John McCain
NAACP Speech
Cincinnati, OH 07/16/08
TRANSCRIPTION
"QUESTIONER: [...] In recent flooding in the Midwest, FEMA has come in and I am a victim of flooding and I want to know, in your cabinet, how do you plan on revamping FEMA? Because there's a lot of things that are not told to the victims. We're not being assessed and assisted in the way that we should be. I would like to know your thoughts and ideas for addressing FEMA. Thank you.
JOHN MCCAIN: My thoughts are that the tragedy and injustice of New Orleans can never happen again. It was an abject failure of government and there's no excuse for it. When babies are dehydrated and senior citizens are dying, there is no excuse for that failure in America and can never be repeated and it will remain a national disgrace until the American people have the confidence it will never happen again.
Now, I think there's a number of things that need to be done. First, appoint and ask the most qualified people in America to serve, not political appointees. The second thing that you do, in my view, is that we go to some of the major large and small businesses in American that know how to deliver goods and services. You know that there was a truck full of water that [...] ended up in Maine? Do you think that Wal-Mart or Home Depot or any of those people would have not kept track of everything?
I think we need to have a combination of government and business so that they will have these lines of distribution and are able to deliver the goods and services as necessary and I think frankly we need maybe to do some drills. You know what I mean? How does the federal government react to the next hurricane? I pray to god it's not gonna happen, but the weatherman tells me a little different.
The point is [...] that we have to be prepared and we have to understand that he attacks on America, by natural calamities, in many respects, are as bad or worse in its ultimate effects than the attacks by terrorists from outside this country or from inside this country. So I want to assure you my commitment from a top-to-bottom reorganization and review and finally there are so many things that need to be done we could spend a whole speech on it, but the other failure, as you know, was a lack—a total lack of cooperation between the federal, state and local authorities. There has got to be better cooperation and work with them."
LABEL: JM OH 7-16 (JR#61) TCZZ -- Clip F
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