Gulf Watch: Gingrich at CPAC: New Orleans destroyed by lack of education, "citizenship"

Most of the controversy from last week's Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) conference has centered around Ann Coulter calling John Edwards a "faggot" (although many news accounts failed to mention it -- I guess gay-bashing isn't news?).

"The intellectual cornerstone of our modern conservative movement." On the week of the 18-month anniversary of Katrina, as families across the Gulf remembered the tragedy and how it devastated their lives, Gingrich claimed that those killed or displaced from the Ninth Ward of New Orleans had it coming because they were, in short, bad citizens and stupid.

Here's what he said (listen to the audio here):

How can you have the mess we have in New Orleans, and not have had deep investigations of the federal government, the state government, the city government, and the failure of citizenship in the Ninth Ward, where 22,000 people were so uneducated and so unprepared, they literally couldn't get out of the way of a hurricane.

I'm sure Gingrich knew that nothing would get the crowd excited like blaming the victims -- although Gingrich ended up coming in fourth in the event's presidential straw poll -- but this is over the top even for him. Instead of bizarre platitudes about "citizenship," let's review why New Orleans residents "couldn't get out of the way" of Katrina's devastation:

(1) It wasn't wind and rain from Katrina that destroyed New Orleans, it was flooding, which effected 80% of the city (why does Gingrich focus only on the poorest and blackest part of town?). And why did New Orleans flood? Because of ineffective federally-built and maintained levees, which the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers insisted would hold. That's why groups like levees.org are calling for a federal investigation. As Harry Shearer notes at Huffington Post:

[T]he folks in the Ninth Ward weren't caught by a hurricane. They were surprised at 5:30 Monday morning (according to [LSU Hurricane Center co-founder Ivor] Van Heerden's timeline) by an eighteen-foot-high wall of water as their federally built flood protection structure catastrophically failed.

Who's the uneducated one?

Of course, that's not the only damage from Katrina one can link back to Washington leadership. The Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet ("Mr. Go"), a money-losing shipping lane that Congress should have closed years ago, intensified Katrina's storm surge. For years the EPA and other federal agencies let energy companies and other interests decimate Louisiana's coastal wetlands, the best buffers against hurricanes.

In other words, Gingrich is right to say the destruction of New Orleans was due to a failure of citizenship -- but the failure happened in Congress and the White House, not the Ninth Ward.

(2) Those who were left behind weren't "uneducated" and "unprepared" -- they were the low-paid workers that kept the New Orleans tourism industry humming for wealthier visitors like Gingrich. New Orleans had one of the lowest wage rates in the country going into the storm, and as this piece in the Washington Post showed, the divide between rich and poor determined who could escape and who couldn't:

To those who wonder why so many stayed behind when push came to water's mighty shove here, those who were trapped have a simple explanation: Their nickels and dimes and dollar bills simply didn't add up to stage a quick evacuation mission.

"Me and my wife, we were living paycheck to paycheck, like most everybody else in New Orleans," Eric Dunbar, 54, said Saturday [...]

He offered a mini-tutorial in the economic reality of his life.

"I don't own a car. Me and my wife, we travel by bus, public transportation. The most money I ever have on me is $400. And that goes to pay the rent. And that $400 is between me and my wife." Her name is Dorth Dunbar; she was trying to get some rest after days of peril.

Dunbar estimated his annual income to be about $20,000, which comes from doing graphic design work when he can get it. Before the storm, when he and his wife estimated how much money they needed to flee the city, he was saddened by the reality that he could not come up with anywhere near the several thousand dollars he might need for a rental car and airfare."

But during his years in Congress, Gingrich voted down every attempt to increase the federal minimum wage.

(3) After the storm hit, who was to blame for people not "getting out of the way" of harm?

Maybe it had to do with Landstar Express America, the Bush-connected company that was given a $278 million contract to deliver evacuation buses, which didn't arrive until a week after Katrina hit, directly leading to the deaths of 34 people including children from dehydration?

Or what about the dozens of families that tried to flee over the Gretna Bridge -- only to be turned away by white cops who "were concerned about life and property" in their mostly-white suburb, as opposed to the lives of those escaping the floods?

Or perhaps we could look at FEMA chief Michael Brown, distracted with his wardrobe and job future while thousands were stranded in New Orleans?

(4) Most importantly, when Gingrich talks about Katrina, why does he stop at August 2005? The Gulf Coast is still in crisis today -- and who's to blame for that? As we showed in our report last week, A New Agenda for the Gulf Coast (pdf), the failed post-Katrina recovery goes straight back to Washington. As we wrote in a piece for The Hill last Friday:

Now, a year and half after Katrina, a failed policy at the highest levels of government is the major reason for the "second tragedy" of Katrina: a stalled recovery that keeps thousands of Gulf residents in limbo, and has left neighborhoods from the Lower Ninth Ward to East Biloxi looking like the storm hit yesterday. And only bold leadership from Congress and the President can turn the situation around.

In our report, we detail over 30 things national leaders can do (pdf) -- right now -- to turn around the situation in the Gulf.

But trying to score cheap political points with bogus claims that dishonor those who lost their lives in a great tragedy -- largely due to federal negligence and incompetence -- isn't one of them.