Year I, A.D. (Apres le Deluge)

(not so) Happy Anniversary

First, though, I'd like to offer a very humble thank-you, we-are-not-worthy to those who organized the Rising Tide NOLA conference--wow. I'll probably be leaving some people out, so apologies in advance, but Oyster, Ashley, Dangerblond, Maitri, Scout, and others did a superb job of bringing it all together. With folks like Adrastos, Mark Folse, Morwen, Greg Peters and others moderating or participating on the various panels--and a first rate keynote--and the attendence of all sorts of people who love or are concerned about the best city in the US--well, it keeps me optimistic about NOLA's future.

Provided Peggy Wilson is thoroughly leashed and muzzled, of course.

Actually, I'm serious: one panelist, during a later session, mentioned something about the power of activists, and the conference itself was a measure of this. Even Dunbar's, um, VIRTUAL delivery of lunch didn't slow things down, although again, a big thanks to Ashley and Mark for taking a hell of a risk in driving through a couple of feet of standing water and torrential rain (symbolic, I guess) to bring the "catered" food on-site.

I'd be nice if that made for a small discount.

Anyway, the determination, foresightedness, and planning of Rising Tide NOLA (on a shoestring budget, no less) stands in sharp contrast to the efforts of the richest government on earth--THEIR statement is...more photo-ops and political damage control, please, as Frank Rich points out:

But before we get to that [Iraq and 9/11] White House P.R. offensive, there is next week’s Katrina show. It has its work cut out for it. A year after the storm, the reconstruction of New Orleans echoes our reconstruction of Baghdad. A “truth squad” of House Democrats has cataloged the “waste, fraud, abuse or mismanagement” in $8.75 billion worth of contracts, most of which were awarded noncompetitively. Only 60 percent of the city has electricity. Half of the hospitals and three-quarters of the child-care centers remain closed. Violent crime is on the rise. Less than half of the population has returned.

How do you pretty up this picture? As an opening act, Mr. Bush met on Wednesday with Rockey Vaccarella, a Katrina survivor who with much publicity drove a “replica” of a FEMA trailer from New Orleans to Washington to seek an audience with the president. No Cindy Sheehan bum’s rush for him. Mr. Bush granted his wish and paraded him before the press. That was enough to distract the visitor from his professed message to dramatize the unfinished job on the Gulf. Instead Mr. Vaccarella effusively thanked the president for “the millions of FEMA trailers” complete with air-conditioning and TV. “You know, I wish you had another four years, man,” he said. “If we had this president for another four years, I think we’d be great.”

The CNN White House correspondent, Ed Henry, loved it. “Hollywood couldn’t have scripted this any better, a gritty guy named Rockey slugging it out, trying to realize his dream and getting that dream realized against all odds,” he said. He didn’t ask how this particular Rockey, a fast-food manager who lost everything a year ago, financed this mission or so effortlessly pulled it off. It was up to bloggers and Democrats to report shortly thereafter that Mr. Vaccarella had run as a Republican candidate for the St. Bernard Parish commission in 1999. It was up to Iris Hageney of Gretna, La., to complain on the Times-Picayune Web site that the episode was “a huge embarrassment” that would encourage Americans to “forget the numerous people who still don’t have trailers or at least one with electricity or water.”

That is certainly the White House game plan as it looks toward the president’s two-day return to the scene of the crime. Just as it brought huge generators to floodlight Mr. Bush’s prime-time recovery speech in Jackson Square a year ago — and then yanked the plug as soon as he was done — so it will stop at little to bathe this anniversary in the rosiest possible glow.

Douglas Brinkley, the Tulane University historian who wrote the best-selling account of Katrina, “The Great Deluge,” is worried that even now the White House is escaping questioning about what it is up to (and not) in the Gulf. “I don’t think anybody’s getting the Bush strategy,” he said when we talked last week. “The crucial point is that the inaction is deliberate — the inaction is the action.” As he sees it, the administration, tacitly abetted by New Orleans’s opportunistic mayor, Ray Nagin, is encouraging selective inertia, whether in the rebuilding of the levees (“Only Band-Aids have been put on them”), the rebuilding of the Lower Ninth Ward or the restoration of the wetlands. The destination: a smaller city, with a large portion of its former black population permanently dispersed. “Out of the Katrina debacle, Bush is making political gains,” Mr. Brinkley says incredulously. “The last blue state in the Old South is turning into a red state.”

Perhaps. But with no plan for salvaging either of the catastrophes on his watch, this president can no sooner recover his credibility by putting on an elaborate show of sermonizing and spin this week than Mr. Cruise could levitate his image by jumping up and down on Oprah’s couch. While the White House’s latest screenplay may have been conceived as “Mission Accomplished II,” what we’re likely to see play out in New Orleans won’t even be a patch on “Mission: Impossible III.”

By the way, I see that C. Ray issued an apology for his "hole-in-my-head," I mean, "hole-in-the-ground" remark. Don't know about y'all, but I'm still waiting for Shrub to come up with something beyond "to the extent that the federal government was responsible..." non-apology.