Having wiped out portions of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, Hurricane Katrina headed straight for Washington, a city so thoroughly unprepared for the storm that it didn’t know whether to duck, run or take it square in the face. So far, it has behaved as New Orleans did, with a splash of planning and a whole lot of self-preservation.

Before things get worse, Washington needs its own equivalent of the Coast Guard, one part of the Department of Homeland Security that worked quickly and effectively around the Gulf. It needs some pro-government members of Congress comfortable with the heavy lifting of reform, who are willing to spend on services and equally comfortable drawing the line on spending, which is to say it needs congressional moderates. It needs them now not just to point the way to safety from Katrina but to use the force of the hurricane to change attitudes in Washington.

Katrina’s destruction requires the capital to provide a historic federal works program and a major expansion of social programs – its victims need housing, food, jobs, schools, medical care and rebuilt communications. The president promised to do whatever it takes, but not only doesn’t the federal government have any money, earlier this year it approved $35 billion in reductions to services and a further $70 billion in more tax cuts that will lead to further reduced programs over the next five years. The deficit for the fiscal year that ended Friday came in somewhere around $350 billion. Congress talks about offsetting the $200 billion or whatever it will pay to rebuild the Gulf Coast, but it can’t expect to offset spending when it has already decided that it must run large deficits to pay for current programs.

The wing of the party in control of Congress and the White House has been telling the public for 25 years that government is not the solution to your problems but the problem itself. When government was badly needed in New Orleans, it completed that self-fulfilling prophecy by its absence. And because this wing sees government always as the problem, it has divorced spending from performance, regarding tax dollars instead as the means to votes rather than service, further leading to poor service and enfeebling debt.

Actually, the situation is worse than this because Katrina leaves a long-term challenge with a public that is almost certain to have a short-term interest in the situation. After Congress approves many billions more dollars for Gulf Coast restoration as it moans about the deficit, will anyone remember that more than a month after the hurricane 4,300 children affected by the disaster were reported still separated from their parents or guardians? Certainly the public won’t care that in the week after the storm thousands of people in New Orleans went for days without eating while pallets of food sat in a staging area waiting to be sent. Nor will anyone recall except in a technical way the confusion and frustration caused by FEMA’s miserable performance.

There are now House and Senate task forces, committee hearings and investigations to address Katrina. The executive branch is looking into the disastrous response, too. Congress already has passed a half-dozen spending bills worth about $70 billion and there are several more to come, including a $250 billion request for Louisiana alone.

This is where the moderates enter, though it’s obvious even now that post-Katrina reviews and investigations will fall into the category of thankless do-goodism. Sen. Susan Collins is chairman of the committee with oversight of Homeland Security and has begun an investigation that she promises to be thorough and tough in its examination. Sen. Olympia Snowe has been invited to join the GOP leadership’s task force on spending for Katrina, where she will encounter a conservative leadership itching to use the cost of Katrina to cut social spending.

Some members of Congress have already seen political opportunity emerge from Katrina – the Louisiana delegation is trying to leverage a $250 billion spending bill for its state alone; the Republican Study Committee suggested nearly $1 trillion in offsetting cuts in programs it never liked but couldn’t eliminate absent crisis.

The moderates’ opportunity is quite different: It is to establish new standards for what the public can expect from government by re-establishing the idea that government isn’t a necessary – or even unnecessary – evil but a means through which the nation protects and serves its people. This may sound irritatingly naive (it does to me, and I wrote it), but the last dozen years of high-voltage bickering in Congress has put the nation in the kind of jeopardy that demands a little irritation.

You don’t need to hear again how the war in Iraq, tax cuts, the cost of Medicare and Social Security threaten to consume the federal budget and create a deficit more harmful to the economy than any tax increase you could imagine. But you may need to hear a powerful case for the nation paying for a more effective, responsive government.

Moderates are in the best position to make that argument and change the debate in Washington. Well after the immediate public attention has been diverted, they can haul it back by using Katrina as the most telling evidence for the care and tending of government. They can, like the Coast Guard, lead by example and set the standard for the rest of Congress.

Todd Benoit is the editorial page editor of the Bangor Daily News.