That passage, taken from a July 1 letter education historian Diane Ravitch wrote to the New York Times disputing columnist David Brooks’ characterization of her public policy views, can easily be superimposed onto the current national education portrait.

Ever since Congress and President George W. Bush reauthorized the Early and Secondary Education Act in 2002 to become No Child Left Behind (NCLB), schools have been under the gun to up state-mandated student test scores or face financial and structural consequences. Results from those exams are notoriously inflated or teased with public relations precision, not out of the malfeasance of school administrators but as a function of what happens when students are taught to a series of exams that determine a great portion of the state’s education funding.

“The central premise of NCLB was that states would be free to set their own version of what would constitute proficiency,” says Kristen Amundson, a former Virginia state legislator and school board member who now heads communications at Education Sector. “In a serious effort to not create a federal system of education, that legislation allowed states carte blanche.”

The result, she says, is “an institutional bias in states and local districts to believe that things are better than they really are.”

This week, 44 of the just over 100 schools in the Atlanta school district were implicated in a cheating scandal that calls into question years of high gains on the state’s annual Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests (CRCT). The investigation ordered by a former governor of Georgia was triggered in part due to a set of reports published by the Atlantic Journal Constitution. The American Independent has reported on comparisons between the state’s high scores on the CRCT to the much more dour results on the federal National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), putting the limelight on how federal education policy compels schools to cook their statistics to demonstrate adequate yearly gains.

Even without outright cheating, school systems are eager to fend off the punitive sting of state and federal stipulations for school progress with ethically dubious procedures. In New Orleans’ Recovery School District, administrators invited charter schools to cauterize the low-score bleeding of their districts; some improvements followed but critics allege serious collateral damage as mostly high-needs children are still being shipped around schools that are either underfunded or unwilling to tend to their needs.

The trouble, critics allege, began with decisions made in Baton Rouge after Hurricane Katrina.

In November 2005, the Louisiana Legislature passed Act 35 that put most of New Orleans’ schools in the hands of RSD, a school system introduced in 2003 by a separate piece of legislation that manages troubled institutions. Prior to the passage of Act 35, RSD operated five city schools. The new law increased the minimum performance threshold schools had to meet, deeming many in the city as failing.

As a result, between 107 and 115 schools were shuffled from the city’s original district — The Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB) — into either RSD or Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) control. As of March 2011, there were five school classifications totaling 88 schools within the city headed by three public authorities. Only 29 are not charters. This map illustrates the extent to which the city’s schools are balkanized (PDF).

Raynard Sanders, a former professor of education who monitors the RSD, told TAI the district was given large sums of money following Hurricane Katrina, but not enough of it went to students.

“When they opened up the direct-run schools, they hired Teach for America, cheaper teachers but with very little experience,” he begins. “They didn’t put in a lot of social workers … but in the first year’s budget (2006-2007), $2,100 was spent per child on security.”

Before Katrina, Orleans Parish spent $46 on security per child, according to Ralph Adamo, author of “NOLA’s Failed Education Experiment.” For the 2008-2009 school year, RSD was spending $690 per student. And it is difficult to underplay the role of race and class: 89 percent of students in RSD and Orleans Parish, which make up the bulk of the city’s student population, are (PDF) black, and 91 percent of RSD students receive free or reduced-price lunch, a leading indicator of low income.

A 2010 study assembled(PDF) by the National Economic and Social Rights Initiative (NESRI) and Families and Friends of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children (FFLIC) examined the harsh disciplinary action RSD uses against its students. It found the rate of expulsion among RSD students in 2008 to be ten times the national average. Suspensions were also extremely high, with 29 percent of RSD students losing at least one instructional day — over four times the national average. The report quoted Thena Robinson, an attorney at the Southern Poverty Law Center, explaining that:

In most cases expulsions are a way to hide a school’s failure to address the educational needs of students. Our current education system is flawed by design as it focuses far too much on high stakes testing to measure academic success. As a result, schools are compelled to expel and push out “problem” students in an effort to meet state-wide performance standards.

The behavioral issues did not emerge from a vacuum:

In 2006, 42% of the students displaced by Hurricane Katrina had respiratory problems that might be linked to formaldehyde in FEMA trailers, and more than half had mental-health problems. In a 2009 article in The Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, researchers found that 9.3% children in hurricane- affected areas have a “serious emotional disturbance … that is directly attributable” to the storm.

