With tropical storm Isaac (likely to be a full-fledged hurricane by Sunday/Monday) bearing down on the Gulf of Mexico and possibly Florida -- home of next week's RNC convention in Tampa -- it may be an excellent time to remind voters in Florida about the GOP's 2011 efforts to gut FEMA's budget for 2012.
Appropriators reported the Homeland Security and military construction spending bills to the floor after beating back Democratic amendments to restore funding for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and grants to fund firefighter training and assistance programs.
Luckily, Democrats in the Senate were able to
hold the line on the FEMA budget and prevent the mammoth Republican cuts to the disaster relief agency.
Three months ago (ed., May 2011), Republicans in the House of Representatives tried to slash 2012 spending for the Federal Emergency Management Agency by 55% compared with 2011 spending levels, 70% compared with the 2010 budget. Thankfully, Senate Democrats avoided the most extreme cuts to FEMA. But since then, the United States has been pelted by several major disasters and FEMA is almost out of money.
Of course, when a barrage of deadly, destructive tornadoes struck a number of red states during 2011, Republicans backtracked on their attempt to slash FEMA funding, and deployed the Rovian technique of attacking their opponent with the very thing they're guilty of doing themselves:
... now some Republicans in Congress are demanding FEMA's budget be increased. The very same party that tried to slash FEMA's budget by more than half is now accusing President Obama of "purposefully and irresponsibly underfunding" disaster relief and "putting families and communities who have suffered from terrible disasters on the back burner."
The Republican-led House Appropriations Committee which earlier this year gouged FEMA's budget has issued a press release trying to blame Democrats and the president for cuts to disaster relief aid.
While the phrase "perfect storm" is overused and has become trite, in this case, it may make sense to quickly make an ad for Florida that points out Republican hypocrisy on government spending at precisely the time when the GOP is not only in the state, but a hurricane is bearing down on Florida's coast.
Gut FEMA? Yeah, who needs it, right GOP? Who needs government? Cut it all and restore our freedoms!
This plays perfectly into the larger political narrative that Greg Sargent so ably outlines this morning in his column in the Washington Post:
This allows them (Obama campaign) to make the case in the ad above (Bill Clinton ad) — that Romney doesn’t have the answer. The gamble is that even if things are bad, Obama’s approach has not been discredited; voters won’t see this election as a decision to end a presidency that has failed; they will take a long view of the situation and see the election as a choice between two parties with differing views on a range of issues, between two overall visions of the future, and ultimately, between two men.
We need a Democratic PAC, the DNC or the Obama campaign to make this ad and get it ready to go for Monday.