Wrong Guys for the Job

Apparently Mitt Romney thinks that hurricane relief consists of sending canned goods to the victims. There's nothing wrong with canned goods, except that it takes a herculean effort to collect them, and repackage them, and put them on a truck or a plane, which then have to make their way across country over roads that have been inundated by heavy rains and storm surge, where they then need to be distributed. The amount of gas and effort required to move those canned goods dwarfs the actual value of the contributed items.

It turns out that relief organizations like the Red Cross would much rather we contribute blood and money, which can be used to pay for things like gas, vehicles, emergency equipment like generators and to resupply prepositioned relief depots around the country. Romney's campaign even bought $5,000 worth of stuff as props to prevent his relief truck from being empty. That's $5,000 the Red Cross could have used for real relief.

Romney's response to people dying, thousands losing their homes, and millions losing power was a cynical photo op at a repurposed campaign rally. It exemplifies why he's the wrong guy for the job.

Small-scale canned food drives are great for supplying food shelves for the homeless, but for a devastatingly huge catastrophe that spans almost the entire eastern seaboard, Romney's ideas are quaint, inadequate and quite wrong. Hurricane Sandy requires a nationwide response, coordinated by a federal agency that has expertise in dealing with such colossal emergencies. In other words, FEMA. An agency that Romney refuses to answer questions about these days, though he said he would cut its funding to it in 2011.

Romney isn't the only Republican to think small. Former FEMA director Michael "Heckuva job Brownie" Brown, had the gall to criticize President Obama for responding too quickly to the hurricane. This is the same guy who dragged his feet and totally botched the federal response to Katrina under Bush. The guy who wrote emails back to Washington pleading, "I'm trapped now, please rescue me." That anyone would ever hire this guy again boggles the mind, but that someone would actually give him a radio show is really incredible.

Republicans insist small government is better than big government. But the fact is, we need a government that is equal to the magnitude of the problems we have to deal with. New York is the financial capital of this country. If a hurricane wipes it out, we're dead in the water until it gets going again. A nationwide response is needed to restore the financial markets, and we need to get all the people that work in those markets back to work ASAP. That means helping New York and New Jersey (and Chris Christie) get the trains running again.

If massive hurricanes, tornadoes and droughts hit the Gulf Coast, Southeast, Midwest and Texas, threatening oil and gas and grain and livestock production, the rest of the country needs to help them get back on their feet as fast as possible. Because we need the food and energy they produce. If an earthquake hits California and disrupts Internet traffic—the central nervous system of this country—a nationwide response is necessary to get us back online as quickly as possible.

Every state in this country is dependent on other states for something. We're all in this together. The idea that everyone can be totally self-reliant and do everything by themselves is sentimental hankering for a time that never existed. The only truly self-sufficient humans were cavemen—the rest of us need other people to build our roads, grow our grain, bake our bread, butcher our meat, manufacture our tools and cars and computers, write our software. John Donne wrote "No man is an island" four hundred years ago.

Republicans express nothing but contempt for government. Does it make any sense to put people in charge of something they totally despise? For the same reason you don't make an Greenpeace activist CEO of Exxon, you don't put Grover Norquist and his Republican pawns in Congress in charge of the federal government.

Republicans make excellent mad dogs biting at the heals of government, calling attention to inefficiencies and problems that inevitably crop up. But putting Mitt Romney and the Republicans in charge of FEMA again would inevitably result in another Katrina-scale Brownie screwup.

Romney is running for president with the same policies and the same cast of characters from the Bush administration. With Katrina, Iraq, the financial meltdown, massive tax cuts during a massive wartime buildup that resulted in huge deficits, these folks have demonstrated that they are not competent to run this country.