The All-White Elephant in the Room

BORED by those endless replays of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright? If so, go directly to YouTube, search for “John Hagee Roman Church Hitler,” and be recharged by a fresh jolt of clerical jive. What you’ll find is a white televangelist, the Rev. John Hagee, lecturing in front of an enormous diorama. Wielding a pointer, he pokes at the image of a woman with Pamela Anderson-sized breasts, her hand raising a golden chalice. The woman is “the Great Whore,” Mr. Hagee explains, and she is drinking “the blood of the Jewish people.” That’s because the Great Whore represents “the Roman Church,” which, in his view, has thirsted for Jewish blood throughout history, from the Crusades to the Holocaust.

Mr. Hagee is not a fringe kook but the pastor of a Texas megachurch. On Feb. 27, he stood with John McCain and endorsed him over the religious conservatives’ favorite, Mike Huckabee, who was then still in the race.

Are we really to believe that neither Mr. McCain nor his camp knew anything then about Mr. Hagee’s views? This particular YouTube video — far from the only one — was posted on Jan. 1, nearly two months before the Hagee-McCain press conference. Mr. Hagee appears on multiple religious networks, including twice daily on the largest, Trinity Broadcasting, which reaches 75 million homes. Any 12-year-old with a laptop could have vetted this preacher in 30 seconds, tops.

Since then, Mr. McCain has been shocked to learn that his clerical ally has made many other outrageous statements. Mr. Hagee, it’s true, did not blame the American government for concocting AIDS. But he did say that God created Hurricane Katrina to punish New Orleans for its sins, particularly a scheduled “homosexual parade there on the Monday that Katrina came.”

Mr. Hagee didn’t make that claim in obscure circumstances, either. He broadcast it on one of America’s most widely heard radio programs, “Fresh Air” on NPR, back in September 2006. He reaffirmed it in a radio interview less than two weeks ago. Only after a reporter asked Mr. McCain about this Katrina homily on April 24 did the candidate brand it as “nonsense” and the preacher retract it.

Mr. McCain says he does not endorse any of Mr. Hagee’s calumnies, any more than Barack Obama endorses Mr. Wright’s. But those who try to give Mr. McCain a pass for his embrace of a problematic preacher have a thin case. It boils down to this: Mr. McCain was not a parishioner for 20 years at Mr. Hagee’s church.

That defense implies, incorrectly, that Mr. McCain was a passive recipient of this bigot’s endorsement. In fact, by his own account, Mr. McCain sought out Mr. Hagee, who is perhaps best known for trying to drum up a pre-emptive “holy war” with Iran. (This preacher’s rantings may tell us more about Mr. McCain’s policy views than Mr. Wright’s tell us about Mr. Obama’s.) Even after Mr. Hagee’s Catholic bashing bubbled up in the mainstream media, Mr. McCain still did not reject and denounce him, as Mr. Obama did an unsolicited endorser, Louis Farrakhan, at the urging of Tim Russert and Hillary Clinton. Mr. McCain instead told George Stephanopoulos two Sundays ago that while he condemns any “anti-anything” remarks by Mr. Hagee, he is still “glad to have his endorsement.”

I wonder if Mr. McCain would have given the same answer had Mr. Stephanopoulos confronted him with the graphic video of the pastor in full “Great Whore” glory. But Mr. McCain didn’t have to fear so rude a transgression. Mr. Hagee’s videos have never had the same circulation on television as Mr. Wright’s. A sonorous white preacher spouting venom just doesn’t have the telegenic zing of a theatrical black man.

Perhaps that’s why virtually no one has rebroadcast the highly relevant prototype for Mr. Wright’s fiery claim that 9/11 was America’s chickens “coming home to roost.” That would be the Sept. 13, 2001, televised exchange between Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, who blamed the attacks on America’s abortionists, feminists, gays and A.C.L.U. lawyers. (Mr. Wright blamed the attacks on America’s foreign policy.) Had that video re-emerged in the frenzied cable-news rotation, Mr. McCain might have been asked to explain why he no longer calls these preachers “agents of intolerance” and chose to cozy up to Mr. Falwell by speaking at his Liberty University in 2006.

