Victoria Brownworth

i never miss my old home town of new orleans more than when i am seeing people act incredibly stupid there. there is no dearth of stupid to go around in new orleans when it comes to politicians or tourists, but post-katrina people seem to have been working double-time to say and do the wrong thing at the wrong time. yesterday it was obama’s turn.

i’m not keen on being wrong. but there are times when i would prefer that my instincts–especially those that come from nearly three decades of covering politics in and out of the beltway–utterly missed the mark. that’s how i feel about obama. i really would have prefered to have been dead wrong about everything i wrote in column after column during the primary and the general election. alas, i wasn’t wrong about any of it.

obama doesn’t like to hunker down. maybe he’s a hard worker, but who would know? there’s a bit of the fop about him–he’s here, he’s there, he’s running for this after he was just elected to that. he doesn’t seem to have a lot of what my grandmother used to call stick-to-it-iveness.  obama seems to gain momentum only from one thing–talking to a crowd in fiery, fist-pumping speeches.

during the primary when obama did badly in debates with hillary clinton pundits–99% of them in the tank for obama–would whine that he was “tired.” tired? he was 13 years younger than hillary clinton and more than 3o years younger than john mccain. he should have had more energy than both of them.

when obama gets tired he lapses into his last best option: speechifying. it still seems to work a lot of the time, putting a bit of the lie to p.t.barnum. apparently some people can fool all of the people all of the time.

so there obama was on a pit-stop to new orleans ten months into his presidency saying vieled things about george bush and veiled inferences about how much damage the bush administration did to gulf coast residents. as if the folks living there had no clue unless obama told them. as if they hadn’t been living it. as if they hadn’t voted en masse for that change we can believe in.

please–there’s no valor in mincing words about what bush did to the gulf. the aftermath of katrina is bush’s domestic legacy. it’s the purse to match the shoes of  iraq and afghanistan as his foreign policy legacy. not one member of team bush was there for katrina victims. (my particular outrage was over condoleeza rice who was nonchalantly shopping for shoes in ferragamo and seeing spamalot in new york while people were going into shock on rooftops from heat and lack of water.) bush nearly destroyed what for me will always be the most wonderful city in america. so let’s not gloss over what happened on one’s trip to talk about what happened and how it’s all better now under your watch.

throw me something, mister!

i still can’t figure out why obama was there except that he seems to be everywhere but the oval office. (maybe bill clinton was in the white house more because monica was under the desk, who knows? and we didn’t really want george bush in the white house more, did we? but i’d like to see a giant magnet draw obama back to washington to stay for an extended period. a week perhaps, maybe even two.)

obama used the usual obama buzz words in his new orleans speech. he said more had to be done and it will never happen again and that he’s working on it and he said it wasn’t like he could just write a check and when someone asked him why he couldn’t just write a check (considering how many checks have been written to wall street and motor city and that obama himself  just got $1.4 mil from the nobel committee that he said he’s giving to charity, it’s a good question. obama’s friend oprah poured $20 million of her own money into nola post-katrina and also built more than 100 houses for the displaced. just saying.)

not much has been said about obama’s trip to new orleans. it didn’t get the republican gutting that the trip to copenhagen received, probably because the republicans still don’t give a flying hoo-ha about what happens in new orleans. it was disturbing to me to see obama once again still running for office (you were elected almost a year ago–go to the white house, please, please) and still making the same tired claims, getting a little testy, making weak jokes and generally looking less than presidential, even though he had a built-in audience of people who just wanted to see the first black president up close and iconic because new orleans still needs every little something it can get. i mean david vitter is their senator…. 

the upshot of obama’s visit, in which he lauded the “inspirational strength” of those who survived katrina (and then survived the federal government’s handling of katrina), was to tell people change is hard.

“i’ve been saying all along that change is hard,” obama intoned. and? that’s all you have? having one’s city underwater and losing everything one has, including family members–that’s hard. you’re the president. you went to harvard. you can do better than “change is hard.”

then obama told the crowd that he was pleased with the progress his administration had made vis a vis helping rebuild new orleans. which in normal parlance could be said to be adding insult to injury.

obama said, “On the housing front, we are tackling the corruption and inefficiency that plagued the New Orleans Housing Authority for years. We’ve also been able to dramatically cut the number of people who are still in emergency housing. And we’re moving families towards self-sufficiency by helping homeowners rebuild and renters find affordable options.”

 i could have laughed till i cried.

i used to work on housing issues in treme and the ninth ward exactly 30 years ago. housing and corruption go hand-in-hand in new orleans and katrina just made it that much worse because it plopped the federal government into the mix. the napoleonic code in louisiana (the only state the doesn’t follow english common law) adds an element of surprise!!!! to housing that non-louisianans can’t even imagine. katrina made that reality (and the surprise!!!) so much worse. so. much. worse.  

this statement of obama’s–whoever wrote it for him–is an out-of-touch statement. it’s inelegant. it’s beneath the person that obama not only claims to be but who he is, which is president. it’s blisteringly stupid.

yet that wasn’t obama’s most out-of-touch comment. he also said, “When it comes to health care, we’ve invested in supporting health centers, and recruiting more primary care providers, nurses, and other medical professionals to fill the shortage left by Katrina. We remain committed to building a new VA medical center in downtown New Orleans so that we can better serve and care for our veterans. And to help fight crime, we’re helping hire cops and rebuild jails.”

does the president know that there’s no hospital in new orleans? does the president know that people have to go to baton rouge or houston for real medical care? does the president know that charity hospital is still closed? screw a VA hospital—let’s get a hospital for the non-veterans and let the vets go there too!

obama was in new orleans for about the same amount of time he was in copenhagen. he came, he sparkled, he speechified, he adopted a pseudo-southern accent for a time as he often does when he speechifies, he left. he became one more in a looooong list of pols who have dropped in and run out on the city that time–and the feds–forgot.

obama ended his katrina-related remarks by saying, “And so I promise you this – whether it’s me coming down here or my Cabinet or other members of my Administration – we will never forget about New Orleans. We will never forget about the Gulf Coast. Together, we will rebuild this region and we will build it stronger than before.”

well that’s a relief. because four years after the worst natural disaster in american history, people are still living in formaldehyde-infused trailers, the city runs like an eastern bloc city just post-glasnost. everything almost works some of the time. but obama said together we will rebuild.

obama wasn’t staring at a bar code and wondering what it was a la george bush pere. nor was he standing in the backlit darkness of an immediately post-katrina jackson square in a blue work shirt like george bush fils draining all the electricity to spotlight himself. but obama had a shocking element of idiocy going on, just with way better delivery and infinitely more charisma.

why can’t you write a check, mr. president? because real people in real crisis are too little to have a failure not of their making matter? they aren’t the auto or banking or housing industries. if you recognize that the previous administration failed the city, then why can’t you alleviate the suffering? why did it take you ten months to take an hour flight from washington? (and why couldn’t you go on the actual anniversary of katrina?) why are your answers not answers? when will you realize we need more than speeches?

change is hard. and change we can believe in?

obama’s speech was delivered with characteristic verve and flair, but it was a big, bold lie. same as it never was. —vab