FEMA trailers being shipped to New Orleans. (Flickr/factoryseashell)

This week, The Washington Independent is featuring a series of investigative stories on the rebuilding of New Orleans, five years after Hurricane Katrina. Find all of them here.

A few weeks ago, in Henry County, Ga., a woman named Angela Wilson led a local television anchor into her camping trailer, a standard white-clad box on wheels, ready to be pulled into the woods by an RV or a truck. She described how her eyes started to tear up after standing in it a few minutes – not due to emotion, but due to the chemical preservative, irritant and carcinogen formaldehyde.

[Environment1] Unknowingly, Wilson bought one of the 145,000 infamous Katrina trailers – the mobile camping and housing units the Federal Emergency Management Agency bought to house the hundreds of thousands of New Orleanians displaced by the devastation wreaked by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. “We were told that this trailer was in no way related to Katrina, that this trailer came from North Dakota,” Wilson told the camera. She said the out-of-state dealer assured her that chemical contaminants were not an issue. Later, she found a pamphlets from FEMA and state officials in Mississippi tucked away.

Five years after Katrina, the infamous trailers – bought for billions, sold for pennies on the dollar – are still causing trouble. And that trouble and those trailers are now widespread. The campers were once congregated around New Orleans, but now blanket the entire country, uncounted and mislabeled in dealers’ lots, back lawns and sites for oil spill cleanup.

On the Gulf Coast, organized into parks of a few hundred trailers each, at the peak occupancy, FEMA trailer housed more than 92,000 families. The government intended the trailers to act as temporary shelter – a place for families to stay for up to 18 months.

Many of the trailers are not mobile homes, but units meant for temporary stays, like camping trips. The problems with them were always manifold. First there weren’t enough: FEMA let tens of thousands of trailers sit idle while New Orleanians suffered without homes. Then, argue advocacy groups, FEMA took the trailers back from families too soon, exacerbating homelessness. The worst problem, though, was the formaldehyde.

As soon as Katrina survivors moved into the trailers, some noticed a harsh chemical stench, soon followed by nosebleeds, coughing, irritated eyes. Formaldehyde, a preservative used in the trailers, was to blame, as was the fact that many of the trailers were not meant for permanent living – just temporary use.

The Sierra Club and other advocacy groups led the fight for testing of the FEMA trailers, and the problem came under congressional investigation in 2007. Dozens spoke out about their experiences. Lindsay Huckabee, for one, gave wrenching testimony to the House Committee on Science and Technology about her FEMA mobile unit in Kiln, Miss.  Huckabee’s six-year-old, Lelah, developed moderate asthma and sinus infections so bad they required an operation to widen her sinus passages. Lelah also had “pneumonia, ear infections, throat infections, asthmatic bronchitis, nose bleeds, headaches, two MRIs,” and four surgeries. Huckabee’s four other children had similar problems.

The Huckabee family lived in FEMA trailer housing for two and a half years – as did thousands of other displaced families. But they moved out, and then the trailers sat – thousands of them – in storage, for years.

In the late summer of 2005, FEMA had paid about $2.7 billion for 145,000 trailers, campers and mobile homes, approximately one for every home hurt by the storm and flood. The trailers came from Gulf Stream, Forest River, Fleetwood and other major manufacturers. While campers and other recreational vehicles are enormously popular in America – about one in 12 families that owns a car owns an RV — the request for 145,000 new units posed a tremendous shock of demand for the RV market, according to the Recreational Vehicle Industry Association, a trade group. In 2005, manufacturers shipped about 384,000 RV units – campers, trailers, motor homes – to dealers, in line with production and sales in the years before and after. The government’s request meant producers had to come up with an additional 40 percent their entire years’ production – and yesterday.

As a result, Uncle Sam has paid for about one in 11 or 12 trailers produced since 2005. The companies and subcontractors started redirecting and pumping out new units. They purchased extra parts, mostly from abroad, for assembly in Indiana, where the camper industry is based. They put out calls for additional workers and kept them on midnight shifts. By September, ordered trailers started to arrive on the coast, shipped by train.

Now, however, the government has little use for those units and has flooded the market for trailers, driving down prices. FEMA endeavored to move families from the trailers to permanent housing as soon as rebuilding started, and by 2007, the number of people living in the trailers had fallen by half, to less than 50,000. In May 2009, FEMA officially ended the temporary housing program, forcing the residents in 4,600 remaining trailers out. (Thousands purchased their trailers for the government, others did not want to move and needed to be evicted.) Today, there are about 800 families in Louisiana still residing in government-owned trailers.

