The complicated politics of the poor

A liberal or conservative response?
Which is how Jim McCrery and Chip Pickering ended up in Congress.

McCrery’s Louisiana district wasn’t badly hurt by Katrina — Hurricane Rita, in fact, did more damage, especially in Beauregard Parish — but it took in tens of thousands of evacuees from farther south. Like Pickering, he said there was a real human need that called for “extraordinary measures to give the state a chance to recover.”

McCrery personally managed floor passage of some of the more generous aid bills in the House. “Being from Louisiana and witnessing the impact, I understand it’s going to take an extraordinary effort on the part of the government,” he said in an interview.

It’s a legitimate point when “those on the left are concerned that we under-invested in the infrastructure,” he said. At the same time, “those on the right are also concerned about not needlessly frittering away the taxpayers’ hard-earned dollars.”

McCrery asked: “Are people concerned about throwing money down a rathole? Absolutely. They don’t want to just throw money into a deep pit ... and I agree with them. I don’t want to do that, either.”

Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images Rep. Jim McCrery, R-La., personally managed passage of some of the more generous aid bills on the House floor, but he cautions against abandoning fiscally conservative principles.

Pickering said that, as vital as the mammoth spending was in the days right after Katrina hit, in the end, the story of the Gulf Coast’s recovery would be a monument to conservatism.

Appropriating tens of billions of dollars in emergency aid immediately after the storm was neither a liberal nor a conservative response — it was a human response. It’s in what happens next that conservatives will find a challenge, he said, and an opportunity.

“How do we say to our fiscal conservative friends that this has a purpose from their perspective?” Pickering asked. “This gives us a chance to reform the ways we respond to disasters as well as how our government interacts with the private sector and local and state communities on a whole range of issues,” from public housing and health care to education.

“That same dynamic form of compassion should be the model as we try to reform the institutions of how we help people in need, whether it is after a disaster or whether it is during normal times as we try to tackle poverty in our communities and the stresses and crises that occur in communities every day,” he said. “And bureaucratic models are failures in each of those responses.”

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