The Audacity of Hope

I had been out of the country when the hurricane first hit the Gulf, on my way back
from a trip to Russia. One week after the initial tragedy, though, I traveled to Houston,
joining Bill and Hillary Clinton, as well as George H. W. Bush and his wife, Barbara, as
they announced fund-raising efforts on behalf of the hurricane’s victims and visited
with some of the twenty-five thousand evacuees who were now sheltered in the Houston
Astrodome and adjoining Reliant Center.
The city of Houston had done an impressive job setting up emergency facilities to
accommodate so many people, working with the Red Cross and FEMA to provide them
with food, clothing, shelter, and medical care. But as we walked along the rows of cots
that now lined the Reliant Center, shaking hands, playing with children, listening to
people’s stories, it was obvious that many of Katrina’s survivors had been abandoned
long before the hurricane struck. They were the faces of any inner-city neighborhood in
any American city, the faces of black poverty—the jobless and almost jobless, the sick
and soon to be sick, the frail and the elderly. A young mother talked about handing off
her children to a bus full of strangers. Old men quietly described the houses they had
lost and the absence of any insurance or family to fall back on. A group of young men
insisted that the levees had been blown up by those who wished to rid New Orleans of
black people. One tall, gaunt woman, looking haggard in an Astros T-shirt two sizes too
big, clutched my arm and pulled me toward her.
“We didn’t have nothin’ before the storm,” she whispered. “Now we got less than
nothin’.”
In the days that followed, I returned to Washington and worked the phones, trying to
secure relief supplies and contributions. In Senate Democratic Caucus meetings, my
colleagues and I discussed possible legislation. I appeared on the Sunday morning news
shows, rejecting the notion that the Administration had acted slowly because Katrina’s
victims were black—“the incompetence was color-blind,” I said—but insisting that the
Administration’s inadequate planning showed a degree of remove from, and
indifference toward, the problems of inner-city poverty that had to be addressed. Late
one afternoon we joined Republican senators in what the Bush Administration deemed a
classified briefing on the federal response. Almost the entire Cabinet was there, along
with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and for an hour Secretaries Chertoff, Rumsfeld,
and the rest bristled with confidence—and displayed not the slightest bit of remorse—as
they recited the number of evacuations made, military rations distributed, National
Guard troops deployed. A few nights later, we watched President Bush in that eerie,
floodlit square, acknowledging the legacy of racial injustice that the tragedy had helped
expose and proclaiming that New Orleans would rise again.
And now, sitting at the funeral of Rosa Parks, nearly two months after the storm, after
the outrage and shame that Americans across the country had felt during the crisis, after
the speeches and emails and memos and caucus meetings, after television specials and
essays and extended newspaper coverage, it felt as if nothing had happened. Cars
remained on rooftops. Bodies were still being discovered. Stories drifted back from the
Gulf that the big contractors were landing hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of
contracts, circumventing prevailing wage and affirmative action laws, hiring illegal
immigrants to keep their costs down. The sense that the nation had reached a
transformative moment—that it had had its conscience stirred out of a long slumber and
would launch a renewed war on poverty—had quickly died away.