In Possible Preview of 2008 Contest, Clinton, Romney Weigh In on Disaster

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The New York Sun

Seizing on an issue likely to define the nation’s two major parties as they battle for the White House in 2008, two figures expected to participate in that contest, Senator Clinton of New York and Governor Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, used Hurricane Katrina yesterday to expound upon the role of government.


In speeches delivered in Manhattan, the two prospective candidates differed sharply over where blame for the Katrina fallout lies. Mr. Romney, a Republican, cited a lack of leadership at the local level and an outdated, bureaucratic approach to crisis management. Mrs. Clinton, a Democrat, recommended increased government involvement, and excoriated the Bush administration for being insufficiently supportive of local authorities in New Orleans.


“In crisis situations, you have to respond with leadership,” Mr. Romney said in remarks delivered to the Manhattan Institute, a free-market think tank. He added that, in the aftermath of the storm, “there seemed to be none” at the state and local levels.


To handle future disasters, Mr. Romney said, it is essential to scrap the “old way” of a bloated and cumbersome government bureaucracy.


“The new model is really what’s essential in dealing with a crisis,” the governor said. He was referring to earlier comments about how the modern world is increasingly nimble, and to his argument that entrepreneurship, free-market principles, and rapid communication will be the defining characteristics of successful nations in the 21st century.


Mr. Romney’s analysis stood in marked contrast to the diagnosis offered by the woman who could well be his opponent in the 2008 presidential race.


Mrs. Clinton defended local authorities in New Orleans and Louisiana, saying: “It’s very hard when you’re in the eye of the hurricane and being flooded out to be able to communicate and then implement whatever plans you might have.


“That’s why we needed more federal assets there,” she said in remarks delivered to a Friends of Hillary fund-raising event at the New York Sheraton hotel.


Katrina, Mrs. Clinton said, highlighted what the government’s role ought to be. The framers of the Constitution, the senator said, “didn’t have helicopters and search-and-rescue teams, but they understood that the primary duty of government was the common defense.”


“They enshrined it in our Constitution,” Mrs. Clinton said, “and they realized that it went to the very core of what our national purpose is … we have to provide for the common defense and provide for the common welfare.”


The differences in Mr. Romney’s remarks about Hurricane Katrina and Mrs. Clinton’s highlighted the dispute that will probably define Republicans and Democrats in the 2006 mid-term elections and the 2008 presidential contest, a veteran national political consultant and the editor of Rothenberg Political Report, Stuart Rothenberg, said yesterday.


“The way I’ve heard it described by some Democrats,” Mr. Rothenberg said, “is that this focuses attention on what government needs to be about.”


For the Democratic Party, Mr. Rothenberg said, the issue of the role of government, seen through the lens of Katrina, is a “way to redefine the electorate – to move it away from terrorism … and the use of American forces – to move it away from that, back toward protecting people, and toward government as a positive vehicle for enhancing our living.”


The Katrina disaster, the consultant said, could be used by Democrats to paint Republicans’ embrace of limited government as dangerous, leading to a lack of preparedness for crises.


Mr. Romney, however, made limited government and “individual responsibility” the backbone of the political philosophy he outlined yesterday, in a speech that might well have been the first articulation of his presidential platform for 2008.


Mr. Romney – a Michigan native who, after accumulating vast wealth in the financial sector, was elected governor of Massachusetts in 2002 – dedicated part of his remarks yesterday to trumpeting his record in the commonwealth. In particular, he cited successes in transforming a $3 billion deficit into a surplus without raising taxes, and his steps toward using the market to provide health insurance for all Bay Staters.


Most of the Massachusetts governor’s podium time, however, was spent on his vision of America. Mr. Romney described the defining elements of the American way of life – “optimism” and the pursuit of “opportunity”- and the threats facing it.


America, Mr. Romney said, is “under attack” in three ways. The first, he said, was the threat posed to national security by a “small band of maniacal, murdering terrorists.” He described the need for America to encourage the rest of the world to embrace modernity, and to defuse “young Arab men” frustrated by the backwardness of their circumstances.


Although Mr. Romney said Americans were “fortunate to have a president who recognizes a threat,” he faulted the response to terrorism at the federal level as insufficiently prevention oriented, and too response-driven. Hurricane Katrina, Mr. Romney added, did little to inspire confidence in the state of those response capabilities.


The second “attack” on America that prompted the governor’s concern, Mr. Romney said, was the threat posed to the nation’s economy by China. Praising the Chinese as “ambitious” and “extremely mercantile,” the governor nonetheless expressed concern that the Beijing government has produced a better-educated populace than America’s, particularly in the natural sciences.


The third line of attack, Mr. Romney said, was a cultural one, and he emphasized the importance of families, particularly of encouraging marriage and combating a rise in out-of-wedlock births.


While Mr. Romney – like Mrs. Clinton – is seeking re-election next year, the national scope of his remarks prompted one audience member to ask whether he is also seeking the presidential nomination in 2008.


The self-described “white male Mormon millionaire businessman Republican conservative” responded that he was “not a candidate for anything besides governor.”


“I love my job,” he said, before adding: “Time will tell what the future holds.”


The New York Sun

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