None of this is to say that two wacky white preachers make a Wright right. It is entirely fair for any voter to weigh Mr. Obama’s long relationship with his pastor in assessing his fitness for office. It is also fair to weigh Mr. Obama’s judgment in handling this personal and political crisis as it has repeatedly boiled over. But whatever that verdict, it is disingenuous to pretend that there isn’t a double standard operating here. If we’re to judge black candidates on their most controversial associates — and how quickly, sternly and completely they disown them — we must judge white politicians by the same yardstick.

When Rudy Giuliani, still a viable candidate, successfully courted Pat Robertson for an endorsement last year, few replayed Mr. Robertson’s greatest past insanities. Among them is his best-selling 1991 tome, “The New World Order,” which peddled some of the same old dark conspiracy theories about “European bankers” (who just happened to be named Warburg, Schiff and Rothschild) that Mr. Farrakhan has trafficked in. Nor was Mr. Giuliani ever seriously pressed to explain why his cronies on the payroll at Giuliani Partners included a priest barred from the ministry by his Long Island diocese in 2002 following allegations of sexual abuse. Much as Mr. Wright officiated at the Obamas’ wedding, so this priest officiated at (one of) Mr. Giuliani’s. Did you even hear about it?

There is not just a double standard for black and white politicians at play in too much of the news media and political establishment, but there is also a glaring double standard for our political parties. The Clintons and Mr. Obama are always held accountable for their racial stands, as they should be, but the elephant in the room of our politics is rarely acknowledged: In the 21st century, the so-called party of Lincoln does not have a single African-American among its collective 247 senators and representatives in Washington. Yes, there are appointees like Clarence Thomas and Condi Rice, but, as we learned during the Mark Foley scandal, even gay men may hold more G.O.P. positions of power than blacks.

A near half-century after the civil rights acts of the 1960s, this is quite an achievement. Yet the holier-than-thou politicians and pundits on the right passing shrill moral judgment over every Democratic racial skirmish are almost never asked to confront or even acknowledge the racial dysfunction in their own house. In our mainstream political culture, this de facto apartheid is simply accepted as an intractable given, unworthy of notice, and just too embarrassing to mention aloud in polite Beltway company. Those who dare are instantly accused of “political correctness” or “reverse racism.”

An all-white Congressional delegation doesn’t happen by accident. It’s the legacy of race cards that have been dealt since the birth of the Southern strategy in the Nixon era. No one knows this better than Mr. McCain, whose own adopted daughter of color was the subject of a vicious smear in his party’s South Carolina primary of 2000.

This year Mr. McCain has called for a respectful (i.e., non-race-baiting) campaign and has gone so far as to criticize (ineffectually) North Carolina’s Republican Party for running a Wright-demonizing ad in that state’s current primary. Mr. McCain has been posing (awkwardly) with black people in his tour of “forgotten” America. Speaking of Katrina in New Orleans, he promised that “never again” would a federal recovery effort be botched on so grand a scale.

This is all surely sincere, and a big improvement over Mitt Romney’s dreams of his father marching with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Up to a point. Here, too, there’s a double standard. Mr. McCain is graded on a curve because the G.O.P. bar is set so low. But at a time when the latest Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll shows that President Bush is an even greater drag on his popularity than Mr. Wright is on Mr. Obama’s, Mr. McCain’s New Orleans visit is more about the self-interested politics of distancing himself from Mr. Bush than the recalibration of policy.

Mr. McCain took his party’s stingier line on Katrina aid and twice opposed an independent commission to investigate the failed government response. Asked on his tour what should happen to the Ninth Ward now, he called for “a conversation” about whether anyone should “rebuild it, tear it down, you know, whatever it is.” Whatever, whenever, never mind.

For all this primary season’s obsession with the single (and declining) demographic of white working-class men in Rust Belt states, America is changing rapidly across all racial, generational and ethnic lines. The Census Bureau announced last week that half the country’s population growth since 2000 is due to Hispanics, another group understandably alienated from the G.O.P.

