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Watching Obama's speech from my flu bed in New Orleans--what a way to celebrate Mardi Gras, by waiting in line for a prescription at a freezing Walgreens!--my first question was: If this guy's so smart, why'd he, or his handlers, schedule this impressive speech at an hour when they knew the broadcast networks would have abandoned the Super Tuesday story? Hillary and Huckabee used that schedule to their benefit, gaining valuable free time on the broadcast nets, while both Obama and McCain had to settle for cable.
My second question was: was he talking about New Orleans? Hillary, of course, made a glancing wave at the city, conjoining it with some other city elsewhere in one of those "from the nurse in....to the student in...." concoctions. Obama, in his "yes, we can" peroration, referred to a woman whose house was swept away in a vicious storm. Where? The Mississippi Gulf Coast? The recent tornado alleys of Tennessee and Arkansas?
He was having it both ways, allowing the attention-starved people of New Orleans (why'd you guys schedule Mardi Gras on Super Tuesday, anyway?) to believe they'd been thrown a crumb, while avoiding responsibility for focusing on what really happened here--the betrayal of the city by a federal government that swore to protect it. The new word that should be inserted in that formulation, incidentally, is "knowingly". In a decision last week throwing out half of the citizens' lawsuit against the US Army Corps of Engineers, Federal Judge Stanwood Duval castigated the Corps thusly:
"While the United States government is immune for legal liability for the defalcations alleged herein, it is not free, nor should it be, from posterity's judgment concerning its failure to accomplish what was its task," the judge wrote. "This story -- 50 years in the making -- is heart-wrenching. Millions of dollars were squandered in building a levee system with respect to these outfall canals which was known to be inadequate by the corps's own calculations."
He added, in a postscript made more bitter by tonight's failure by the candidates to say anything remotely substantive about this situation:
"It is not within the court's power to address the wrongs committed. It is hopefully within the citizens of the United States' power to address the failures of our laws and agencies."
Most of the national media have long since given up bringing the facts of why New Orleans flooded to the public's attention. Now, the candidates, all working their poll-approved themes, choose not to take the judge's cue. Who the hell will?
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