Levees Not War

How many times my friends have the pundits written off the McCain campaign? We’re gonna fool ’em again. We’re gonna fool ’em one more time!
—John McCain | La Crosse, Wisc. | Oct. 10, 2008

Did he really say that? We had to play it back several times to be sure. (Check it here, on NBC Nightly News.) John McCain says he’s going to win the White House by fooling us? This comes just a week after his campaign aides acknowledged they couldn’t win by talking about the economy, and just days after an apparent Hanoi Hilton flashback in which he addressed a crowd as “my fellow prisoners.” • Even his fellow Republicans are alarmed about his grip on reality and the potential for violence. (See remarks by Gergen and Weaver below.) McCain spent the week trashing Barack Obama—his TV ads are now 100% negative—letting Sarah Palin accuse a U.S. senator of “palling around with terrorists” (a charge gladly echoed by Fox), and whipping their supporters into a frenzy of shouts of “Traitor!”, “Off with his head!”, and worse. Republican Frank Schaeffer writes in the Baltimore Sun, “I accuse you of deliberately feeding the most unhinged elements of our society the red meat of hate. . . . Stop! Think! Your rallies are beginning to look, sound, feel and smell like lynch mobs.”

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‘Barack Obama has been running away from New Orleans for his entire campaign.’ —Naomi Wolf

Palin and McCain at Mississippi Emergency Management Agency, Jackson, Aug. 31.

Is this true? In all our excitement about Barack Obama (and lately the convention and Gustav), for some reason it hadn’t occurred to us to ask: Why doesn’t he come to New Orleans? Why doesn’t he talk about us more, and make New Orleans at least one example of the nation’s desperate need for change and hope and some expert community organizing?

In a powerful article in The Nation (9/22), Naomi Klein points out that “The City That Won’t Be Ignored” is being neglected by Obama—who blew it when he let McCain and Palin fly down to Mississippi to show their concern while he stayed away. Maybe McCain’s act was lame, but at least he came. Gustav didn’t inconvenience the Grand Old Party so badly after all. Maybe McCain’s visit was only setting the stage to demand new offshore drilling, as Bush did the very day after the storm, while more than half a million were without electricity and New Orleanians weren’t yet allowed to return home. Great: Republicans got credit for caring about storm victims.

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