I made an argument (much like many others, I'm sure) for an updated "New Deal," one that takes seriously the desire to rebuild New Orleans, to rebuild any semblance of trust in government, and to rebuild an economy that benefits only the very rich.

[burritoboy]

Well, it's relatively easy when your opponents reach the stage that they've stolen everything in the treasury and killed some 6000+ Americans in New Orleans and Iraq.

The difficulty with that is that:

1. Americans don't seem to retain the lessons of when Republicans fail. Bush I clearly had no idea what to do when the economy declined in the early Nineties and just bumbled around......and voters returned his son to office just eight years later.

2. We've got the central economic problem that there's been very limited economic growth for anybody below the top 10% in the entire developed world for more than 30 years now. (Japan kept growing until 1989, but hasn't been growing since then). The economic policies of the Democratic party are effectively the exact same as those of the Republicans. There are a few outliers (Edwards, Strickland, etc) but even these are extremely mild - and the leading Democratic candidate has Robert Rubin as her economics potentate.

3. Just saying that the Democrats will be better administrators is simply not enough to win voters' hearts permanently. Who's going to vote for a party whose PRIMARY platform is "we'll put lots of smart Ivy League grads in charge"? People need to be inspired. We need sweeping changes, not just better administrators. Otherwise, we'll just be back at 2000 again in 2016 (voters bored by Democratic technocratic competency vote for anything that even remotely resembles something more).

[Redstar]

I've been working in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast since the storms hit in '05 (I'm including Rita too). I've written about NOLA redevelopment and recovery politics over at my site (if you're not suffering from Katrina fatigue!).

My perception - confirmed by hearing H. Clinton speak last week in Boston - is that the Dem pres. candidates are using Katrina as metaphor for Bush's failures, but have no real plans to step up the investment in the region should any of them be elected. It's sadly boiled down into a quick, emblematic soundbyte on the Bush Admin.

http://www.grahamad.com/blog/2007/10/11/the-era-of-cowboy-democracy-is-over/
http://www.grahamad.com/blog/category/disasters/
http://www.grahamad.com/blog/category/city/new-orleans/

I just found you via Shakesville, which I am just getting to know.