Since Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Louisiana, it seems that the spine of the state's Democratic party has gone missing. Every day new information on state and federal governmental preparation and response to the storm comes out, the insinuations about her role fall by the wayside. Keep going....
ReTHUGlicans locally cried foul about delayed state of emergency pronouncments and the facts showed she was calling on state of emergency declarations the Thursday before the Monday landfall, and only got it from the President when the storm made landfall.
ReTHUGlicans griped about her role leading the state's National Guard, and in fact, thousands of the "available" guardsmen not in Iraq were in place in Baton Rouge and New Orleans the Sunday night before Monday landfall.
ReTHUGlicans speak of commuunications breakdowns on the local and state level, and yet Michael Brown's testimony last week point out a key flaw in communications... on the national level... Brown spoke of "VTCs" (video teleconferences) the Thursday before the storm, where he and Homeland Security, the National Weather Service and the White House... NOTE: nobody from the state or local governments were in on these VTCs!!
ReTHUGlicans howl over the evacuation of New Orleans and those left behind, and buses flooded, etc., but we've since learned that nearly 1.2 million of the 1.3 million metro New Orleans residents WERE evacuated in an timely, orderly fashion, without clogged interstates and vehicles parked after running out of gas (see: Texas v. Rita, 2006). We've also learned that Blanco asked FEMA for hundreds of buses before and after Katrina, and each time she asked, FEMA told her they were on the way. She got tired of that answer the Wednesday after Monday landfall and cancelled schools in other parts of Louisiana to use their buses to evacuate stranded New Orleanians.
Listen, if you're not from Louisiana, you have no idea what kind of person Kathleen Blanco is. Is she an eloquent speaker? Not really. She stammers a bit, is fairly plain-spoken and not very glossed-over by political handlers. She's a school teacher-turned-local board of education member who blinked and found herself in the lt. governer's seat one day. She'd been there many years, working under a republican governor, and was elected governor over a Bush crony outright. So if you aren't from Louisiana or familiar with her, you might judge her on the surface and think she's incompetent. Far from it... she's just not podium-friendly.
But what she is is genuine, sincere, and hard-working. With the abundance of misinformation that nearly buried her in the immediate aftermath of Katrina, there's been LITTLE effort to undo that damage by her party. It's a grave injustice, state Democrats should be ashamed of themselves.
Bush's NUMEROUS flaws go chronicled here, and most of THOSE are just...and yet his party and their allies in the media defend and shield him. See, folks, that's what makes the Republican party a stronger election-day machine. When will we learn?
Right now, Blanco's polling at around 40% in-state, which I think is amazing given the untruths told in a conservative southern state. She still deserves better, and I'm STILL waiting on the Democrats to step in and aid her in not only the STATE'S recovery, but hers as well.