"A Compassionate Conservative Republican"

Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., meets with elderly survivors of Hurricane Katrina, Thursday, April 24, 2008, during a tour of New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward during his 'It's Time for Action' campaign tour.

(AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)

Republican presidential candidate John McCain took stock of still-hurricane-damaged areas of New Orleans on Thursday and declared that if the disaster had happened on his watch, he would have immediately landed at the nearest Air Force base, drawing a sharp contrast to President Bush's handling of the tragedy.

McCain called the response to Hurricane Katrina "a perfect storm" of mismanagement by federal, state and local governments.

The Arizona senator walked a few blocks of the hard-hit Lower 9th Ward, passing tidy rebuilt stucco houses standing next to abandoned structures, their facades still spray-painted with the markings of rescue workers who went door to door nearly three years ago searching for bodies. Government-issued trailers still dot the neighborhood. McCain said his teenage daughter Bridget had been there with a volunteer youth group a few weeks ago to help in the recovery.

"Never again, never again, will a disaster of this nature be handled in the disgraceful way it was handled," McCain declared, a pledged he repeated over and over during the day.

(Republican Presidential hopeful John McCain has given a scathing rebuke of the Bush Administration's response and rebuilding efforts of hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans. Is it good politics for a GOP candidate to condemn your party's incumbent President? Perhaps it is when that President has very low approval ratings.)

McCain was unsparing in his criticism of the Bush administration on Katrina, and said members of Congress must share the blame for putting money into pork-barrel projects when those dollars should have been used to fortify the region against disaster. He said his record was clean on that count, with a consistent opposition to wasteful spending.

Without mentioning Bush directly, McCain said that when Katrina struck, "If I had been president, I would have ordered the plane landed at the nearest base and I'd of been over here." He repeated that later, saying, "I would've landed my airplane at the nearest Air Force base and come over personally."

McCain said the missteps of the Bush administration were well chronicled and undisputed, citing unqualified leaders, poor communication and a failure to recognize the dimensions of the problem.

In a conversation with reporters aboard his campaign bus, McCain rejected the notion that he ran any risk of guilt by association with the Bush administration by coming to New Orleans, saying voters would judge him on his own record, not Bush's.

(Compassion has always been the hallmark of liberal Democrats. When one thinks of conservative Republicans one usually thinks of someone telling the downtrodden to "pick your self up by your own bootstraps". Is there really such a thing as a compassionate conservative Republican?)

McCain is campaigning this week in what he calls "forgotten" areas of the country, and he assured residents that their situation was not lost on him.

"I've been going to places that are perhaps very cynical about government," he told students during a town hall at Xavier University. Trying to reach out for the votes of Democrats and independents, he pledged to be a president who would take action to erase that cynicism.

"As president of the United States, I'm not going to leave anybody behind," he said.

McCain's "call to action" tour this week is designed to show him as a different kind of Republican, reaching out to all and ready to help those in need. Earlier stops included Selma, Ala., site of a famed civil rights battle; a shuttered steel mill in Youngstown, Ohio, and a tiny coal town in Kentucky where President Lyndon B. Johnson declared war on poverty.

"There must be no forgotten places in America, whether they have been ignored for long years by the sins of indifference and injustice, or have been left behind as the world grew smaller and more economically interdependent," McCain said in prepared remarks. "In America, we have always believed that if the day was a disappointment, we would win tomorrow."

McCain (Ariz.), the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, is scheduled to visit Appalachia; New Orleans; Youngstown, Ohio; and Little Rock as part of a week-long trip designed to make sure the GOP does not cede the issue of compassion to the Democrats.

McCain: Time for the Right Kind of Change

 

(I feel compelled to give Senator John McCain credit for at least trying to reach out to minorities, particularly black Americans none of whom except black Republicans, will vote for him. To me that takes guts and principle, particularly in the light of his past voting record when it came to civil rights issues. I feel he is sincere and repentant for his past opposition to civil rights. Will John McCain, if elected President in '08 really not forget America's poor and disenfranchised? Will he truly prove to be a compassionate conservative Republican? Let's hope we don't have to find out, preferably by electing Senator Hilary Clinton for President in '08.)

tags: john mccain  republicans  takebackamerica  politics  president  us  power  compassion  

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