Anniversary draws political parade

WASHINGTON – The second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina is refocusing national attention on New Orleans, with President Bush due in the city on Wednesday and five of the candidates seeking to replace him also making anniversary-related appearances.

A successor to Bush won’t be selected until more than three years after the hurricane. But Democrats in particular are hoping to use the botched early response to the hurricane as evidence that a fundamental change in the federal disaster apparatus must be a priority for the new president.

Some candidates – most notably the top Democratic contenders, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., and former Sen. John Edwards, of North Carolina – have pledged an all-out effort to speed the recovery. Edwards announced his candidacy in New Orleans, and both Clinton and Edwards said they would appoint one person to oversee recovery efforts and report to them daily.

All three will be in New Orleans – Obama today and Clinton and Edwards at a University of New Orleans hurricane summit sponsored by Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La.

Also attending the Landrieu event will be Republican challengers Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor, and Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif. Huckabee has said that after watching people stranded on rooftops, in the Superdome and on highways without any sign of rescue workers it made him “ashamed of my own government” for one of the few times in his life.

Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, said Katrina clearly will be a secondary issue, especially compared to Iraq, but that it would be a mistake to underestimate its potential effect on voters.

“One thing that people of all ideological stripes can agree on is that government should rescue people in dire straits during disasters and it should use the taxpayers’ money wisely,” Sabato said.

“Katrina was George W. Bush’s domestic Iraq, and Democrats will remind him and the new GOP standard-bearer of that frequently.”