Anyone who does the math knows that America is on track to become a white-minority nation in three to four decades. Yet if there’s any coherent message to be gleaned from the hypocrisy whipped up by Hurricane Jeremiah, it’s that this nation’s perennially promised candid conversation on race has yet to begin.

Judge: Corps can be sued for flood

A federal court judge cleared the way Friday for the Army Corps of Engineers to face trial on claims that defects in its Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet destroyed wetlands and turned the navigation channel into a funnel for storm surge.

U.S. District Judge Stanwood Duval's 40-page ruling "paves the way for the first and only trial that will likely be held on how the Army Corps of Engineers drowned New Orleans" during Hurricane Katrina, said California attorney Pierce O'Donnell, who leads the legal team that filed the case two years ago on behalf of a group of plaintiffs that includes WDSU-TV anchorman Norman Robinson, who lived in eastern New Orleans.


The suit alleges the controversial shipping channel flooded thousands of homes in eastern New Orleans, the Lower 9th Ward and St. Bernard Parish.

A spokesman for the U.S. Justice Department, which is defending the corps, declined comment, saying department attorneys needed time to review the ruling.

Duval's decision rejected the corps' argument for tossing out the case without a trial: that a federal law makes the agency immune from lawsuits over damage caused by its flood protection projects.

But Duval said that because the MRGO -- a deep draft navigation channel built over a decade starting in 1958 -- is not a part of the Lake Pontchartrain and Vicinity Hurricane Protection plan, the Corps can be held liable for damage caused by the waterway.

Duval cautioned that his ruling does not hold the corps liable, a matter he said he can decide only after "questions of material fact" about what caused the flooding can be examined at trial.

O'Donnell predicted that if the trial ends with the judge ruling for the plaintiffs, then anyone who lives in the affected areas -- eastern New Orleans, the Lower 9th Ward and St. Bernard Parish -- will be entitled to collect compensation from the corps, "subject to proving their damage."

O'Donnell said his team will also go to bat for residents in part of New Orleans that flooded after drainage canal levees broke after Katrina -- damage for which Duval has already said the corps cannot be sued.

"We are going to the new Congress in January, hopefully with a judgment in our hands, and we are going to say we need a 9/11 style Katrina Victim's compensation fund," O'Donnell said.

In the Friday decision, according to O'Donnell, Duval said the plaintiffs had offered "substantial evidence" that the storm water that surged through the MR-GO and into residents' homes overwhelmed hurricane protection levees.

Corps may have to rebuild floodwall sections

The Army Corps of Engineers may have to rebuild sections of hurricane protection walls on the lakefront to meet engineering standards adopted in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, according to floodwall studies done by the corps.

The walls stretch from earthen levees on Lake Pontchartrain to floodgates installed after Katrina on the Orleans Avenue and London Avenue canals. Because these sections of floodwalls are outside the new gates, they are the sole defense to block storm surge from the lake from pouring into such neighborhoods as Lakeshore, Lake Vista and Lake Terrace, as well as the University of New Orleans campus.

The cost of those repairs would be about $4.3 million. Geotechnical engineer John Grieshaber, technical support chief for the corps' Hurricane Protection Office, who hadn't seen the reports, said they still must undergo internal review.

If officials conclude the threats to the walls require immediate response, repairs could be ordered immediately. Otherwise, they would be completed after the reports are finalized, and before the June 2011 deadline for completing the first phase of levee improvements, he said.

Evolving standards

The walls were strengthened after Hurricane Katrina but before the new engineering standards for walls were adopted. Both are now about 16 feet high, which is expected to be high enough to meet the requirements of the new 100-year protection system.

In the past, the walls were only required to meet standards for water rising in the canal to a pre-determined "project height," which was below the top of the wall. Now, the walls are required to withstand the pressure of water rising all the way to the wall's top, even when water shoves the wall a bit out of place, forming a crack between its hard surface and the earth into which it is built.

On each wall, one section was identified that does not meet the new engineering standards and may collapse under extreme circumstances during a so-called 100-year hurricane, or a storm with a 1-in-100 chance of occurring in any given year.

--For the Orleans Avenue Canal wall, the report cites an unacceptable reading based on soil-sample results taken close to the wall; additional sampling is likely to indicate the wall does meet the standards.

