Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, toured a house on Friday that the Hurricane Katrina floods wrecked, picking up debris, lamenting the federal response and leaving little doubt of the powerful symbolism his party sees in the ruined neighborhoods here.As Mr. Dean's well-covered hurricane-cleanup mission suggested, New Orleans may well become for Democrats in 2006 and 2008 what New York was for Republicans after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, an evocative metaphor rooted in tragedy that can potentially be turned to electoral advantage.
Where Republicans looked to the imagery of a battered but resilient New York to project a tough president standing up to the dangerous world, Democrats are looking to this city as the symbol of an administration that is at once incompetent and heartless.
"It brings back home the notion that there is a difference with the two parties," said Donna Brazile, a Democratic leader whose family home was ravaged by the flooding.
The Democratic National Committee gathered this week on the edge of the French Quarter for its spring meeting. Talk is in the air of staging the 2008 nominating convention here, though that would require scaling considerable logistical obstacles.
For now, the backdrop has proven politically irresistible to the party. Mr. Dean was one of 100 Democratic committee members who volunteered for community work projects with names like Dems in Blue Jeans, gutting houses, working in parish kitchens and distributing food.
In the Lower Ninth Ward, Mr. Dean put on a white hazardous-materials suit and, more than a little winded, helped gut a house. He needed barely a nudge from reporters to declare the federal effort here a disgrace that would cost Republicans control of the government.
"This is a searing, burning issue," Mr. Dean said, "and I think it's going to cost George Bush his legacy, and it's going to cost the Republicans the House and the Senate and, maybe very well, the presidency in the next election. People will never forget this."
Pointing to two abandoned hulks of cars, he added, "I hate to be partisan at a time like this, but this is why the Republicans are going to be out of business."
Even some Republicans view the events here as, at the least, politically potent.
"There's no question that it has refocused attention on issues of race and economics and the poor and a number of domestic issues," said Mark McKinnon, who as Mr. Bush's media adviser incorporated Sept. 11 imagery into advertisements for Mr. Bush's re-election campaign. "There's a possibility that New Orleans has transformed the politics of the nation."
Still, the parallels that Democrats are looking for may extend this week just so far. For one factor, Sept. 11 put the entire nation on edge about the threat of terrorism. By contrast, the hurricane catastrophe was confined to one region. As a symbol, it may be powerful, but perhaps not as enduringly powerful as what occurred in New York and at the Pentagon.
As the White House saw in 2004, there are risks to being perceived as manipulating emotional images for political gain. A spokesman for the Republican National Committee, Tracey Schmitt, was quick to accuse Democrats of "exploiting a human tragedy" after learning of Mr. Dean's remarks.
A senior adviser to Mr. Bush's presidential campaign, Matthew Dowd, argued that Democrats were vulnerable to criticism if they criticized the hurricane response without offering their ideas about what to do, drawing a contrast with how the White House responded after Sept. 11.
"For Republicans, it would probably have come back to bite them if the only thing they had was the negatives," Mr. Dowd said. "But what was beneficial was we had the right folks and the right policies to address the aftermath of the crises. If it looks like a partisan thing they are just using for an election, it can easily backlash on them."
For all the criticism the White House took for pressing the imagery of Sept. 11 in the political campaign, it never backed down. The party's convention in New York was a nonstop blur of invocations of the attack.
Since Mr. Bush's victory, his advisers have argued that they were helped by the backlash from the advertising because it drew more attention to the issue that they saw as central to his re-election, a point of view that Democrats have come to accept.
Ms. Brazile rejected the notion that Democrats were exploiting a tragedy.
"We're highlighting the incompetence of the government," she said.
Ms. Brazile said she never agreed with Democrats who criticized Republicans for using Sept. 11.
"Oh no," she said. "We should have used it, too."