“Ninety-nine percent of these residents have now moved on to more permanent housing,” Mike Karl, FEMA’s Louisiana Recovery Office Interim Director, said in a fifth anniversary statement. “To date, approximately $5.8 billion has been spent to assist Katrina/Rita survivors, including $4.2 billion in housing assistance and $1.6 billion in other needs assistance.”

Since the trailers’ original residents moved out, the government has spent some $220 million storing vacant trailers, stickered as not intended for permanent residence. Most of them sat on deserted lots until Jan. 29 this year, when FEMA sold 93,000 trailers plus a further 9,300 mobile homes – for approximately 7 percent of what the government initially paid. As with the purchase, the sale of the mass number of units messed up the trailer market.

“I’m certainly hopeful we’re approaching the end of the story for the Katrina units, which we have been maintaining in the hundreds and thousands of units, at the expense of taxpayers,” FEMA Associate Deputy Administrator David Garratt told The Washington Post. “I’m hopeful we can reduce the inventory of units which we can no longer use, and actively maintain the units we can use in actual disasters.”

Where are the trailers now? Everywhere. They are being sold on the internet. They are housing workers for the Gulf Coast oil spill cleanup. Someone suggested sending them to Haiti. They are owned by individuals. And they are part of the RV market’s persistent resale culture: An RV unit, one Texas dealer says, gets resold 10 or 15 times in its lifetime of use. Katrina trailers, more faded with each sale, could be circulating the country for years.

“I just had been by this corner a thousand times, and I had never noticed it’s right there,” [one resident] says. “I feel like that’s what happens here. You don’t think about Katrina. You don’t notice Katrina. Then all of a sudden it’s right next to you.” Twenty-five cent martinis are an offer at Commander’s, and much of the city has been rebuilt. But traces of Katrina are still around.

One of those traces, some people argue, is the suicide rate in Orleans Parish. In 2008 and 2009, the rate of suicide was about twice as high as it was the two years before the levees broke. The rate of suicides in Orleans Parish has basically doubled.

A second, very different story focuses on how the cost of insurance for buildings, homes and businesses has skyrocketed, slowing the recovery, though the government has tried to step in to help:

“Katrina obviously exposed the fact that the state is riskier than had been previously assumed,” said Robert Hartwig, who heads the industry-sponsored Insurance Information Institute. “Insurers look at models. The models suggest that we are in a period of heightened hurricane activity. Not just for one year or two years, but over the long run. That makes Mississippi and every other coastal state more vulnerable.”

Katrina cost insurance companies $45 billion in today’s dollars, he said. Claims for the entire year were $70 billion in today’s dollars. “In order to be prepared for years like that,” Hartwig said, “insurers simply have to charge a rate that reflects the risk.”

“It’s a re-evaluation of the risk, but it’s also a recognition of the risk. Katrina made it pretty obvious what that risk was.”

Critics contend the industry has overestimated that risk. Nevertheless, insurance rates continue to climb. The state’s willingness to work with insurers has helped the market, Hartwig and others say. Commercial rates, in particular, have declined from post-Katrina highs and coverage is more widely available.

After Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans needed to remove thousands of tons of debris and trash, some toxic. (Flickr/Editor B)

This week, The Washington Independent is featuring a series of investigative stories on the rebuilding of New Orleans, five years after Hurricane Katrina. Find all of them here.

In the late summer of 1965 — almost 40 years to the day before Hurricane Katrina — Betsy, a Category Four hurricane, devastated New Orleans. City officials reopened a shuttered dump in the Upper Ninth Ward to collect debris and waste left by the massive flooding. The dump, which became known as the Agriculture Street Landfill, closed in 1966. Ten years later, the city covered it with dirt and repurposed it as a residential community, and mostly lower-income black families moved in. None of the residents knew they were living on a former dump. Then people started getting sick, the cancer rate significantly higher than in nearby neighborhoods.

[Environment1] For more than 30 years, environmental activists, New Orleans residents and federal and state officials have struggled with the Agriculture Street site and its periodic flooding in the hurricanes that batter the city. Since Hurricane Katrina, activists have raised broader questions about the safety of local landfills given New Orleans’ propensity to flood. Activists have also raised questions about the impact of local trash-disposal sites on low-income communities and communities of color. Five years after Katrina, in the midst of the Gulf oil spill disaster, those questions and struggles remain.

