The President of the United States came to New Jersey on Wednesday to see what’s left of it, what is left of boardwalks as famous as there are in this world, what is left of Atlantic City and Spring Lake and Seaside Heights, all the other places from Jersey on up that Hurricane Sandy leveled the way bombs and wars and terrorists do.
President Obama was with Gov. Chris Christie on the ground in Jersey and then in the air, in Marine One, and was not at one of the great addresses there are in New York, the great neighborhood of Breezy Point, because the mayor told him that the cops of New York City were needed elsewhere and everywhere on this day.
Because this was a day, another one, when all parts of the area we think of as New York did what New York always does in moments like these, which means first get to one knee and then stand up proudly all over again, the way it did on Sept. 12 of 2001 after New York was hit, the way it was this time, after a storm like this.
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And what President Barack Obama, and Craig Fugate, the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, brought with them to the state of New Jersey on Wednesday was the government. You better believe that means the kind of big government that everybody has talked about in this election cycle like it was some form of assault on our country, its freedoms, its future.
You know when big government is all right for some of the phonies, in government and in the media, who rail constantly against it? When we get hit the way we got hit this week. When fire tries to level Breezy Point, when lives are changed forever the way the landscape in our part of the world is damaged, and changed, forever.
It is the same as when the programs of the government, and that means big programs and big government, become a lot more acceptable to people when they get sick, or somebody they love gets sick.
That is what the President brought with him to Christie before they got on that helicopter on Wednesday, what he brought with him to Jersey.
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Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney’s running mate, has often sounded like somebody trying to explain where the wind comes from when he tries to explain this tough budget of his. But if you want to know why Ryan doesn’t want to talk very much about how FEMA would fit in that budget, it’s because he would look like he’d hit himself in the head with one of those weights he likes to pose with, because his budget wants to spend about half as much on agencies like FEMA as the President’s does.
Politico.com reminds everybody that in a Republican debate a year ago, the head of the Republican ticket, Mr. Romney, was asked a direction question about FEMA by the moderator, CNN’s John King.
King: “FEMA is about to run out of money, and there are some people who say, ‘Do it on a case-by-case basis.’ And some people who say, you know, ‘Maybe we’re learning a lesson here that the states should take on more of this role.”
King asked this question even knowing how helpless the city of New Orleans and the state of Louisiana were in the face of Hurricane Katrina, and how the world saw what happened when the clumsy reaction to Katrina by the George W. Bush and the government and his head of FEMA, Heck-of-a-Job Brownie. People who don’t think Obama’s response has been better this time around, with Sandy, also don’t believe in climate change.
Here was Romney’s response that night, in June 2011, about states taking a more substantial role in the face of natural disaster:
“Absolutely. Every time you have an occasion to take something from the federal government and send it back to the states, that’s the right direction. And if you can go even further and send it back to the private sector, that’s even better. Instead of thinking in the federal budget, what should we cut — we should ask ourselves the opposite question: What should we keep?”
The part about the private sector is best, especially in the wake of a storm that could end up costing this country about $50 billion. You can only imagine how many of Romney’s friends from the private sector would like to kick in now for Spring Lake, N.J., and Breezy Point.
This wasn’t some vague budget showing up in Jersey on Wednesday, riding around in Marine One with a Republican governor forced to take a second look at the President these past few days. This wasn’t ideology, abstract or otherwise. This was the government, the one everybody talks so tough about until they need it.
