Not One Nickel to the State of Oklahoma

Read my lips: not one nickel to the State of Oklahoma for tornado relief. How can I say such a thing? Two dozen (or more) people died in Moore, the Oklahoma City suburb of 55,000 has been reduced to four square miles of rubble, power lines are down, water is scarce, several hundred people are hospitalized, hundreds more are homeless, private charities are tapped out, and children have died. Doesn’t this make me as heartless as the Tea Party loonies against whom I rail on this blog? Read my statement carefully: Not one nickel to the State of Oklahoma.

If Barack Obama has any political savvy at all–a questionable presumption for a president that increasingly (and aptly) draws more comparisons to Jimmy Carter than FDR–he should continue his current plan of flooding the State with Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) agents, cash, and equipment. But he should not allow so much as a penny to be administrated by Oklahoma itself. It’s time for the chickens to roost in the Tea Party henhouse. (Or is it shithouse?). Both of Oklahoma’s U.S. senators, Tom Inhofe and Tom Coburn, voted against the $60.2 billion aid package for Hurricane Sandy victims. I’ll begrudgingly hand it to Coburn–he’s at least consistent. He’s such a Tea party loser that he has said that every dime of aid to his own state must be balanced by cuts elsewhere in the budget, though it’s probably just a matter of time before he calls for cuts in education and/or poverty programs to get some Sooner cash. Inhofe, though, takes the cake for hypocrisy. He’s telling everyone who will listen–­and we shouldn’t–that his request for tornado aid is “totally different” from the Sandy bill, which he insists was loaded with “pork.” (Guess it takes a pig to know pork!) Slice your bacon however you wish, but the bottom line is that both of Oklahoma’s Tea Party senators said, “Fuck you!” to New Jersey and now at least one of them thinks his state’s needs are more important. No–they’re not, senator; suffering is suffering.

The tornado is a moment of opportunity for President Obama, but to seize it he will need to play politics and ignore the caterwauling from the Right. He should release funds to FEMA and make certain that every dollar spent in Oklahoma is funneled through federal agencies, not state bodies. He should make numerous trips there–photo-ops, if you will. At each stop Obama should emphasize that the federal government is committed to helping Sooners restore their lives. Tell them that he’s personally dedicated to the task, even if it means he must tackle Congress to get it done. Let Inhofe and Coburn explain why Obama has delivered and they could not. The Right will scream, “Obama is still campaigning.” He should follow that with a curt, “I don’t have time to respond such nonsense. I’m trying to help desperate people get back on their feet.”

When Franklin Roosevelt put Harry Hopkins in charge of a jobs program during the Great Depression, he told Hopkins not to ask if the person needing a job was a Democrat, a Republican, or a Socialist. Just put them to work, he told Hopkins, and let them see that the government is on their side. FDR presumed that would make them into Democrats, and he was right; in the 1936 election FDR won every state in the Union except two. It is time for a strong leader to expose one-note tax cutters, deficit evangelists, and Tea Party fanatics as the greedy, clueless, provincial  piggies they really are. It’s the first step to restoring a civic ideal that shows where the pork really lies: among those who place their own wealth, intolerant ideologies, and backyards above what philosopher John Dewey called the “Great Community.” You know it as the United States of America, though the word “united” has been savaged and bloodied as of late. It’s time for it to rise from the canvas and deliver a haymaker to the chins of Inhofe and Coburn.