After Irene, gusts from a political storm

Even as the storm named Irene moved out, a political squall -- call it Eric -- moved up from Washington.

Early this week, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) warned that an increase in federal disaster aid must be offset by spending cuts elsewhere.

With Irene's wreckage fresh, that kind of talk stirred a topical storm, instantly incensing the likes of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a fellow Republican.

"You're going to turn it into a fiasco like that debt-limit thing, where you're fighting with each other for eight or nine weeks and you expect the citizens of my state to wait?," Christie said. "They're not going to wait, and I'm going to fight to make sure that they don't. I don't want to hear about the fact that offsetting budget cuts have to come first before New Jersey citizens are taken care of."

Then Cantor said on Wednesday: "There are no strings attached. We found the money."

But others aren't letting the partisan gusts of Eric die down. A Democratic political piece sent Thursday was headlined "Heckuva job, Cantor" -- a spoof of President George W. Bush's famous words to his later-axed emergency-management chief in the fatal aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

The union-backed New York State Working Families Party, an adjunct in many ways of the Democrats, now has executive director Dan Cantor (no relation) firing off missives.

"We've all seen terrible pictures of the devastation, especially in the Catskills and Hudson Valley," said the WFP's Cantor in a mass email. "Tea Party Republicans seem not to have seen those pictures. Or they don't care. They are playing political football with assistance for flood victims and property owners who lost everything."

After Sept. 11, 2001, the emergency solidarity proclaimed by elected officials of all factions dissipated slowly. This week, politics-as-usual returned like a rushing river after the storm.

At first, over the weekend, elected executives followed the lessons of Katrina: Be visible, update information, put off rivalries, issue safety warnings, voice concern, coordinate or give the best semblance of all of these. Male politicians followed the no-tie protocol that applies to TV appearances during weekend and middle-of-the-night crises.

So you had the rare sights of Democratic Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo appearing alongside GOP Suffolk Executive Steve Levy, and of Christie convening with President Barack Obama's homeland security secretary, Janet Napolitano.

Now the matter of money and aid comes to the fore -- and with it, a return to the sloganeering over taxing and spending and debt.

Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) was on vacation in Europe when Irene struck. As a legislator, his role applies more to this aftermath anyway. So by midweek, he and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) were urging officials to declare an agricultural disaster in Irene-ravaged rural burgs.

Each day that passes after water recedes, people find shelter, and electricity resumes, the usual tensions over public money regain force. If this latest storm, Katia, also proves destructive, you won't need a weatherman to know how the rhetoric goes.