RACIAL LOGIC
By Jacob Weisberg's logic, Katrina's aftermath should persuade more blacks to vote Republican:
Had the residents of New Orleans been white Republicans in a state that mattered politically, instead of poor blacks in city that didn't, Bush's response surely would have been different. Compare what happened when hurricanes Charley and Frances hit Florida in 2004. Though the damage from those storms was negligible in relation to Katrina's, the reaction from the White House was instinctive, rapid, and generous to the point of profligacy. Bush visited hurricane victims four times in six weeks and delivered relief checks personally. Michael Brown of FEMA, now widely regarded as an incompetent political hack, was so responsive that local officials praised the agency's performance.The kind of constituency politics that results in a big life-preserver for whites in Florida and a tiny one for blacks in Louisiana may not be racist by design or intent. But the inevitable result is clear racial discrimination. It won't change when Republicans care more about blacks. It will change when they have more reason to care.
Let me say first that I don't buy Weisberg's thinking at all. The fact that two other whole states got slammed along with New Orleans, and the sequence of the disaster which put NO last in the timeline, have played a very large role in how FEMA and the Bush adminstration have responded to the disaster. Louisiana's disgraceful, incompetent, petulant, indecisive and just plain lame Gov. Blancout's disastrous role in the apocalypse never even gets a mention from Weisberg--surely it's relevant that the two Republican governors in neighboring states responded better than Blancout, so much so that even NO Mayor Nagin has started blaming her, and not Bush, for keeping supplies from poor people and sitting on evacuation orders until Bush personally asked her to issue them.
But leaving all of that aside, as Weisberg did because none of it helped him make his race baiting points, he says that Republicans don't care about blacks and therefore didn't help majority black New Orleans because Republicans aren't supported by blacks to any extent and don't need to maintain their political support. So then the obvious response from blacks should be to vote Republican. It'll get the President off his vacationing keister faster next time, right, Jake?
Right?
To tell you the sad truth, the Democrats' collective whiny and disgusting response to Katrina has had everything to do with what happened in 2004. In 2000, Gov. George W. Bush only garnered 8 percent of the black vote on his way to winning the White House. In 2004, he jumped up to 11 percent and was comfortably re-elected. If the GOP can even manage to attract 15-20 percent of the black vote, just one in five black voters, the Democrats are doomed. Doomed, I tell you. Pre-Katrina, it was possible to imagine a GOP candidate reaching 15 percent of the black vote. Now...not likely.
Since dropping to near-permanent minority status, the Democrats have no margin for error and cannot afford to lose even one percent more of the black vote without suffering at the polls around the country. Their power at the state and city level will continue to erode. So when Katrina came and they saw lots of suffering black faces on the cable nets, a meme was born: Bush and the Republicans hate blacks and are letting them die.
It didn't matter that Louisiana politics are Democrat dominated, or that the governor and mayor are Democrats or that their failures had contributed mightily to the suffering. Well, I take that back. All of that did matter. And the Democrats couldn't let those facts out without making sure to prevent Bush from getting any kind of traction for being seen to help blacks. Which, absent the race war talk of Al Sharpton et al, that is the image that the nation would have seen. That is also an image that a stricken nation needed to see. We, all of us, needed to see our President responding to a crisis with smooth efficiency. And we would have seen that, because his response to Katrina wasn't out of line with federal responses to other disasters.
The Democrats prevented, consciously and with intent thought out beforehand, letting President Bush be seen as helpful in any way in the middle of a national crisis because they knew it threatened their own political prospects. They let poor black people die in great numbers in order to protect their stranglehold on the black vote. And they then accused Republicans of letting blacks die for racist reasons. The Democrats' performance during Katrina has been the most ghastly display of race-based politics this nation has seen in a long, long time.
That is the truth.
AND ANOTHER THING: Weisberg refers to previous hurricanes, ones for which Bush received praise rather than insurrection. He states that Bush got praise because he helped the victims faster because they were mostly white and therefore Bush supporters, so Bush wanted to help them more than he wanted to help poor, black New Orleans.
Might it be possible that Bush received praise for handling those other disasters because the race hustlers saw no advantage to playing up some nonexistent racial angle? It's kind of hard for Sharpton et al to argue that Bush is a racist for not helping blacks when most of a given storm's victims aren't black. But it's very easy to smear Bush when a natural disaster hits a location that happens to have a mostly black population.
Weisberg never even considers the race hustlers' own unsavory motivations at all. Not a bit. I think their motivations--which mostly amount to keeping themselves rich and relevant--explain quite a lot about the past week and how the story has played.