--At the London Avenue Canal wall, the report recommended that a stability berm -- a layer of clay that would add weight and mass to offset the water pressure -- be added on the protected side of the wall.

The reports also concluded that the "stick-up" of parts of the Orleans wall -- the area of the wall between its top and the earthen levee into which it was built -- was as much as a foot higher than the post-Katrina 4-foot limit for I-walls. Still, that's a foot lower than an earlier interim standard, the report noted, which might be acceptable.

But where masonry boxes containing utilities, such as electrical cables, were built a few feet from the walls, short sections of the walls were uncovered for 7 feet above the earthen embankment, which would be two feet higher than the new standard.

Overlapping demands

Studies of the I-wall segments are among dozens of investigations of features of the 350 miles of hurricane levees, either as part of continuing efforts to improve protection to pre-Katrina standards or as part of the redesign and rebuilding of the system to withstand the forces of 100-year hurricanes by 2011.

The mouths of the two canals are typical of the overlapping construction demands facing corps designers, said Grieshaber, the geotechnical engineer. The designers are scrambling to make sure that remaining immediate repairs meet the pre-Katrina design standards, while also redesigning them to meet the new 100-year standards that must be in place by June 2011.

Grieshaber said he expects these sections of I-wall and others in the system eventually will be replaced with stronger inverted T-walls as part of the 100-year improvements.

An I-wall has a concrete wall sitting atop sheet piling driven deep enough to block water from moving beneath it, while an inverted T-wall also includes a concrete platform at the base of the wall and a series of deeper, square pilings installed at angles to provide better stability.

The reports recommended replacing the concrete pad on the canal side of the Orleans wall with reinforced concrete that would be directly connected to the existing I-wall, making it into a single unit that would prevent the wall from leaning and creating a crack. It also recommended relocating the masonry boxes or building a different kind of wall at the box that would be more stable. The second alternative would cost less, it said.

The reports also recommended building a concrete cap on top of the outer layer of sheet piling on the Orleans canal and atop sheet piling that is uncapped along the London canal, which would reduce wear and make them more attractive.

La. parish president still facing lawsuits over Katrina

METAIRIE, La. (AP) — On the eve of Hurricane Katrina, massive pumps that keep water out of this New Orleans suburb went silent when the roughly 100 workers who run them were allowed to flee under a "doomsday" evacuation plan.

With the storm raging, backflow from levee breaks in New Orleans had nowhere to go, damaging thousands of homes, shopping malls and businesses between Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River in Jefferson Parish.

For parish President Aaron Broussard, a populist Democrat who rose to power over three decades, the evacuation of the workers could be make-or-break politically and legally.

While other government officials and agencies have persuaded courts they are immune from liability for Katrina damage or deaths, Broussard seems to be the last still dogged in public and in court.

After the storm, parish residents along the lake's east bank dried out and scraped the muck from their middle class and upscale homes. Then they went to court against Broussard, with a judge recently refusing to dismiss him from lawsuits that hold him personally responsible.

At first, Broussard publicly accepted responsibility for the evacuation decision in August 2005. Over the years, he went about rebuilding a rapport with angry voters with support from residents who suffered less hurricane damage. In October 2007, Broussard managed to narrowly win re-election over a little-known challenger.

But about a month after the election, he swore under oath in lawsuit depositions that he didn't know of the doomsday evacuation plan before Katrina, saying he learned the pump operators had gone only after the fact.

Many constituents wonder where the truth lies.

"He's changing his story to fit the legal situation," said Debbie Settoon, a civil engineer and president of the civic group Citizens for a Safer Jefferson.

Why would Broussard defend a plan he didn't know about? Because it "preserved life," he said last week. And why shoulder the blame for a decision he swears he didn't make? That's the "burden of leadership," he said.

Both sides of the lawsuits agree on this: For nearly 12 hours after Katrina struck, Jefferson's network of canals overflowed because pump operators were evacuated. In refusing to dismiss Broussard, state District Judge John Peytavin cited "unanswered" questions posed by storm victims' lawyers during a November deposition.

"Would you have agreed with that decision?" attorney Darleen Jacobs asked Broussard at that session.

