McCain on Katrina Scandal: ‘Never Again’

Sen. John McCain has a tough path and a lot to prove in his presidential campaign: that his age isn’t an issue, that he doesn’t have an anger problem and that he’s like Bush in ways some voters admire but unlike him in other ways. Thursday was a day for McCain to make himself appear very different indeed as he campaigned in New Orleans.

The New York Times:

Senator John McCain took direct aim at the Bush administration on Thursday as he stood in the lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, the area hardest hit by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and declared that “never again will a disaster of this nature be handled in the terrible and disgraceful way that it was handled.”

Mr. McCain, who was on the fourth day of a tour of America’s “forgotten places” to try to prove that he is a compassionate Republican, ticked off a long list of mistakes: “There was unqualified people in charge, there was a total misreading of the dimensions of the disaster, there was a failure of communications.”

Asked at an outdoor news conference if he traced the failure of leadership straight to the top, Mr. McCain, who has vowed to campaign with President Bush, said, emphatically, “yes.”

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AP photo / Mary Altaffer

Sen. John McCain and his wife, Cindy, meet with a cleanup crew in New Orleans’ lower Ninth Ward on Thursday.