Marc,

I’ve got a question for you. With John Edwards out of the race, do you think anybody will remember New Orleans? I am so fed up with the Democrats in the aftermath of Katrina, and he was the one candidate who kept insisting that we remember.

Katrina captured everything the Democrats are supposed to be good at: environmental degradation, racial injustice, urban poverty and Southern exceptionalism. But Dems have done little more than exploit the political opening that Katrina provided.

After 9-11 anybody who criticized W. was labeled unpatriotic. But during Katrina reporters went ballistic about the slow government response.  CNN reporters were the best: Anderson Cooper got radicalized and Soledad O’Brien got racialized.  Suddenly it was OK to be critical of Bush.  Somehow the Democrats found the spine they were missing during the authorization of the Patriot Act and the Iraq resolutions.  They were finally ready to criticize Bush.

But they had almost nothing to say about the perfect storm of domestic issues implicated in Katrina. Instead, the story was somehow about Iraq. If Bush can’t get water to the Superdome he can’t be trusted to fight the war in Iraq. It was a winning strategy. The party walked to their anti-war victory in the 2006 midterms over the bodies of New Orleans’ dead. Nancy Pelosi brought to you by the televised images of Big Mama dead in her wheelchair outside the Superdome.

I am convinced it is because we don’t think of poor, black people as citizens.  Would it have been different if instead of calling them refugees, CNN had reported, “Oh my God, there are thousands of voters trapped on the roofs of their homes!”   At least John Edwards noticed. I am going to miss him.

Melissa

Melissa Harris-Lacewell is Associate Professor of Politics and African American Studies at Princeton University.