Accidental Blogger

Well, John Edwards has declared.  Big surprise, right?  And I’m sure we’ll all be shocked when Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and maybe Al Gore do the same.

I’m no election politics expert, but it seems to me that Edwards is ready to run a strong campaign.  He declared in damaged-but-not-destroyed working-class neighborhood in New Orleans [NY Times].  This furthers the image he will try to create of himself as an outsider and a "son of a mill worker."  And of course, he’s taking advantage of what has become America’s darling city.

Implicit in his brief remarks was criticism of the Bush
administration’s handling of New Orleans’s foundering recovery. In Mr.
Edwards’s telling, the city was exemplary in both positive and negative
senses, as a symbol of citizen action and government inaction. This was
his fourth visit since the storm, and he spent part of the
well-photographed previous day shoveling mud outside the same house.

Thursday,
the ex-senator praised the army of volunteers that has gutted hundreds
of houses and removed debris, but he pointedly omitted any recognition
of the patchy official efforts.

He saved his criticism of Mr.
Bush’s New Orleans role for a question-and-answer session afterwards,
telling reporters, “This is a place where presidential leadership would
have been critical.”

Asked how he would have handled New
Orleans, Mr. Edwards responded: “I would have had somebody coming into
my office every morning, and I would say to him, ‘What did you do in
New Orleans yesterday?’ And then the next day, ‘What did you do
yesterday? What steps do we need to take? What are we not doing? What
are the people in New Orleans telling us that we’re not doing?’ ”

Katrina-based criticism of the Administration.  How original.  He’d have done it differently, it’s not his fault that the government screwed up.  This sounds disturbingly close to the Democrats sniping at the Administration on Iraq: "It’s not our fault, they’re just incompetent, no we don’t have a plan, but did we mention that they’re incompetent?"  I don’t want to lambast Edwards, because I think he would make a good President, and I think he has a very real chance of becoming President.  At this point he deserves the benefit of the doubt, and the Times article could well be incomplete.  But I’m worried.  For as much as NOLA is America’s sweetheart city, I’ve yet to hear any encouraging news about rebuilding it — or even rebuilding the levees (which of course famously failed due to the incompetence of the Army Corp of Engineers).  We all love it (now), and we all hope it will recover (but our tax dollars are busy being thrown at the failed state we’ve created in Iraq in the absurd and counterproductive "War on Terror").

Is there any hope for New Orleans?  I can think of two possible analogues in American history: (1) the 1906 earthquake where San Francisco was destroyed and hurriedly (and sloppily and dishonestly) rebuilt — it has, obviously, since prospered, in part because of its unique cultural appeal; and (2) the "Reconstruction" of the South after the North ravaged it in the Civil War — it never did recover, with the exception of, say, Atlanta.  Which way is New Orleans headed?