Terry vs. Katrina

I read this New York Times article by Frank Rich about how Bush totally messed up with the whole Hurricane Katrina situation in the Gulf Coast, and when I read the following paragraph, my jaw dropped:

But a president who flew from Crawford to Washington in a heartbeat to intervene in the medical case of a single patient, Terri Schiavo, has no business lecturing anyone about playing politics with tragedy.

We're going to have to ask why it took almost two days of people being without food, shelter, and water for Mr. Bush to get back to Washington.

I had totally forgotten that just a few months back, when poor Terri Schiavo, brain dead for over a decade, was dying after her husband had given the order to take her off the machine that had kept her alive all this time, a culture war erupted on the national stage and everyone took sides.

Terri's parents didn't want to take her off the machine, but her husband did. So the parents sued him and each and every court they went to sided with the husband. The Republican Governor (and George W. Bush's brother) rushed legislation through to keep her alive, but it was struck down by the courts.

In an unprecedented move, the Republicans in Washington decided to pass legislation themselves to stop the court orders, but it didn't work (this was a state matter, so the federal government should have never intervened, and all federal courts agreed with the state courts -- the Supreme Court declined to take the case.)

Incredibly, the president, known for not working late, overnight, or on weekends, cut short a vacation (another one!!) in Crawford, Texas, to fly back to Washington DC in the middle of the night to sign the legislation the GOP Congress had passed.

All this turned out to be useless, since, like I said, every court, state and federal, sided with the husband, and eventually Terri was taken off the machine and died. What is striking however, is how quickly the president moved to "save" one person but didn't move at all to save hundreds or thousands at the end of August when the hurricane struck his neighboring state.

The different response is easily interpreted: Terri Schiavo was a white woman from a good (read rich) family, and her case had pitched the religious right on one side of the debate (every life is worth saving) and the courts on the other (ruling over and over again that she could be taken off the only machine that was keeping her alive.) The culture war between the people that helped put him in the White House and the courts for which Bush has such contempt (although, ironically, he was in the end put in the White House by activist judges, just not liberal ones,) demanded he intervene. A failure to do so could have damaged his image in his supporters' minds and eventually the GOP candidates in future elections.

The victims of Hurricane Katrina were poor and black, and there was nothing to gain politically from helping them since they mostly voted Democrat, lived in a Democrat state, elected a Democrat Governor, Senator, and Mayor. On the contrary, he thought, there would be a lot to gain if their elected Democratic officials didn't perform as they should have. The GOP would stand to gain from the windfall.

Alas, the elected Democrat officials might end up taking a hit, but Bush and the GOPers at large (who made a lot of remarkably STUPID comments in the aftermath of the storm, like "should we even bother rebuilding," or "we should punish those who chose not to leave the city") are certainly taking the most heat and might end up being hurt the most in next year's midterm elections.

The lesson here is the one we had already learned: if you're white and rich you count in Bush's eyes. If you're black and poor, he doesn't even see you. What a failure of a president.