In the long-ago of 2005, just days after Hurricane Katrina made landfall near New Orleans, a young Kanye West blurted out on live television during a fundraising drive with comedian Mike Meyers that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.”
It was perhaps an early sign of West’s mental instability, but at the time it ended up defining the media narrative about Katrina and Bush, who was lambasted by the media for being indifferent to the fate of New Orleans because it was mostly poor black people who had been killed or displaced by the storm.
It didn’t matter that the main cause of the problems in New Orleans during and immediately after Katrina — lack of evacuation, widespread looting, poor emergency response and coordination — was corruption at the local and state level, not incompetence at FEMA. (New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin would later be indicted and convicted in federal court on multiple corruption charges.)
But in the moment that didn’t matter. The national news media unfairly blamed President Bush. Every major media outlet ran a now-infamous photo of him looking down on hurricane-ravaged New Orleans from the window of Air Force One, cementing the narrative that the president was detached and indifferent to events on the ground.
It would come to be known as Bush’s “Katrina moment,” and it heralded the effective end of his administration. Democrats sailed to a massive victory in the 2006 midterms, campaigning on Bush’s allegedly flat-footed Katrina response and the unpopular war in Iraq, rendering the president impotent for his last two years in office.
I mention all this because what’s happening in North Carolina in the wake of Hurricane Helene should be Kamala Harris’s “Katrina moment.” Her staged photo pretending to work on the disaster response (earbuds not even plugged into the phone, taking notes on a blank piece of paper), together with the absence of FEMA or any other federal assistance to storm-ravaged areas of western North Carolina and Georgia, should end her presidential campaign.
While Harris spent the weekend at glitzy campaign events in Las Vegas and Los Angeles, and Biden napped on the beach in Delaware, communities in the path of Hurricane Helene were pounded with rain and flooding across six southeastern states, the worst such flooding ever seen in some areas. More than a hundred are dead, thousands are missing. Entire towns have been swept away. Millions are without power. Roads and bridges have been washed out across the region, making it difficult to get clean water and food to stranded communities.
Natural disasters like Hurricane Helene, a category 4 storm, are of course going to cause massive damage and devastation no matter what. But it didn’t have to be as bad as it has become in the absence of timely federal aid from the Biden-Harris administration. Military assets could have been deployed from Fort Bragg (recently renamed “Fort Liberty” by the woke U.S. military) in North Carolina, which is only a couple hundred miles from the worst-hit areas. For decades, Fort Bragg has supported domestic disaster relief. Why isn’t it happening now? Why isn’t every military helicopter within 500 miles of the affected areas in the air right now?
To be clear, what the people of North Carolina and Georgia and Tennessee need right now is evacuation, food and water, shelter — the kinds of things the U.S. military, National Guard, and FEMA are best equipped to provide. But so far none of that seems to be happening. Why?
Setting aside the failure to prepare ahead of time for the massive flooding the hurricane would bring to these areas, why has it taken so long for Biden and Harris to address the disaster, and why have they done so in the most cursory, dismissive ways? Asked by a reporter on Monday why he and Harris weren’t in Washington over the weekend coordinating and commanding the emergency response, Biden responded, shockingly, “I was commanding. I was on the phone for at least two hours yesterday and the day before as well.”
That retort, “I was on the phone for at least two hours,” while Americans are drowning and starving in massive floods, should go down in our history as one of the most callous and shameful things ever said by an American president.
But at least Biden said something. As of Monday afternoon, Harris hadn’t said a word.
It hasn’t escaped anyone’s notice that the victims of the flooding are predominantly poor white people in Appalachia. Given that fact, and the appalling lack of concern from Harris and Biden, there’s a lot more reason right now to claim that Harris doesn’t care about white people than there ever was to claim Bush didn’t care about black people.
Unlike in 2005, you won’t hear that from the media. You’re far more likely, in fact, to hear corporate outlets attack Trump for “making it political” by traveling to Georgia on Monday to help distribute supplies and assist in relief efforts. In delivering comments to the media from the state on Monday, Trump announced he is working with Elon Musk to make satellite internet service Starlink available to storm-ravaged areas currently without means of communication.
It is political, and the political message from Harris is clear: The victims of Hurricane Helene are white Trump supporters from a red state, so she doesn’t really care what happens to them.
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