At some point, someone is going to start collating the Obama textual record concerning Katrina, circa 2005 to March 2009. Here’s my tiny contribution from the Harvard Law School bulletin of November 2005. After calling the government’s response “achingly slow,” Obama, then a freshman senator, berated the progressive community for not mobilizing and focusing their anger in a more sustained fashion against the federal response, as Katrina and Bush were supposed to be a focal point for channeling a larger discontent.

“We’ve been a little complacent. We haven’t displayed the kind of cool, focused outrage that Charles Hamilton Houston displayed when the calamities of Jim Crow were occurring around him. In fact, our anger at Bush and the administration lets us off the hook. It allows us to say, ‘Well, I didn’t vote for him. I wrote John Kerry a check, so it’s not my problem.’ But of course it is our problem.”

I guess, mutatis mutandis, the president’s message would now be not to let our righteous anger at Barack Obama’s poor response let us off the hook, just because lots of us did our best by not voting for him. Use our furor at his administration’s pathetic response to the BP spill for a larger, cool, and more focused effort to fix whatever “our” problem happens to be.