Here's my NEWSWEEK colleague Holly Bailey with a report on McCain's tricky Katrina history:
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While floods ravaged New Orleans in August 2005, Bush and McCain celebrated McCain's birthday in Arizona. Susan Walsh / AP
NEW ORLEANS--President Bush's lackadaisacal response to the Hurricane Katrina
crisis is pretty much a truism by now. But John McCain's cameo role in
the mess may soon make it into the highlight reel as well.
As
the deadly storm system moved ashore almost three years ago, sending
fatal floods through New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, Bush was in
Phoenix, on a tour aimed at boosting participation in what was then the
administration's new Medicare prescription-drug plan. McCain had
opposed the bill, but showed up to meet Bush at the airport anyway,
along with other Arizona lawmakers. It was Aug. 29, McCain's 69th
birthday, and on the tarmac, Bush presented his old political rival
with a cake. The two posed, holding the cake up for cameras, and within
seconds, went their separate ways. The cake, melting in the 110-degree
Arizona heat, was left behind, uneaten.
It's a photo op
that Democrats will no doubt use as part of their campaign to portray a
McCain presidency as nothing more than a third Bush term--a picture of
the senator and the president, yukking it up on one of the
administration's darkest days. But McCain, visiting New Orleans this
week as part of his campaign's tour of America's "forgotten" places, is
trying to put distance between himself and Bush as he woos moderate
Democrats and independents. Arriving Thursday morning, McCain was asked
how he planned to distinguish himself from Bush's handling of Katrina.
"Just like I do everything," he said. "They have to judge me on my
record." He argues, as he has all week in places like Selma, Ala., and
in eastern Kentucky, that he's a different kind of Republican and would
be a different kind of president.
Today he took a
walking tour of the Ninth Ward--perhaps the most visible symbol of the
Bush administration's inaction in the wake of Katrina--passing a mix of
rebuilt homes and vacant, blighted houses. After the tour, McCain
addressed reporters in front of a restored church. "Never again will we
allow such a mishandling of a natural disaster," he vowed. "Never
again."
Yet on the issue of New Orleans, it's still unclear
how different McCain and Bush actually are. Speaking about Katrina,
McCain, like many other Republicans, has trashed the administration's
handling of the storm and has vowed to prevent similar catastrophes.
"We can never let anything like that happen again," McCain told
reporters on board his Straight Talk Express earlier this week. Still,
the senator, who has visited the Lower Ninth Ward twice since the
storm, has yet to tread into the far trickier debate over what to do
about New Orleans now, a fight that has dragged on and on with little
progress since the waters washed part of the city away. READ THE REST HERE.
