A harder look at Haley Barbour's post-Katrina miracle
Mississippi's GOP governor did a good job getting cash out of Republicans in Washington, but is he really doing a good job cleaning up after Katrina?
By Chris Kromm and Sue Sturgis
As president of the supervisory board in Hancock County, Miss., Roderick "Rocky" Pullman faces more problems than he sometimes cares to think about. In August 2005, his coastal county became "ground zero" for Hurricane Katrina, when the eye of the most destructive storm in the nation's history made landfall just south of Pearlington, the small town on the Louisiana border 40 minutes from New Orleans that he calls home.
Katrina's 170-mph winds and 35-foot waves literally reduced Pearlington to rubble. Every last vehicle and building in town was destroyed. In Hancock County as a whole, 50 residents were killed, and half the businesses and homes were wiped out. When relief teams arrived 10 days later, they found 600 people living under tents and tarps, linked to the outside world only by ham radio.
Today, Hancock County and the rest of coastal Mississippi are 21 months into a recovery that has garnered Gov. Haley Barbour lavish praise. Governing magazine named Barbour its 2006 Public Official of the Year largely due to his supposed post-Katrina leadership and savvy, including his skill in convincing federal lawmakers to channel billions of relief dollars to the Magnolia State. As Billy Hewes III, a Republican official from Gulfport, said: "He is to Katrina what Rudy Giuliani was to 9/11."
Outsiders might be surprised to learn then, that despite the plaudits, and despite the fact that Barbour's GOP connections seem to have won him a disproportionate share of relief money from Washington, post-Katrina recovery in some of the hardest-hit areas of the Mississippi coast is moving as fast as molasses in winter.. . .
The disparity between the states' needs and the funding they received from Washington has been so glaring that even disgraced former FEMA director Michael Brown recently charged that politics played a role.
"Unbeknownst to me, certain people in the White House were thinking we had to federalize Louisiana because she's a white, female Democratic governor and we have a chance to rub her nose in it," Brown told students at Metropolitan College of New York in January.
The White House denies any favoritism. But as Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., has pointed out, much of the power in allocating Katrina recovery funds before this year fell to a Republican-controlled Congress -- and, more specifically, to a Senate committee chaired by Sen. Thad Cochran, who just happens to be a Mississippi Republican.
Read the rest. Click to expand...
