Barely a day-and-a-half after Gov. Perdue asked President Obama to declare parts of north Georgia a natural disaster area, one local politician — a guy who happens to be running for statewide office — gripes to Jim Galloway, the paper’s political blogger, that the president’s taking too long.

Galloway’s headline? “Shades of Katrina: A frustrated Sam Olens wonders if Washington knows how badly metro Atlanta is hurting.”

Whoa, now, Jim. Doncha think that’s a tad melodramatic?

Not to belittle the North Georgia flood at all — at least nine people died in this week’s disaster. But we are not going through anything like Hurricane Katrina; this is not something that requires massive National Guard mobilization. And FEMA’s response to it has not been a you’re-doing-a-heckuva-job-Brownie moment.

Taking less than two days to declare a disaster in counties hit by a bad flood appears to be slightly on the fast side for FEMA . It’s important to recognize that this aide isn’t about urgently airlifting people off their roofs or other such Katrina-esque measures; it mainly goes toward household reimbursements and debris cleanup.

To get a comparison, I did a quick web search on a few of the 48 floods that FEMA has declared a disaster zone over the past couple of years. Most appeared to have taken more than two days to be declared, and it didn’t seem matter whether Bush or Obama was in the White House. The closest comparison I could find was a 2007 flood in Minnesota that cost seven lives. President Bush granted federal disaster status four days after the floods and three days after the request.

It’s not unusual for politicians to try to score political points off disasters, though it reeks of cheese when the complaint is baseless. Cobb Commission Chairman Sam Olens is running for the Republican nomination for attorney general, so he certainly has something to gain by getting media attention for public fulmination about Obama. That’s a relevant point that Galloway neglects to mention.

He also fails to let his own readers in on something his own paper reported: Obama immediately responded to Gov. Perdue’s request for aid by calling the governor personally Tuesday night after his speech before the UN to assure him of a prompt disaster decision.

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