The general take I got from the media is that if no one in New Orleans is assdeep in water, a hurricane missed us. Days long,statewide power don’t produce newsporn, but in late August, that’s a pretty significant problem. But focusing on the physical damage is also missing the story. The Times-Picayune reports:

More than 25,000 employees who have been thrown out of work since Hurricane Gustav smashed into the state have filed claims for unemployment benefits, about 10 times more than the weekly average of about 2,300 claims filed, state labor officials said Thursday. 

Evacuation for Gustav forced many who live paycheck-to-paycheck to leave and spend money otherwise budgeted for rent, bills or basic needs to spend it on gas, hotels and food on the road. On Tuesday, The Times-Picayune reported:

The personal economic toll from the evacuation for Hurricane Gustav emerged in full force Tuesday as thousands of southeast Louisiana residents lined up for public and private relief, saying their treks to safety had pushed them to the financial brink.

With home food stocks spoiled after days with no electricity and household finances depleted by unexpected hotel and gas bills totaling $1,000 or more, haggard evacuees spent hours in long lines under a sweltering sun to sign up for emergency food stamp benefits.

Unprepared for the crush, state officials administering the food stamp program stopped accepting new applications at sites in New Orleans, Mandeville and Marrero around midday and asked would-be recipients to return this morning to determine whether they qualify for the federal food subsidy, using income guidelines expanded because of Gustav. 

Fortunately, Hurricane Ike moved west of Louisiana because the evacuation experience was sufficiently challenging and taxing of resources that the storm would have found a city full of people had it approached New Orleans.

Hurricanes highlight the class disparities in our society, and how the government has chosen to subcontract out the job of helping people. You’d think that would be a message Barack Obama would find useful, but as I’ve documented, Katrina was almost as scarce during the Democratic convention as Cheney was in Minneapolis. In The Nation, Naomi Klein writes:

In his Denver speech, Obama did invoke a government “that sits on its hands while a major American city drowns before our eyes.” But that only scratches the surface of what happened to New Orleans’s poorest residents, who were first forcibly relocated and then forced to watch from afar as their homes, schools and hospitals were stolen. As Obama spoke in Denver, families in New Orleans were already packing their bags in anticipation of Gustav, steeling themselves for yet another evacuation. They heard not even a perfunctory “our thoughts and prayers are with you” from the Democratic candidate for President.

There are plenty of political reasons for this, of course. Obama’s campaign is pitching itself to the middle class, not the class of discarded people New Orleans represents. The problem is that by remaining virtually silent about the most dramatic domestic outrage in modern US history, Obama created a political vacuum. When Gustav hit, all McCain needed to do to fill it was show up. Sure, it was cynical for McCain to claim the hurricane zone as a campaign backdrop. But it was Obama who left that potent terrain as vacant as a lot in the Lower Ninth Ward.