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Please forgive the length of this message, but I'm from louisiana and I VERY much want to amplify danslos' point because it is at the very core of what happened -or rather didn't happen- after Katrina.
Bush is furious with New Orleans and has been for years. Orleans has certainly given him a lot of reasons for spite. New Orleans is the seat of Democrat support in Lousisiana. Without New Orleans black voters Louisiana's governor, Congressional seats and both Seante seats would have been Republican LONG ago. Even in a state that goes Republican in presidential elections the city of Orleans gives the Dems the edge in statewide elections. Senator Mary Landrieu had lost most of her black support by the Fall 2002 midterms. She was trailing her GOP opponent, former New Orleans city councilwoman, Susie Terrell in the polls -Terrell by the way had been given her walking papers out of the council by the black voters of New Orleans. In her first term Landrieu had lost support by not visiting her home state and not doing a thing to improve the condition of the black voters who elected her. All the prominent black politicians had abandoned her: congressman Cleo Fields, William Jefferson, State senator Greg Tarver -in fact Fields and Tarver attacker her publicly. Her poll numbers were falling near-daily. By November 2002 the GOP thought they would easily add a Republican seat from Lousisiana, a "slam dunk," you could say. But Landrieu immediately began to repair her allegiances with the black community.
Remember, the 2002 mid-terms were the first elections after 9-11, and everyone was saying it would be a barometer to measure Bush's post 9-11 political clout. The GOP won seats nationwide, but Louisiana's Senate race went into a run-off. The whole nations' eyes were on this state. Bush bragged so much following the initial mid-term victories, but now people were saying it was a fluke, the result of Dems intimidated from campaigning full-bore against the GOP by the prospect of Bush questioning their patriotism. However, if Bush could pull off a statewide win again, so soon after his mid-term victories, then it would prove beyond any doubt that the mid-terms weren't the result of weak and vaccillating Democrat campaigns, but rather of his own undeniable popularity. Mary Landrieu based her entire campaign on Bush-bashing, blaming him for Louisiana losing it's sugar industry, and steel, calling Terrell a "rubber-stamp." She was the only Democrat with the guts to campaing and talk like a real Democrat. Bush HAD to defeat her, no matter what. He pulled out all the stops. Bush came down here(to my hometown of Shreveport in north louisiana), his father went to New Orleans, as did Trent Lott and Dick(head) Cheney. But just like with Iraq the GOP overestimated their prestige in Louisiana. The GOP's invasion turned off white voters who didn't like all these outsiders telling them how to vote, plus it mobilized the black vote statewide and while Landrieu's six years of ignoring her black voters still left a bad taste in our mouths about her, we knew the consequences of not supporting her. Of course Landrieu won, and then (to add insult to injury) the next morning Landrieu went on all the Sunday morning talk shows thanking the black community for their support. This rubbed salt in the wounds of Republicans nationwide! To think of it, a white feamle from the South thanking blacks for her job. It proved to the whole country who blacks supported and it proved why. I'll never forget how on all 4 major Sunday talk shows she said, "We won and the black vote led the way." It was nice to see her acknowledge that it was the black vote that saved her job. She was clearly in fence-mending mode.
Bush was furious but his humiliation at the hands of New Orleans voters wasn't over. Bobby Jindal, a former Bush administration official with HHS, ran for governor and again it was Orleans parish's black voters who handed him a sound beating at the polls. The GOP was red-faced with fury and all Louisiana's right-wing talk shows became free-fire zones for racial slurs and insults. I actually enjoyed listening to them confirm their racism and unabashedly broadcast to the world how "dumb" they thought blacks supposedly were, because I knew we had finally done something that reached the bastards. David Vitter won John Breaux's old Senate seat last year by running on the traditional platform of vowing to ensure white privilege, but his "victory" was only by one measly percentage point. And even Vitter admitted that if the Democrat vote hadn't been split by a 2-way race between Chris Johns and John Kennedy he would have lost. Bush painted Vitter as a rock-ribbed Republican rooted in principle, unwilling to bend to the demands of the undeserving negro. But the power of Orleans (even in defeat) was to put the lie to this boast too. The day after the election Vitter broke his chief campaign promise and went to the New Orleans voters. Suddenly he was willing to be "flexible" on affirmative action, city and state jobs and contracts for blacks, funding for poor inner-city schools and all the other things important to blacks that he said he'd get rid of. After the election he did the math and no matter how he worked the numbers he realized the number and rate of growth of black residents (and hence voters) in Louisiana is far outgrowing the white populace. He may have eked out a slim win with white support in 2004 but this was the LAST time that would EVER happen. Blacks are currently 35-percent of the state's population. In 20 years blacks will be at or near 50-percent. In the South, where Red states reign, Orleans parish has been the biggest thorn in Bush's side for years. A perpetual reminder of the GOP's impotence before a mobilized black electorate.
It is against this backdrop of being continually humliliated and his ambitions thwarted by the black voters of Orleans parish that this disaster happened. It also explains why Bush reacted so slowly, and why he and Mike Brown are playing such sick games with aid delivery. To Bush this wasn't a natural disaster, it was a opportunity for some payback against the people of New Orlenas for having denied him the power he craved. Don't think it's lost on him that were it not for Orleans he would have had both Louisiana Senate seats by now instead of only one (bringing him that much closer to the critical 60-percent Seante supermajority he wants so badly), and he would have had one more governorship, filled by one his former lackeys, no less. When you see him smiling on TV as he stands before a landscape of destruction, that's a gleeful smile you're seeing on his putrid face. I'll bet he even believes God sent this storm to punish Orleans for not obeying HIS "chosen" representative. Nothing that's happned after Katrina has been accidental, especially not the non-response. His actions before and after the storm are completely consistent with his famous vindictiveness. Recall how he treated John McCain, Richard Clark, Joe Wilson & Valerie Plame, John Kerry -the list goes on and on. Now tell me that what he's done to New Orleans doesn't fit the pattern of Bush getting some payback! This whole affair is nothing less than Bush at his vindictive worst.
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