Small-town hick, while W.C. Fields shuffles the cards: Is this a game of chance?

W.C. Fields: Not the way I play it, no.

— from My Little Chickadee

After Hurricane Katrina, after he saw the DVD with the images of suffering in New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast, after he saw his sagging poll numbers, George W. Bush made a televised speech in New Orleans. For what may have been the first time, he acknowledged the presence of “deep, persistent poverty” in America. He acknowledged the history of racism that has done so much to shape the face of American poverty. He promised “to confront this poverty with bold action.” He pledged to “do what it takes” to rebuild the region, better than ever. Some have called Bush’s reconstruction plan a “conservative New Deal,” after President Franklin Roosevelt’s Depression-era New Deal.

Roosevelt’s New Deal was not a carefully-calibrated set of federal programs; it was a desperate set of experiments, trying anything that might get the economy moving and people working once again. The guiding principle was, try lots of stuff. If something works, do more of it. If it doesn’t work, stop doing it.

Bush’s New Deal doesn’t start with the same blank slate. Bush’s political guru, Karl Rove, has been put in charge:

Rove’s leadership role suggests quite strikingly that any and all White House decisions and pronouncements regarding the recovery from the storm are being made with their political consequences as the primary consideration. More specifically: With an eye toward increasing the likelihood of Republican political victories in the future, pursuing long-cherished conservative goals, and bolstering Bush’s image.

That is Rove’s hallmark.

Another Rove hallmark is the Blame Game — he’s always setting someone up to take the blame for every Bush administration screw-up. The Justice Department is on a fishing expedition, trying to blame the failure of the New Orleans levees on environmentalists:

Federal officials appear to be seeking proof to blame the flood of New Orleans on environmental groups, documents show.

The Clarion-Ledger has obtained a copy of an internal e-mail the U.S. Department of Justice sent out this week to various U.S. attorneys’ offices: “Has your district defended any cases on behalf of the (U.S.) Army Corps of Engineers against claims brought by environmental groups seeking to block or otherwise impede the Corps work on the levees protecting New Orleans? If so, please describe the case and the outcome of the litigation.”

What does a conservative New Deal look like? Well, it has no-bid contracts for Halliburton. It eliminates prevailing-wage protection for workers in the afflicted area. It has “enterprise zones,” areas with special tax breaks for business development, “temporary exemptions” from environmental laws and estate taxes, and more. From the Wall Street Journal:

Now, Republicans are working on legislation that would limit victims’ right to sue, offer vouchers for displaced school children, lift some environment restrictions on new refineries and create tax-advantaged enterprise zones to maximize private-sector participation in recovery and reconstruction.

Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson:

Problem is, New Orleans and the Mississippi Delta have been designated enterprise zones for a decade now, and they’re still just about the poorest places in the United States. Right-wingers have railed for 40 years now at the failures, real and imagined, of Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty, but Johnson’s policies, and those of Franklin Roosevelt before him, have been far more successful at reducing poverty than those that presidents Reagan, Bush and Bush promoted during their terms in office. Indeed, poverty has risen steadily during the current Bush’s presidency, and median household income has declined for each of the past five years, though for the past three years the economy has been in recovery.

If it doesn’t work, do more of it?

The conservative New Deal helps the rich first. It has big tax cuts for casino operators, with the costs offset by more IRS audits of poor taxpayers and cuts to lots of social safety-net programs.

So we listen to George W. Bush’s promises and wonder: in the conservative New Deal, do poor people have a chance?

Not the way Bush plays it, no.