I think McCain is speaking from LA tonight, so thought this apropos.
When hurricane Katrina first struck, John Mccain was celebrating his birthday with President Bush in Arizona. In the days that followed, he urged Congress to make sacrifices to help the recovery effort. But he also expressed concern about going overboard and burdening "future generations of Americans" with "the highest deficit, probably, in the history of this country."
The McCain campaign has done its best this week to get the media world to focus on the lapse in time since Sen. Barack Obama last visited Iraq. Two years without getting on the ground information, John McCain and his aides argued, is far too long for any candidate vying for the White House.
A similar line of attack could be levied at McCain when it comes to one of America's largest domestic tragedies. Up until traveling there one month ago, the Arizona Republican had made just one public tour of New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina touched down in August 2005, according to the Washington Post's travel records.
McCain's first post-hurricane visit to the region was in March 2006. His trip, according to those in attendance, was a full-day affair touring all aspects of the storm's destruction. It came, it should be noted, after pining by local officials for more federal attention including, Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu insisting that any politician serious about a presidential run would have to, at the very least, get a first hand account of the hurricane's destruction.
In the year that followed McCain did not return to New Orleans. He did, as noted by a Mother Jones feature on the topic, vote against establishing a congressional commission to examine the federal, state, and local responses to Katrina. Later, he voted against allowing up to 52 weeks of unemployment benefits to people affected by the hurricane. In July 2007, he ventured back to the Gulf Coast, but, while he held an open news conference, the purpose of the trip was officially a private fundraiser.Finally, two years after he first toured New Orleans, McCain returned to the battered city. On April 25, 2008, the GOP frontrunner traveled to the lower ninth ward with the state's newly elected governor, Bobby Jindal. It was what the Times Picayune called "an effort to distance himself from a signature failure of the Bush administration." He is currently scheduled to return to the city within the next week to attend rallies and host a town hall event.
Contrast this schedule to Obama's. By February 2008, the Illinois Democrat, according to his website, had visited New Orleans five since Katrina struck. Those trips included public announcements about Gulf Coast recovery plans, tours of devastated areas, public speeches, and campaign events.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/05...Even John McCain, who tells conservatives that he's a Reagan disciple, proposes far-reaching government action on issues such as climate change, high energy prices and the mortgage crisis -- problems that are supposedly better left to the cruel genius of free markets, according to the old paradigm that Bush has pushed to absurd extremes.
It took a leader of the Decider's uncommon gifts to kill the philosophy he worships. To be fair, there is one area in which he has been the most proactive of presidents, to our nation's lasting discredit: Violating the basic rights of citizens and noncitizens alike in the name of his "war on terrorism."
Otherwise, he has interpreted Reagan's small-government mandate as an excuse -- or an instruction -- to abdicate government's most fundamental responsibilities. Anyone who wants to argue this point need simply remember the "heck of a job" our government did in handling the devastation from Hurricane Katrina.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/...
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