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two likely long-term political outcomes of the 2008 flood occurred to me while in the midst of sandbagging last week:

one, a lot more people are going to be open to the idea of global climate change after this summer. two 500-year floods fifteen years apart should be enough to convince even the most willfully ignorant skeptics that, at a minimum, something is up.

two, there’s vast political capital to be reaped by whoever is smart enough to grasp the magnitude of the disaster and respond accordingly. unlike louisiana, a state where democrats lost influence with the post-katrina exodus of african americans, there will be no diaspora here. instead, as is often the case in situations where normal life has been turned upside-down, the potential for change — and people’s appetite for it — are at a peak. the conventional strategies and demographic calculations that used to keep populations divided and neatly contained within predictable voting blocs are falling apart faster than a poorly constructed levee.

in the last week i’ve seen iowa city hippies working side-by-side with mormon and baptist missionaries, farmers holding bags for college professors to fill, black folks showing up to stack sandbags in exclusively white neighborhoods. it’s funny how little it resembles the red/blue america we’ve been told we were living in. the more people get outside, meet their neighbors, engage with them in common cause, the less interested they become in the old ideological wedges and abstractions: those who pitch in to help are friends, those who obstruct and drag their feet are not.

as george bush arrives in eastern iowa today, more than a week after the need for help was greatest, nobody is particularly pleased to see him. nobody that i talked to was much impressed by michael chertoff’s mealymouthed, empty platitudes after last week’s tornadoes either. but barack obama filling sandbags across the river in quincy makes an impression:

even if it is a staged photo-op, it’s clear from his remarks that obama has at least spent enough time in the affected areas to have some idea what its like for people there, and more importantly, to understand the feeling in the air and the fluidity (no pun intended) of the political situation. that’s one reason why stories like this one are happening all over the region.

and where’s john mccain? who the hell knows, or cares? people here have been too busy to watch or read anything but local news. nobody’s paying attention to mccain or his 20th-century-style campaign. until he actually shows his face here, he’s a nonentity.

meanwhile, bleeding heartland reports on some iowa GOP bloggers who are objecting to state & federal flood relief on the grounds that it’s politically beneficial to democrats. i’ll give them this much: it’s true that actually, y’know, doing the work of government likely redounds to the benefit of those politicians who are doing it. but convening a special legislative session to address the worst natural disaster in our state’s history, they complain, constitutes pandering to special interests — in this case, the people of iowa. this, ladies and gentlemen, is the legacy of the bush presidency, in which nobody ever lifted a finger to help anyone but GOP cronies. from a post-bush republican mindset, any meaningful action whatsoever is only comprehensible as political payoff — why else would you bother?

so, my fondest hope for 2008 is that iowa republicans campaign hard on this theme, that democrats are only pushing the relief effort because they want your vote — as if rewarding effective leadership and punishing incompetence and venality weren’t the whole reason we vote in the first place.