While Senator Barack Obama was on his world tour, Senator John McCain should have been busy—neither planning to speak at an Gulf Coast oil rig, visiting with the Dalai Lama, nor whining about his coverage in the press. Instead, McCain should have paid a visit to the Rio Grande Valley. There, of course, fifteen counties have just been declared federal disaster areas, thousands are still without power, and an assessed $750 million dollar clean-up task awaits. All this as a result of Hurricane Dolly.
The two contrasting images of the presidential candidates would have been staggering. Imagine: Obama assuring hordes of Germans that he is “a fellow citizen of the world” in the picturesque Berlin Tiergarten; McCain, donning a slicker, assuring the citizens of South Texas that the federal government will not allow this to be another Hurricane Katrina. It would have contrasted a sprightly Obama with a sober McCain; an arrogant, high-flying orator with a person conscious of the needs of average Americans. This is exactly the message McCain has been unable to send successfully.
In addition to further delineating himself from Obama, McCain could have accomplished something else. By visiting the scene as the disaster unfolded, McCain could have silenced some critics and assured voters that his candidacy is not a continuation of the Bush administration. Bush has to this day not been able to recover from the political hit he took after Hurricane Katrina. McCain would have been politically smart to distance himself from this element of the Bush administration’s legacy.
