Okay, so I’ll give George W. Bush some credit for trying to get it.

After seeing his approval ratings take a beating as fiercely as the one that Hurricane Katrina unleashed on the Gulf Coast, the president got on national television last week and said some things that, I’m sure, made the ideological wing of his party cringe. Among other things, he said that poverty in that area had “roots in a history of racial discrimination, which cut off generations from the opportunity of America.”

And, he said, “We have a duty to confront this poverty with bold action.”

If nothing else, Bush’s words are a step in the right direction -- that direction being reality -- for him to pair race with poverty. I chuckled when he did that because, if nothing else, it puts his jihadists at a loss when they try to argue that poverty is colorblind. For a long time, Bush probably believed that too, until the Superdome’s overwhelming black, huddled minions too poor to escape the path of a hurricane proved otherwise. Only the diehards of denial who insist on seeing black people strictly through the lens of pathology rather than social injustice would continue to hang on to that argument.

But while I was glad to see that Katrina is forcing Bush to turn more attention to fighting poverty rather than Iraqis, I wasn’t all that thrilled with his battle plan. To me, it sounds like the same-old, same-old, supply side stuff. Stuff that didn’t do much to counteract deep poverty in the 1980s. Stuff that is weighed toward ideology rather than reality.

Already, some questionable signs are emerging.

To combat the persistent poverty that he spoke of, Bush proposed the creation of a Gulf Opportunity Zone. One major feature of this zone, which would encompass Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, are huge tax breaks and loans to businesses that invest in those areas -- arguably as a way to create jobs and bolster the tax base.

But we’re not talking about a depressed neighborhood here. We’re talking about an entire region. And while empowerment zones and enterprise zones may have helped a few small businesses set up shop in struggling areas, and hire one or two people from the ‘hood, for the most part, they haven’t done much to bring massive influxes of higher-paying jobs that would counteract the deep poverty that Katrina brought to the surface of our consciousness.

Then, on top of that, I didn’t hear Bush say anything about wages. That’s troubling. One of the reasons so many people were too poor to leave New Orleans wasn’t because they weren’t working, but because the service jobs available to them didn’t pay enough for them to afford private transportation.

But for some reason, Bush seems to be unable to make the connection between poverty and low wages. If he was, then he wouldn’t have suspended the Davis-Bacon Act, a 1931 act that requires construction workers be paid prevailing wages on projects that receive federal money. What that means is that some of New Orleans’ poorest residents, who are looking to return and improve their economic fortunes through construction jobs, will be in for a rude awakening.

I don’t like that.

Bush also wants to give evacuees $5,000 for job training and education. That sounds like a plan, but it’s one that can be undermined if he doesn’t pay attention to -- guess what? --  wages. What good does it do an evacuee, for example, to receive job training, only to learn that no jobs that allow him or her to escape poverty are out there because that has all been compromised away just to entice businesses into the area?

That would be a waste.

Now don’t get me wrong. I don’t wholly disparage the free-enterprise approach to helping people escape poverty. I also like solutions that create a situation in which people can see a future for themselves beyond just the day-to-day survival. And I confess that, as a black woman who relishes her history, it was deeply troubling to me to see thousands of black people trapped at the Superdome. It troubled me because we are people who overcame some of the worse oppression in the world to create the greatest freedom movement the world has ever known. Yet in New Orleans, many of us had lived for years and years under low-wage conditions that, in the end, rendered us helpless. We left our destiny to a government that, through its policies, have encouraged the flight of jobs from our communities, and left us begging.

It’s time for that to stop.

That’s why, as Bush lays out his plans for restoring the Gulf, we need to ask questions. We need to insure that those proposals include adequate job training and livable wages -- the only real solutions to the poverty that was played out on cable television during the Katrina crisis. We need to insure that Bush’s rebuilding of the area is directed toward ending the low-wage reality that so many people grappled with -- a reality that was, in essence, a co-conspirator in the tragedy. And we need to be leery about proposals that do more to bolster supply-side ideology that uses tax dollars to enrich corporations more than the people they are supposed to help.

Maybe Katrina really did help Bush make the connection between race and poverty. Now he needs to make the connection between poverty and low wages.

That’s the only way to help people get out of the path of a hurricane and onto one that leads to prosperity.