JACKSON - What we need least of all in our hurricane-stricken Mississippi-Louisiana area of the Gulf South is for politicians or journalists to frame our struggle for massive federal help as a bidding match between the two states.
It's a grave disservice to the suffering thousands in the two neighboring - and traditionally allied - states for anyone here to paint Louisiana as the bad guys because its plea for federal recovery funding is several times larger than ours, and we're the good guys because ours is smaller.
Louisiana's two senators, one a Democrat, the other a Republican, laid before Congress what is actually only a "blueprint" for long-term relief and recovery that has an ultimate price tag of $250 billion. Mississippi's request so far is more modest, varying from Gov. Haley Barbour's $33 billion to $36 billion by Sen. Thad Cochran.
Apologists for George W. Bush's callously slow response after Katrina hit want us now to believe that the size of Louisiana's request is what is impeding Bush and his Republican-controlled Congress from helping Mississippi.
What I heard famed Mississippi trial attorney Dick Scruggs say here the other day about our post-hurricane aid dilemma comes much closer to why, 100 days after Katrina, our two states are still begging.
Unlike politicians or bureaucrats, the wealthy, well-informed Scruggs doesn't need to parse his words or pull his punches in critically assessing the performance of governmental leaders or programs they administer.
Pure and simple, Scruggs said, we in Mississippi and Louisiana, even in this time of our great need, are considered expendable by the Bush administration because we do not have enough political muscle to get Bush's attention.
And the Coast attorney made clear another reality many Mississippians don't acknowledge: that Bush's war in Iraq remains his top priority (it's price tag soon to reach $400 billion), and we in the battered Gulf South, despite this nation's greatest natural disaster, are playing second fiddle.
Scruggs' observations are more telling in view of the fact that Mississippi Sen. Trent Lott, the ex-majority leader of the Senate, is his brother-in-law. Lott, surprisingly, has turned into a strong critic of the administration's Katrina response efforts.
In Mississippi, we feel we have a good case for recovery need with the gripping pictures of a wiped-out Waveland, or Bay St. Louis or miles of devastated homes and businesses elsewhere along the Gulf Coast.
But if we get into a bidding contest with Louisiana's case - of which New Orleans is a big part - we are no match for the post-Katrina images that have mesmerized the nation: that New Orleans, one of America's great, inimitable, lovable cities now could die.
Americans don't want that to happen, and if it possible for public opinion to move Congress and a national administration to act, it won't. We in Mississippi necessarily are in the same boat with New Orleans, as well as other parts of Louisiana that were battered by Katrina, then took a second hit from Rita.
If we are to draw comparisons, Louisiana suffered six times the number of fatalities as Mississippi and had four or five times as many businesses destroyed.
Consider this single item: what caused the greatest damage to the New Orleans area was the failure of a levee system built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. To rebuild it to withstand a Category 5 hurricane, with needed drainage canals, would cost $32 billion.
Dick Scruggs was right: Neither Mississippi nor Louisiana has the political clout to get the kind of help we need under this administration, no matter that President Bush, in his ballyhooed September Jackson Square speech, vowed that "we will not only rebuild … we'll build better."
Bush has failed to deliver on his promise, offering only a $17 billion Katrina relief package, which even Republican loyalist Thad Cochran calls a paltry sum.
When GOP uber-loyalist Haley Barbour says his state's recovery efforts are "stalled because of inaction in Washington," you know things are really bad. Frustration has begun to set in, even with those who early on painted a rosy scenario of how their good friend in the White House would come through for them.
Maybe Thad, as chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, should do what Dick Scruggs suggested: shut down all appropriations hearings until Bush throws full support behind substantive federal help so this stricken region can begin to recover and build anew.
My journalist friend Charlie Mitchell in a recent column made mockery of some of the items in Louisiana's requested disaster needs, one of them being $23 million for sugar cane research.
That caught my eye, since I had recently spoken with a young lawyer from Baton Rouge who is a native of Louisiana's sugar belt. He alerted me to what devastating blows the sugar industry, which represents a $1.8 billion share of Louisiana's economy, had suffered from both Katrina and Rita.
Delving further, I learned that 50,000 acres of sugar cane ripe for harvest had been hit, first by salt water incursion from one storm and flattened by wind in the other, representing a $700,000 loss to sugar cane growers and the sugar industry and gravely endangering the cane root stock.
Now the sugar industry needs federal help, and with it, modernizing the USDA's 50-year-old sugar research station. No giveaway there, Charlie.