“We should have learned from Hurricane Betsy with Agriculture Street and we didn’t,” says Darryl Malek-Wiley, a New Orleans-based field organizer for the Sierra Club. “We should have learned from Katrina and we didn’t. Now we’re doing it again with the Gulf oil spill.”

“The Agriculture Street Landfill is the cautionary tale,” explains All Huang, an environmental justice attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council — but not a cautionary tale well-heeded.

It took until the mid-1990s for the Environmental Protection Agency to declare Agriculture Street a “superfund” priority site for cleanup, and until the late-1990s for the removal of contaminated dirt to start. The area had only a few years before been declared nearly cleaned up when Hurricane Katrina made landfall, devastating the Gulf coast and flooding 80 percent of New Orleans. The Agriculture Street site flooded too, leaving many homes destroyed.

Residents soon raised concerns that the flooding had dredged up toxic materials again. Soil testing conducted by the Louisiana Environmental Action Network and the Natural Resources Defense Council months after Katrina found high levels of arsenic as well as “disturbingly high levels of polyaromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) — cancer-causing chemicals from soot and many petroleum-based products,” according to a report on the tests.

But testing conducted by the EPA found that “the majority of the contaminants detected in flood-deposited sediments and soils at the [Agriculture Street Landfill] posed no apparent public health hazard to residents at the site.” The EPA concluded that flooding had not compromised the area. It took no further measures, despite outcries from environmental groups.

Over time, some residents have moved back to Agriculture Street. Advocates following the Agriculture Street case say residents living on the site, who are almost all poor and black, have no other option but to live there. “There were several people who didn’t have anywhere else to go, so they are back in the community,” Mary Williams, program manager for community outreach at the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice says. “I think its criminal that they would allow these people to rebuild in a place that they know is dangerous to live in.”

Other communities face similar issues — and since Katrina, the government has undertaken no specific measures to deal with waste. Worse, the hurricanes do not just flood waste sites, but overfill them: Hurricane Katrina produced an estimated 20 million cubic yards of waste and debris, much of it sent to landfills around New Orleans.

Former New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin waived certain zoning rules after Katrina to build a new landfill along the Chef Menteur highway on the eastern side of the city. The landfill is just over a mile from a large Vietnamese community. After Katrina, the community fought for New Orleans to stop adding trash to the landfill, and won. But residents say the landfill, which holds millions of cubic yards of waste, is still posing problems.

“It’s closed, but what was put in there is still in there,” says Tuan Nguyen, deputy director of the Mary Queen of Vietnam Community Development Corporation, a local group that has been a key voice in trying to clean up the landfill. Nguyen says waste from the landfill is leaking into the nearby Maxent Canal, which runs directly through the local Vietnamese community, one of the largest in the country. “There are many terrace gardens that elders grow,” he said, asserting that waste finds its way into the water supply.

The group is in the process of taking legal action to clear the landfill, but Nguyen says he does not expect a speedy resolution. “We don’t anticipate it to be done any time soon,” he says. In the meantime, Nguyen says Vietnamese elders in the community will continue to water their gardens with contaminated water.

Environmental justice advocates say Chef Menteur is symbolic of the way waste was dealt with after Hurricane Katrina. Split-second decisions were made to truck the waste away, in order to show progress in the recovery effort. But little attention has been paid to the potential long-term impacts, the experts say.

“Those landfills were not properly permitted and many of them were actually hydraulically connected to the groundwater,” says Wilma Subra, a chemist and president of Subra Company, which tests soil for the presence of hazardous materials. She says it is difficult to determine the long-term impacts of the landfills, as many lack monitor wells for testing for groundwater contamination. But, she believes that the “long-term impact is contamination of shallow ground water.”

Similar stories abound. The Old Gentilly Landfill, which had been shut down because of environmental concerns, was reopened after Katrina. Robert Bullard, director of the Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark Atlanta University says the Gentilly landfill could still pose problems for the poor black communities that live near it. “There’s no guarantee that Gentilly won’t create problems in terms of leaching into the groundwater,” he says.

Bullard says New Orleans learned too few lessons about waste from Katrina. For instance, he worries that the Environmental Protection Agency recently approved landfills for Gulf oil waste too close to communities of color.

