I wasn't going to write on this topic. Really, I wasn't. But then, as we were preparing for our trip to the quilt show yesterday, my wife brought the topic up, and even suggested that I blog on the topic -- and when my liberal Democrat wife suggests such a thing, I can't refuse.

It is, of course, a favorite topic around our house -- the disparate treatment of survivors of Hurricanes Katrina and Ike. Katrina was four years ago -- Ike is barely a year past. Yet to this day we continue to see stories about Katrina and the people displaced and effected by the that monster storm. Yet little more than a year ago another monster storm hit the United States, only a few hours away in the Houston/Galveston area, and we have been told, in effect, to bugger off and tend to our own needs. We got a great illustration of this during the week that just ended.

On Thursday, Barack Obama graced the people of New Orleans with his presence and promises of even more help to get their lives back to normal -- in other words, a continuation of the open-ended commitment to throw money at New Orleans and its myriad problems. Then on Friday (after diverting to San Francisco for a high-dollar political fundraiser), Barack Obama came to Texas -- College Station and Texas A&M, to be exact. That put him 80 miles from Houston, and 127 miles from Galveston -- less than an hour by air to Ellington Field on the south side of Houston and its direct path (I-45) into the heart of the devastation. But did he bother with the victims of the more recent storm who are still in recovery mode? No, he did not.

Now I could point out that the folks in New Orleans are reliable Democrat voters while we in this area are not and suggest that partisan politics is the reason -- but I won't. Or I could point out the obvious demographic differences between New Orleans and the area impacted by Hurricane Ike and attribute the disparate treatment to race -- but I won't. Those are not the reasons that Barack Obama is ignoring the Texas Gulf Coast devastated by Hurricane Ike.

No, I'll attribute the neglect of the recently devastated area of Texas to something much more venal -- the fact that the first priority for Barack Obama is Barack Obama. The media drove Katrina into the national psyche in a way that it did not with Ike (overwhelmingly due to the racial and political components), and there is therefore much more in the way of personal political capital for Obama to earn and store up with a visit to New Orleans to commiserate with the victims of a storm that happened four years ago than there is to be gained through a visit with the survivors of any more recent natural disaster. So Barack Obama will visit New Orleans and throw more money at that city while recovery projects here in the Houston/Galveston area will be allowed to go unfunded or underfunded because there just isn't any political gain to be had in providing such presidential attention and federal largesse to this community. So Barack Obama will never forget New Orleans -- and he will never remember the Texas Gulf Coast area.

Posted by: Greg at 06:09 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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