"I don't know," he answered.

Could you, as parish president, have vetoed the decision to remove the pump operators?" Jacobs asked.

"I don't know the answer to that," Broussard said.

Broussard, 59, downplays comparisons between his public rhetoric and sworn testimony.

"Part of the burden of leadership is accepting the public sentiment with respect," he said. "Legal accountability is a different standard."

The parish's former emergency director, Walter Maestri, who retired about a year after Katrina, told victims' lawyers this month that he hadn't discussed evacuation of pump operators with Broussard on Aug. 28, 2005, the eve of the storm. But he contradicted Broussard's claim of ignorance of the doomsday plan.

Maestri, who drafted the original plan in 1998, revised the document in 2005 to identify a new hurricane shelter for parish employees. Maestri said Broussard sought the change through a deputy, who quoted the parish president as saying he "wanted no one to die on his watch."

Broussard said he didn't recall voting on the plan in 1998, when he chaired the parish council. Maestri, however, said the council approved the plan as part of a larger emergency operations strategy that Broussard voted for in 2001, according to parish records.

Blaine LeCesne, a Loyola University law professor, said despite the progression of several lawsuits, plaintiffs against Broussard face long odds given legal protection afforded public officials.

"Unless they commit some grossly negligent, highly reckless conduct, generally the courts are not quick to hold them responsible for those discretionary acts," LeCesne said.

Danny Buckman, a Broussard supporter, said his flood-damaged Metairie neighborhood used to be filled with lawn signs calling for his ouster.

"I see him as a human being who had to make tough decisions," said Buckman, 47, a school custodian.

Others are less forgiving. Reading accounts of Broussard's sworn statements reminded Settoon of a placard in Broussard's office: "The Buck Stops Here."

"The buck slipped right past him," she said.

McCain's False FEMA Promise

While touring New Orleans yesterday, John McCain declared the government's response to the Katrina disaster "terrible and disgraceful" and pledged that it would never happen again. But McCain also demonstrated precisely the mindset that caused FEMA to revert from what both Republicans and Democrats in the 1990s had called a model agency back into the turkey farm it had been before the Clinton administration. He said: "Too often, government has its own peculiar way of doing things, following practices that in the private sector would invite financial ruin or worse." McCain reiterated the talking point of Newt Gingrich and every other purveyor of right-wing sound bites that UPS, FedEx, and Wal-Mart can tell you where packages are in real time, but FEMA couldn't even locate its own assets or people.

But it's the belief system that the private sector inherently does things better than government that impelled Bush's first FEMA head, Joseph Allbaugh, to dismantle the agency, notwithstanding its greatly improved performance in the 1990s, by farming out many of its activities to purportedly more efficient contractors.

Allbaugh, acting on the right-wing's hostility toward civil servants, politicized its top leadership with like-minded ideologues to bypass much more qualified and experienced personnel who had demonstrated their effectiveness in the 1990s. He cut programs, like the Project Impact disaster mitigation initiative, even though it had been widely considered to be cost-effective. And he told the states that they would have to bear a greater share of the responsibility for responding to disasters. That's the right-wing approach to government management, applied to virtually every domestic agency throughout the Bush years: politicize, privatize, devolve, and cut.

John McCain's comments give every indication that he would follow the same approach, which isn't surprising since conservatives have little else to say about government other than that the private sector is inherently better. In the Senate, he consistently voted against more funds for FEMA, against making it an independent agency as it had been in the 1990s, and even against the creation of a commission to investigate how the government failed after Katrina. That indifference to learning from experience and adjusting accordingly is a central characteristic of movement conservatism. No matter how many times, say, tax cuts for the rich have failed to provide promised broad economic benefits while exploding federal deficits, it remains a central element of the right-wing --and McCain's--platform. The same rigidity applies to neoconservative arguments about foreign policy, regardless of its self-evident failures.

At the very least, anyone who generally cared about preventing a repeat of FEMA's Katrina failures would want to start by looking at how it improved in the 1990s. Simply restating the right-wing incantations about government's inferiority is sure to cause nothing more than the same failures that conservatism produced in this decade.