“Once again, it’s communities of color that are over-represented in these locations,” he says. “If this kind of waste was going into white communities, it would be an uproar.”

The oil spill has created an estimated 50,000 tons of solid waste. To store it, the EPA has approved the use of nine landfills in the Gulf. Waste from the spill includes tar balls, used absorbent boom, used protective equipment as well as oiled vegetation, sand and debris, EPA said in a written statement to The Washington Independent.

The statement said the EPA tests the waste twice a month to “ensure compliance with waste and debris handling, sampling and disposal requirements outlined in our waste management plan,” which the agency released on June 29.

“The landfills being utilized by BP are state-permitted facilities that undergo state review, monitoring and oversight to ensure that this waste, like all waste streams that go to these landfills is managed in a manner that is protective of public health and the environment,” the statement said.

In addition, the statement said the EPA is working to “minimize the impacts of waste to all communities, including low-income and minority communities, by actively enforcing requirements outlined in our waste management directive, while working within the impacted states’ existing waste disposal structures.”

But Bullard’s research indicates that waste from the oil spill is being sent to communities of color. At the end of July, he wrote, “The largest amount of BP oil-spill solid waste was sent to a landfill in a Florida community where three-fourths of the nearby residents are people of color. Although African Americans make up about 32 percent of Louisiana’s population, three of the five approved landfills in the state that received BP oil-spill waste are located in mostly black communities.”

Advocates have focused their ire on the Tide Water Landfill in Venice, La. Bullard says minorities make up 94 percent of the population near the landfill. But it’s not just environmental justice issues that have led to concerns about the landfill. Advocates say the site is vulnerable to future flooding as well.

“It’s a stupid place to put a landfill. The only part of Venice that didn’t go underwater during Katrina is the top of the landfill,” says Malek-Wiley of the Sierra Club. “It’s right in the middle of the marsh. It’s right at the mouth of the Mississippi River.”

Barry Kohl, president of the Louisiana Audubon Council, says the Venice landfill is also vulnerable to significant coastal erosion. “That particular site will erode in the future and the waste will be disposed of all over the coast,” he says. “It should be up on high ground so it will never be disturbed.”

Malek-Wiley and other environmentalists in the Gulf are also raising broader concerns. Under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, oil waste for exploration and production facilities is considered non-hazardous. As a result, the waste does not need to be stored in hazardous waste landfills. “It’s not regulated as hazardous and it goes into landfills that are not protected as a hazardous waste landfill,” he says. “There are a lot more regulations as to monitoring on a hazardous waste landfill. In a garbage dump, guys are out there in their blue jeans.”

Williams, with the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice, says the group is organizing to “challenge the EPA to come up with better solutions” for the waste. “It’s just really frustrating for those of us who are here on the Gulf,” she says. “We’re still trying to recover from Katrina and now the oil spill. It’s a constant battle.”

The White House:

The visit will include remarks by the President at Xavier University of Louisiana.  Members of the President’s Cabinet who have worked to speed recovery and restoration efforts will also be in the region to mark the anniversary.

“The Oval Office symbolizes…the Constitution, the hopes and dreams, and I’m going to say democracy. And when you have a dress code in the Supreme Court and a dress code on the floor of the Senate, floor of the House, I think it’s appropriate to have an expectation that there will be a dress code that respects the office of the President.”

Yeah! Everyone knows wearing a suit in the White House will prevent you from letting the global economy collapse; a major American city from drowning; and not one but two wars from going disastrously down the toilet. Suit jackets symbolize the Constitution. You can eavesdrop on anyone you like while wearing a suit jacket. It’s like a sartorial warrant!

The idea that a key enabler of the most disastrous presidency since — to be charitable — Lyndon Johnson would dare reproach the sartorial habits of the Obama White House is absurdly self-parodic. What’s even more inexplicable is that the opinions of these men and women will continue to be solicited, out of some foolish social ritual about showing respect to the former inhabitants of the White House no matter how little respect they showed the country. The comparison Andy Card sets up from this frivolous little outburst writes itself: Bush was form; Obama is substance.

Hurricane Katrina victims take note. Michael Brown is safe.

A series of wind-whipped wildfires north of Boulder, Colo., have forced the evacuation of more than 11,500 residents — including Brown, the vilified ex-Federal Emergency Management Agency head.

Brown was lauded by President Bush for doing a “heckuva job” in the botched response to Hurricane Katrina, which took the lives of 1,836 people and caused more than $81 billion in damage. Brown resigned in disgrace and the event looms as a national turning point against the Bush administration.

