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Tuesday, September 06, 2005

No election year + Democratic governor = Federal indifference
Posted by Jill | 6:51 AM

Eric Boehlert compares the responses to last year's Florida hurricanes with the response in New Orleans this year:

...In the summer of 2004, FEMA handed out hurricane relief checks with wild abandon, doling out nearly $30 million to residents of Miami-Dade County to replace TVs, computers and microwaves, even though that county suffered little or no hurricane damage.

Writing last November for GovExec.com, which touts itself as "the independent business magazine of government," Charles Mahtesian noted, "Now that President Bush has won Florida in his 2004 reelection bid, he may want to draft a letter of appreciation to Michael Brown, chief of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Seldom has any federal agency had the opportunity to so directly and uniquely alter the course of a presidential election, and seldom has any agency delivered for a president as FEMA did in Florida this fall."

President Bush undoubtedly benefited from the series of heartwarming photo-ops that followed in the wake of the storms, but according to Mahtesian, "The story on the ground was not Bush's hand-holding. Rather, it was FEMA's performance. By the end of September, three hurricanes later, the agency had processed 646,984 registrations for assistance with the help of phone lines operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Fifty-five shelters, 31 disaster recovery centers and six medical teams were in operation across the state."

In other words, FEMA was in overdrive.

[snip]

Standing alongside Florida's Gov. Jeb Bush at a press conference on Sept. 3 as Hurricane Frances approached, Brown bragged, "FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security are bringing in literally thousands of assets to respond to Hurricane Frances. Two of the most important things that we're doing are to focus on life-sustaining and lifesaving efforts."

In a press release issued just one week before the election, FEMA crowed, "Florida Disaster Aid Tops $2 Billion." The public proclamation was part of a torrent of FEMA press releases trumpeting its Florida relief efforts.


But this year, there's no election at stake, and those stranded in New Orleans were largely not reliable Republican voters. So, to paraphrase Richard Nixon, the attitude was "Fuck the [insert group here]. They don't vote for us anyway."
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