http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/07/AR2005090702341_pf.html<>If 9/11 was Bush's Woodstock, Katrina is his Altamont -- the place where his ability to unite people behind a flurry of flag-waving came to look like the hollow sham it always was.
John Edwards's mantra of Two Americas doesn't sound so corny now that Bush's soaring vision of democracy on the march has suddenly been laid as bare as an abandoned Superdome where the toilets are overflowing.
<>But now, in Katrina's aftermath, there's something different in the air: the scent of insurrection. The needless torment of New Orleans has reignited the dormant passions of the election. E-mails are flying again between friends who've been out of touch for months, enclosing Web links to new polemics of disgust.
The big donors with wallet fatigue after John Kerry's loss are ready to write checks again, big time, for any Democrat who shows courage.It's as if the tragedy in the Gulf Coast has awakened us from a deep materialistic sleep to acknowledge the pain of poverty and racial inequality for the first time in years.
Those Democrats who still temporize for fear of being tagged as "playing politics" don't seem to understand that being all kissyface and timid is as over as strategy as it is as substance. Better to play politics than play possum.
Maybe Hillary should stop going on fact-finding trips to Alaska with her new Republican pals. Even before Katrina changed the landscape, her careful tactics of sleeping with the enemy had begun to annoy the town that adored her.<>What's so troubling about Bush is not that he is incompetent, as many currently charge.
It's that he is dismissive, unless programmed to be otherwise. His competence, as Justin Franks pointed out in "Bush on the Couch," extends only to personal self-preservation -- to winning. When the less fortunate are endangered, he reverts to the primal aphasia he learned at his mother's knee. "Everybody is so overwhelmed by the hospitality," Barbara Bush commented from Houston on NPR Monday evening, adding, with a chilling matriarchal chuckle, "And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway. This is working very well for them."
Wow. How's that for one family's values? New York's only consolation this 9/11 is that we no longer feel so marginal as we recoil.