This week, PBS’s “Frontline” broadcast a heart-wrenching investigative report, “The Old Man and the Storm,” about struggling post-Katrina rebuilding efforts more than three years after the massive hurricane destroyed much of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.

FEMA has promised to pay up to 75 percent of firefighting costs, according to a Daily Camera story.

The latest images and ground reports via Twitter can be found at twemes.com/boulderfire.

h/t Westword

Wendy Norris is a reporter for TWI’s sister site, The Colorado Independent. ]]> http://washingtonindependent.com/24440/ex-fema-head-michael-brown-evacuated-from-colorado-wildfire/feed 0 http://washingtonindependent.com/23614/what-the-bush-white-house-considers-exculpatory http://washingtonindependent.com/23614/what-the-bush-white-house-considers-exculpatory#comments Fri, 02 Jan 2009 18:06:44 +0000 Spencer Ackerman http://washingtonindependent.com/?p=23614 White House chief of staff Josh Bolten and national security adviser Steve Hadley somehow got it into their heads that insisting George W. Bush is a hands-on and pro-active leader is a wise legacy-building move.

This must be that famed strategery.

If Bush was an informed and judicious decision-maker More...

Here are some highlights from Reuters’ highlights of the energy situation: All of U.S. Gulf of Mexico oil output has been shut down; about 95 percent of natural gas output has been shut, and 433,600 Louisiana residents have lost power as a result — 101,500 in evacuated areas, 332,600 in occupied areas.

Read the whole factbox.

In the sweltering heat, Palin received an enthusiastic greeting from an audience that the campaign said numbered more than 17,000, but was almost certainly considerably smaller. her speech was periodically interrupted by chants of “Sarah, Sarah,” and five audience members held up giant white letters that spelled “PALIN.” For the first time since McCain added her to his ticket, Palin sought to demonstrate that her experience in Alaska prepared her for the reponsibilities of the federal government. As Hurricane Gustav moved steadily toward New Orleans, three years to the week after Hurricane Katrina decimated the city, McCain and Palin paid a quick visit to the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency’s Emergency Operation Center in Jackson, Miss. yesterday, where they met with the governors of all four Gulf Coast states. Palin used this as a jumping off point.

I’d like to add my call also for every person and every family in danger to make a straight path toward safer ground. As governor of Alaska, I recently just signed a disaster declaration myself last month, when the people of the Fairbanks region, they faced the worst rainfall and flooding in decades, and when any governor calls for evacuation, these instructions need to be taken very seriously. To citizens in the Gulf Coast area, your lives and many others are in the balance, and the success of law enforcement, and of emergency workers, and our great National Guard, depends on your cooperation.

Palin’s remarks about the hurricane preparations were boilerplate, but her delivery was relentlessly upbeat. Even as she talked about the impending doom and gloom facing New Orleans, she spun just about everything she said in an optimistic light.

As we’ve seen in other disasters, crisis on this scale can bring out the best in our country. They show the resourcefulness, the resourcefulness of our people shine through, and the heroic kindness of which we are capable. And whatever the scale of destruction, grief, perhaps loss of life that this hurricane might inflict, people in the Gulf, that region will once again be counting on the good heart of America, Americans like all of you. I know that relief workers and charitable groups, and volunteers, they’ll be up to the task. So I join Sen. McCain in urging all of our fellow Americans to stand ready to help in the work and relief effort to rebuild. Some terrible days may lie ahead for New Orleans, again, and the region. But my fellow Americans, we’re going to get through this crisis, as we always do in our finest moments, by pulling together, and by helping where the need is greatest.

Palin’s speaking style is reminiscent of a friend’s impossibly cheery mother. It’s difficult to imagine her as an attack dog. Palin could provide relief from the near-constant negativity coming from the McCain campaign’s ads. In a reversal of the typical roles of running mates, McCain and the rest of his staff will be able to keep doing what they’ve done all along — launching broadsides against Sen. Barack Obama, while Palin can spread rays of sunshine throughout the battleground states where she will likely be spending the bulk of her time. If Palin largely refrains from going negative, it will make it all the more difficult for the Obama campaign to attack her without appearing to be “picking on the nice lady.” Palin can play the good cop, pushing her message of government reform and change to the masses, to the rest of the campaign’s bad cop.