Nine months after Hurricane Katrina hit, Howard Dean surveyed a flood-damaged home in the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans and said : “I don’t want to be partisan at a time like this, but this is why the Republicans are going to be out of business.” Or so Dean hoped. While the government’s response to Hurricane Katrina contributed to the mood music of the 2006 congressional Republican defeat, voters in Katrina-wracked Mississippi reelected Republican Governor Haley Barbour on Tuesday. Barbour, the state’s second Republican governor since Reconstruction, campaigned on his governance during and after Hurricane Katrina, and he soundly defeated pro-life evangelical Democrat John Arthur Eaves by a margin of 58 percent to 42 percent. Barbour’s reelection comes just a month after Republican Bobby Jindal was elected governor of Louisiana. As Stephen F. Hayes reported in THE WEEKLY STANDARD, Jindal looked to Mississippi’s no-nonsense response to Katrina as a model to be emulated, telling a group of supporters: “In Mississippi, they said: ‘If you loot, we’ll shoot. … In Louisiana, they confiscated guns from more than 1,000 law-abiding citizens.” A possible lesson for Dean and friends in 2008: Even if you pin a scarlet R (or W) on the chests of Republican candidates, perhaps substance matters more than spin.
