New Orleans and Cedar Rapids

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the pipsqueak radical environmentalist who has chosen rabble-rousing as his life’s work, wrote an op-ed column placing the blame for Hurricane Katrina squarely on the shoulders of George W. Bush. His reasoning? Bush opposed ratification of the Kyoto Accords on “global warming.”

In other words, if Bush had agreed to purposely cripple the U.S. economy – at the behest of our major international trading partners – the waters of the Gulf of Mexico might not have been warm enough to fuel Katrina. Never mind that “global warming” remains an unsettled question.

Responsible meteorologists and oceanographers suggest that the warm waters of the Gulf, to the extent that they contributed to the ferocity of Katrina, were created by warm, dry El Niño winds blowing across the Gulf from the west coast of Mexico and Central America. George W. Bush may have control over many things, but control of El Niño winds and currents is a bit beyond his job description.

What soon became clear in New Orleans was that the inaction of Democratic Mayor Ray Nagin and his Democratic counterpart in Baton Rouge, Governor Kathleen Blanco, the designated first responders, was the largest contributing factor in the overall tragedy.

Mayor Nagin and Governor Blanco were there, on the scene, with the direct responsibility to evacuate the city and save the lives of its citizens – but they didn’t. Governor Blanco had 5,000 National Guard troops, tons of food and medical supplies, buses, trucks, emergency shelters, and hospital beds at her disposal, but she sat immobilized for three full days after a Category 5 storm hit the largest city in her state.

With three days advance warning, most residents of New Orleans were able to evacuate to higher ground. They may have lost all of their worldly possessions, but they were alive. Unfortunately, hundreds of thousands of others – those who refused to recognize the seriousness of the storm, those who decided to stay behind to rape and pillage, and those who didn’t have an automobile or other means of transportation – were left behind. It was left to the governor, the mayor, and the chief of police to evacuate those stragglers and they failed, utterly, in that responsibility.

After viewing the horrors of a total breakdown of law and order in New Orleans, millions of Americans asked themselves what would have happened if the stranded citizenry had been 95% white, as in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. They assumed that leaders would have stepped forward to inventory their resources, to ration food and water, to care for the sick, the aged, and the disabled, and to maintain order. There may have been some minor looting and violence, at first, but that would have been quickly brought under control.

Politically and economically, liberals and Democrats would have all but ignored the catastrophe.

However, the dramatic television pictures of so many black people struggling to survive in the streets, on the overpasses, and in the hell-hole that was the Superdome, were just too good to pass up. It provided a perfect opportunity to drive one more nail into the coffin of black self-reliance and to solidify black support for the Democrat Party.

Before anyone could say “seafood gumbo,” every Democrat in Washington was before the TV cameras criticizing the fact that the president decided not to complicate rescue efforts by interjecting his large traveling security detail into efforts on the ground. Suddenly it was not an incompetent Democrat governor and a corrupt Democrat mayor who had failed the people, it was George W. Bush. As Democrats explained it to blacks, Bush failed to elbow the traumatized governor and the incompetent mayor out of his way, not because it wasn’t his job to intervene as first responder, but because all those people trapped in New Orleans were black – better yet, they were black Democrats.

Now, in June 2008, we have the tragedy of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, a city of 130,000 people – 92% White, 3.7% African American, 1.8% Asian, and 1.7% Hispanic. The city was inundated with flood waters from the Cedar River for at least a week before George W. Bush arrived on the scene (he was still in Europe when the levees were breached), but not a word of criticism from Democrats in all that time.

So how do we judge the difference in Democratic reaction to these two natural disasters? Would it be fair to say that, as they look at a city of 130,000 people – 120,000 of them whites and only 5,000 blacks – they would see half of those 120,000 whites as being Republicans? And the blacks? Getting their “shorts in a knot” over the plight of only 5,000 black people in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, would hardly be worth their time and effort. Their tears of sorrow probably wouldn’t make the NBC Nightly News or the first section of the New York Times – so why bother?

It is also important to consider the importance of racial and gender politics in the way Democrats think and react. The Mayor of New Orleans was a black man and the Governor of Louisiana was a white woman. However, to allow a black big city mayor and a white female governor, both Democrats, to be seen as incompetents would not fit well with the Democrats’ idea of racial and gender diversity – regardless of experience or competency. But the Governor of Iowa? He may be a liberal Democrat, but he’s a white guy; he can take care of himself.

While there was much debate over who failed to act quickly and decisively to save lives and provide basic human services in New Orleans, there was no such debate in the cities and towns of Iowa. It was Democrats who had destroyed the self-help and the self-governing instinct in so many black people in New Orleans. In Iowa, it was good old-fashioned Middle American values, taught to the people from childhood, that has carried them through.