Barack Obama did a good job yesterday of bringing attention to an issue that seems to have been largely forgotten: post-Katrina recovery in New Orleans. If only Republicans had bothered to listen to what Obama had to say.
Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama blasted the Bush administration Monday for the slow pace of Hurricane Katrina recovery efforts, saying reconstruction no longer seems to be a White House priority.
“There is not a sense of urgency in this administration to get this done,” said the senator from Illinois. “You get a sense that will has been lacking in the last several months.”
This wasn’t posturing. Obama was in New Orleans for a field hearing of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which saw the inadequacies of the federal response first-hand.
Here’s the kicker from the Chicago Tribune article: “The hearing is one of the first that the Homeland Security Committee has scheduled since the Senate passed to Democratic control. No Republican members attended.” (emphasis added)
None? After Bush swore to do whatever it took to rebuild the Gulf Coast, not a single Republican senator on the committee would even show up for a field hearing on reconstruction?
On the other hand, it’s possible every GOP member of the committee decided not to bother with the field hearing because they know Joe Lieberman chairs the committee — and he’s about as interested in administrative oversight as Republicans were when they were the majority.
As the hearing began, a protester stood and unfurled a banner urging “Probe the White House,” a reference to calls for establishment of a commission to investigate the administration’s response to Katrina modeled after the Sept. 11 commission.
Speaking later to reporters, committee Chairman Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut said he would rather focus on the rebuilding effort and was reluctant to mount a new investigation of the failures in the initial response.
“We don’t want to play ‘gotcha’ anymore,” Lieberman said.
When did we play “gotcha”? I missed a good game of “gotcha” and nobody told me?
Please. The chairman of the committee sets the tone and agenda for the committee’s efforts. Last year, when Lieberman was running for another term, he decried the Bush administration’s unwillingness to answer key questions, and pledged to investigate the White House’s response to the disaster. Then, after the elections and after he became committee chairman, he said the opposite.
Sen. Joe Lieberman, the only Democrat to endorse President Bush’s new plan for Iraq, has quietly backed away from his pre-election demands that the White House turn over potentially embarrassing documents relating to its handling of the Hurricane Katrina disaster in New Orleans.
The president blew off Katrina recovery in the State of the Union; Republicans blew off the field hearing on reconstruction progress; and the chairman of the committee responsible for overseeing all of this has effectively admitted he doesn’t want to hold the administration responsible anymore.
Obama said yesterday that we may be “in danger of actually forgetting New Orleans.” Apparently, some already have.