House Majority Leader and Tea Party movement favorite Eric Cantor is now effectively at odds with his state’s Republican Governor over the idea that providing emergency federal disaster relief should now be given on the condition that there are budget cuts elsewhere in the budget. It turns out that Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell is where the vast majority of American leaders of BOTH parties have been throughout our history: in times of disaster the government responds and disaster relief is not used as a political bludgeon:
Virginia GOP Gov. Bob McDonnell, breaking with Cantor, on Tuesday suggested that deficit-spending concerns should not be a factor as Congress and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) respond to the hurricane.
“My concern is that we help people in need,” McDonnell said during his monthly radio show. “For the FEMA money that’s going to flow, it’s up to them on how they get it. I don’t think it’s the time to get into that [deficit] debate.”
Cantor’s recent comments may earn him cheers from those who seem to see every development as part of the 24/7 partisan and ideological war, but I am betting that a good number of independent voters — even the chunk that leans decidedly Republican — will be turned off by them. There are certain times when we need to forget about party.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.