WASHINGTON – Comparing President Bush to the Birmingham, Ala., police commissioner whose resistance to the civil rights movement became synonymous with Southern racism, Rep. Charles Rangel said yesterday of the president: “George Bush is our Bull Connor.”

Mr. Rangel’s metaphoric linkage of Mr. Bush to the late Theophilus “Bull” Connor – who in 1963 turned fire hoses and attack dogs on blacks, including Martin Luther King Jr., demonstrating in favor of equal rights – met with wild applause and cheering at a Congressional Black Caucus town hall meeting, part of the organization’s 35th Annual Legislative Conference.

Yesterday’s town hall meeting was a highlight of the four-day conference, which today will feature an anti-Iraq-war forum with a roving, protesting anti-war mother, Cindy Sheehan; a prominent New York black activist, the Reverend Al Sharpton, and a former president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Kweisi Mfume. The conference culminates in a gala tomorrow evening.

Mr. Rangel, a Democrat who has represented Harlem for almost 35 years, spent his portion of yesterday’s forum reminiscing about the civil rights struggles of the 1960s, and calling on his audience to undertake similar action today, inciting them to “revolution” after the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina and particularly its impact on indigent blacks in the Gulf Coast region.

The storm, he said, showed that “if you’re black in this country, and you’re poor in this country, it’s not an inconvenience – it’s a death sentence.” Denouncing Mr. Bush for waging “a war that we cannot win under any stretch of our imagination” instead of providing for those devastated by the hurricane, Mr. Rangel left his audience with a parting thought.

“If there’s one thing that George Bush has done that we should never forget, it’s that for us and for our children, he has shattered the myth of white supremacy once and for all,” the congressman said.

A White House spokesman, Kenneth Lisaius, said: “I don’t think we would dignify any such inflammatory comments with a reaction.”

Joining Mr. Rangel as town hall participants were Senator Clinton, a Democrat of New York; Senator Obama, a Democrat of Illinois; an entertainer and left-leaning activist, Harry Belafonte, and the conference’s two cochairmen, Rep. Danny Davis, a Democrat of Illinois, and Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, a Democrat of Texas.

Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama arrived at the Washington Convention Center together yesterday, prompting the town hall forum’s moderator and a Harvard law professor known for litigating slavery reparations, Charles Ogletree, to quip: “I just keep having in the back of my mind this bumper sticker that says ‘Clinton-Obama’ – I don’t know why.” Mr. Ogletree’s suggestion was met with widespread, enthusiastic applause.

Before a similarly appreciative audience, and after exhortations that she stay in Washington “as long as possible,” Mrs. Clinton urged support for her Senate legislation creating a “9/11 Commission”-style body to investigate what went wrong in the Katrina response and to oversee the rebuilding effort. She repeated her concern, cited in recent speeches, that “it is not confidence building that the first contracts issued went to Halliburton on a no-bid contract.”

Mrs. Clinton, who seeks re-election to her Senate seat next year and is widely believed to be a potential presidential candidate in 2008, also discoursed on how Hurricane Katrina demonstrated the need for a more expansive federal government. Strategists and political analysts have said the national Democratic Party in 2006 and 2008 will likely seize on Katrina in an attempt to discredit the limited-government philosophies of Republicans, hoping to identify them as dangerous and inadequate for addressing massive national disasters.

“I believe that one of the great challenges we face is how we’re going to define the role of government in the 21st century,” Mrs. Clinton said yesterday. “And there are those, it won’t surprise you, who want government to be limited to doing very few things, mostly national defense.”

“Obviously, at a time where there are real dangers and threats, we have to be vigilant,” Mrs. Clinton added. “But America must be strong at home in order to be strong around the world. And I don’t believe that strength comes from turning our backs on what has been happening, and Katrina helped to sharpen the focus for many Americans and people around the world about issues that many of us have known about and worked on for a long time.”

Saying that “we were embarrassed in front of the entire world that we didn’t do the kind of job that people expect America to do to take care of Americans first and foremost,” Mrs. Clinton urged Democrats later: “I don’t think we should cede the moral high ground to anyone who tries to put forth a private moral agenda and ignore what is the most important part of what we are called to do, which is to do unto others as we would have them do unto us.”

The senator was joined in offering advice to her party by Mr. Belafonte, who spoke of the Democratic Party as being “ravaged,” wondering openly whether there was anything of the institution to save. The performer, a former civil rights activist, was flanked by Senators Clinton and Obama, who smiled and nodded as he excoriated Democrats and Republicans alike for their negligence toward blacks.

The “eradicating poverty” town hall meeting had several hundred in attendance at the Washington Convention center yesterday, and according to Caucus leaders, another 100,000 listened to the politicians’ remarks over a live Web cast.