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To Obama, tragedy more about class than race
September 5, 2005
BY LYNN SWEET SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST
Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) is scheduled to be in Houston today, meeting with victims of Hurricane Katrina, joining former Presidents George Bush and Bill Clinton, who are heading an emergency fund-raising drive.
Obama is not going there specifically because the hurricane has exposed a raw truth about race, but his travel to Texas will underscore that it was poor blacks who were left behind in New Orleans. Obama is the only African American in the Senate, and race relations are now a factor in dealing with the emergency.
We talked on Sunday, a few hours before his flight for the day trip to Houston. He is offering nuanced, but tough, criticism of the federal response, but is not taking direct aim at President Bush.
Obama sees the deplorable situation of the impoverished marooned in the flooded city more in terms of class rather than race. The federal, state and local response did not fail because New Orleans is "disproportionally black," Obama said.
"I think there were a set of assumptions made by federal officials that people would hop in their SUVs, and top off with a $100 tank of gas and [get some] Poland Spring water," and flee the storm, Obama said.
The tragedy, said Obama, revealed "how little inner-city African Americans have to fall back on. But that has been true for decades."
What I've learned about covering Obama, a freshman senator, is that he is very measured.
On Friday night, rapper Kanye West, during a hurricane relief concert, said, "George Bush doesn't care about black people."
I asked Obama if he agreed.
"What I think is that we as a society and this administration in particular have not been willing to make sacrifices or shape an agenda to help low-income people," he said.
Obama also rejected the suggestion that local and state officials were to blame for the horrific response in Louisiana.
The breakdown occurred at all levels, but "I hold the federal government primarily responsible," he said.
Obama was heading to Houston on Sunday night as a result of an invitation from Clinton.
President Bush asked his father and Clinton to reprise the roles they took on to help tsunami victims, and they agreed to lead a Hurricane Katrina fund-raising drive aimed at the private sector.
Obama, who had been phoning some Illinois-based CEOs to solicit aid, called Clinton and the invitation came in the course of their conversation. Clinton, I am guessing, immediately understood that it would be valuable to include Obama in the Houston day trip. Former President Bush's office also had to approve adding Obama, and it's easy to see why they would agree. The Bush administration is being blistered as racially insensitive.
The hurricane may well prompt, as Obama said, "a more serious conversation about the plight of people in the inner city."
He warned against using a "false dichotomy" to analyze the situation -- an incorrect assumption that there are only two answers to a question -- whereby the answer to what went on in New Orleans gets boiled down to either a failure of personal responsibility or of mutual, or societal, responsibility.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and other Cabinet secretaries were dispatched to the gulf region Sunday. The president and first lady make a return visit today, stopping in Mississippi.
Said Obama, "Clearly there is some damage control going on."
Lynn Sweet is the Washington bureau chief for the Chicago Sun-Times.
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