Project Katrina

Smintheus at Daily Kos has a flat out smack down of John McCain as it relates to New Orleans and using it again and again as a cheap political prop.

Yesterday evening John McCain gave a speech near New Orleans with the goal of seizing Barack Obama’s limelight and grabbing some of the mantle of ‘change’ for himself.

The Republican nominee-in-waiting plans to draw contrasts with Obama on a range of issues and argue that the Democrat offers the wrong kind of change while he offers the right kind. An advertising campaign is expected to reinforce that message in the coming weeks.

Many have commented about the obnoxious message and the equally unpleasant manner in which McCain delivered that message. Some have also pointed out how the episode highlights McCain’s lack of judgment; it was an act of hybris to ask voters to compare his own negative and ad hominem speech to Obama’s gracious and positive one on the very day the latter clinched his party’s nomination.

The cringe-worthy material is so abundant however that few have noted the stunning hypocrisy on McCain’s part. John McCain has a stark record of ignoring NOLA and opposing substantive disaster-relief legislation for two and a half years after Hurricane Katrina - right up until the spring of this year. And yet it is New Orleans that he chooses to use as his backdrop when he wishes to portray himself as the true candidate of “change”.

The fact that McCain is traveling to the Gulf Coast in an attempt to portray himself as an agent of change is a mark of how little he can actually point to in that regard. Where else could he possibly camp out to connect himself to ‘change’? On the front lawn of one of the handful of his lobbyist/campaign staffers whom he dumped in haste when reporters started asking about illegal activities?

Who can forget McCain’s indifference to the disaster as it unfolded? Appearing on Face the Nation the day before Katrina struck, he said nothing about the looming emergency. Then McCain yucked it up with Bush in Arizona even while the Gulf Coast was getting lashed. When he did get around to commenting, three days later, his office issued a tepid press release.

For the next half year, as Jonathan Stein documented, McCain was either absent from or in active opposition to substantive efforts to aid Katrina victims.

Though McCain issued a statement the next week calling on Congress to make sacrifices in order to fund recovery efforts, he was quoted in The New Leader on September 1 cautioning against over-spending in support of Katrina’s victims. “We also have to be concerned about future generations of Americans,” he said. “We’re going to end up with the highest deficit, probably, in the history of this country.”

That attitude was borne out in McCain’s actions and votes. Forty Senators and 100 members of Congress visited New Orleans before he did; he finally got there in March 2006.

During that period McCain wasn’t just failing to show leadership on the issue. Along with most other Republicans, he dug his heels in against spending serious money to help Americans in desperate need (contrast that with his free-spending ways on Iraq). McCain voted against extending unemployment benefits to Katrina victims up to 52 weeks, and against extending Medicaid benefits up to five months. He even voted twice against establishing an independent commission to examine the governmental response to Katrina. In May of 2006, little over a month after visiting NOLA for the first time, McCain also voted against the Emergency Supplemental Appropriations bill that had $28 billion for hurricane relief.