When Barbara Robinson, her mother Florence Burns, and Barbara’s
friend Roy Picou arrived in Hollister recently from their home in
Metairie, Louisiana, to stay with son and brother Tom Robinson,
they were greeted warmly by this community.
When Barbara Robinson, her mother Florence Burns, and Barbara’s friend Roy Picou arrived in Hollister recently from their home in Metairie, Louisiana, to stay with son and brother Tom Robinson, they were greeted warmly by this community.
Given the catastrophe from which they had escaped, it was hard not hard to feel their pain.
That’s a sentiment that some used to make light of when President Clinton uttered it. But in view of the current administration’s callous initial reaction to the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, it is hard not to conclude that President Bush could use a little tutelage on the art of compassion from his predecessor.
What are we to make of a man who stood on the runway at the airport in New Orleans, while the dead remained to be recovered, and joked about how he used to “enjoy myself (in New Orleans), occasionally too much”?
If you had lost everything, perhaps even loved ones, and spent days fearing for your life without food or fresh water, would the president’s good time in New Orleans be high on your list of priorities?
And then there was his mother, Barbara Bush, commenting on how things were “working very well” for the evacuees in the cozy Houston Astrodome because they “were underprivileged anyway.”
These are not the first examples of tone-deafness by members of the Bush family when it comes to connecting with average people. Remember President George H.W. Bush’s encounter with an optical scanner at a supermarket on the 1992 campaign trail, and how unfamiliar he was with something people encounter every day?
Tactlessness in the wake of Katrina was not just a Bush family affliction. At the Astrodome House Majority leader Tom DeLay asked three young evacuees, “Now tell me the truth boys, is this kind of fun?”
The truth, Tom? No, it isn’t kind of fun.
What is fun for DeLay is taking advantage of the situation. Just as the Bush White House politicized 9-11 by forcing through a conservative legislative agenda, DeLay is now taking advantage of Katrina.
Yesterday the House passed a disaster-relief funding plan that calls for huge cuts in programs conservatives dislike, eliminating the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and delaying the Medicare drug benefit. There is no talk of cutting spending in Iraq, or repealing the tax cuts that overwhelmingly benefited wealthy Americans.
If ever there was a time to resurrect the concept of the “compassionate conservative,” this was it. But throwing billions at the problem, while necessary, will do nothing to fix the damage done to the reputation of this president and this Congress.
