Obama's road to the White House began in New Orleans. I have always lined up with the Libertarian Party on most issues. I am pro choice and anti gun control. I don't like the idea of a huge federal bureacracy that sucks money out of my pockets as fast as I can earn them. I have voted for politicians from both parties who seemed to line up with my beliefs.

The turning point for me, and I think most voters came with hurricane Katrina. I remember that the original story was about the looting. I can remember watching CNN and being struck dumb by the disconnect between the commentators denouncing the looters as nothing more than criminals while watching a bunch of people taking diapers and drinking water. Americans sitting on a higway overpass awaiting rescue for not hours but days...I still get mad thinking about it. The image of Americans floating face down, drowned in their own sewage while the President of the United States cut brush at his ranch is burned into my memory. It changed me. I had become cynical. I stopped giving money to charities because they all seemed corrupt, I had stopped voting because there did not seem to be any real difference between candidates. Hurricane Katrina got me thinking about what I really wanted out of a government. For the first time in a long time I started contributing to charities and I started to look for democratic candidates to vote for. Obviously I'm not alone in this.

If Bush had only called his vacation short on say, Monday. He could have sat in the Oval Office and shuffled papers, and his supporters could have defended him. If he had actually gone to New Orleans instead of flying over it, they could have supported him. Instead, he didn't see fit to end his vacation until Thursday. He presided over one of the greatest natural disasters in American history, and he couldn't have done worse if he had started fiddling or said "Let the people of New Orleans eat cake."

As it was, no one can defend his leadership without showing themselves as either dogmatic drudges or party flacks. It was the most expensive two week vacation in history. In a year, the Republican majority in Congress was gone, and now the White House is gone. All of this talk about school vouchers and realignment and wandering in the wilderness is just as empty as the states where the Republicans can still count on votes. It changes nothing. They have lost, and they will continue to lose as long as they continue the way they are. As long as they prey on our fear and our greed, and as long as they keep calling anyone who doesn't agree with them unamerican they will keep losing. Tucker Carlson, Christine Whitman and the rest, you are just moving the deck chairs around on the Titanic. If you think this election went badly, just try financing the next Presidential campaign on contributions from Walmart Republicans and see how much that gets you.

As for me, I hope the new President is up to cleaning up the mess left from the last one.

Hear, hear!

The most important thing a president can do during a natural disaster is to be the voice of reassurance. If all he had done was put his face in front of the cameras for ten minutes and reassured America that FEMA and the other federal agencies were on the case, he would have looked 1,000 times better. Instead, he left that up to appointees who cleary didn't know what they were doing. Bush's image took a beating not just because the federal response was bad, but because he personally looked indifferent to the problem. When he finally did address the issue, it was to make lame jokes about how he used to party too much in NOLA and how he was looking forward to sitting on Trent Lott's deck again soon. In short, he sent the message that he didn't give a crap about the people who were still in dire straights over the flooding.

I have an old friend who died in New Orleans, and it probably had to do with this, it is hard to say this behavior did not matter.