How do we even let things like this become a debate?

Three years ago today, the seed of Hurricane Katrina was gathering strength in the Caribbean. Six days later, when it slammed into New Orleans, it killed almost 2000 people, destroyed almost $100B of property and tens if not hundreds of thousands of lives, and blasted away whatever thin veneer of competence, whatever mirage of tough-minded judgment had somehow convinced just over half of all voting Americans to give President Bush a second term not ten months earlier.

There’s no sport in picking apart the administration’s failure of that week – a failure that, because it was principally one of preparedness, in fact goes back for months and years. They were caught with their pants so far down – off, gone – that of all the lessons that the Bush administration has taught us about what not to look for in a President, this was the one that seems to have stuck with the most of us. This was the point after which Bush could not have won another election.

Kanye West said it simply and memorably: “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.” Another friend put it this way: “No one in that administration has ever known anyone who has ever been unable to afford a bus ticket.”

Hurricane Katrina had the political virtue of being sudden and violent, so when our current President and his orbit failed to protect those in their charge, it was obvious. The crises that our next President will inherit have, by contrast, simmered for long enough that they are far less apparent and vividly cruel, but they exist because of the same wanton disregard for the middle class and the poor; a disregard that, in turn, is born of the failure to relate when too many of those who govern come from a class that has never been unable to pay a health insurance premium, never sent its children to war because the armed forces was the best or only ticket, never juggled credit card debt, and never been trapped in a failing school.

All of which is to say, God help us if enough Americans haven’t figured out how to tell the difference between someone who understands where they are coming from and someone who doesn’t. Watching this slap-fest about how many houses McCain owns makes me want to toss my cookies, but Obama cannot allow McCain to define himself as a man of the people, in contrast to Obama as narcissistic celebrity. So I welcome the new, tough, shin-kicking tone of the Obama campaign in recent days. (Though I cringe when this ad says that McCain said anyone making below $5M is middle class – it’s true he said that, but he didn’t mean it, and it puts me in mind of Obama’s great moment in one of the later primary debates when he said he remembered watching Hillary get flayed over her “I don’t make cookies” business and thought to himself “Well that’s not what she meant. That’s not who she is.” I do miss that Barack. Sigh.)

I’m sure most of Pickle Nation is conscientious enough to know this already, but I’m going to repeat it anyway, as a sign of how dispositive I think it is: Obama spent the years before law school organizing Chicago public housing projects, helping poor black communities figure out how to use their collective power to ensure basic health, safety, and employment opportunity. You can’t fake that. Of course, of course, ad nauseum of course John McCain has served his country and probably believes himself to be doing what he thinks is best for America. But over the next four years, when our government is called on to perform its most critical function – when it must be the arm of our community coming to the aid of those in need – of the two, only Barack Obama will be able to remember real people who can’t afford a bus ticket.