In his effort to make longtime U.S. Sen. Thad Cochran look out of touch with Mississippians, state Sen. Chris McDaniel paused long enough last week to make himself look so.

McDaniel hemmed and hawed when a Politico reporter from D.C. asked whether he would have supported the federal Hurricane Katrina aid Cochran championed.

“I would have to see details of it. I really would,” McDaniel said. “That’s not an easy vote to cast.”

After being lit up from D.C. down to Destrehan, which McDaniel called “slander,” he’s been trying to do a little Katrina two-step since — keep his D.C. tea party, anti-federal spending money backers happy while sorta-kinda walking back his statements. A little. He’s for helping people after a storm and all. But he’d probably do it different, without all the “fraud, waste, abuse and misspent funds.”

He gave a similar non-answer answer to the same question from a reader in a Clarion-Ledger live chat back in October. As best I can tell, he’s never directly answered whether he would have voted for the $29 billion in Katrina relief Cochran secured for the Gulf Coast.

And it would appear he and his campaign staff haven’t closely studied the most important Mississippi legislation to come out of Congress in his lifetime. They’ve mostly so far referenced fraud, waste and abuse that came from a first round of practically automatic federal emergency relief spending, and money that was distributed by the Red Cross.

There was fraud, waste and abuse in Katrina relief spending. And there will be the next time there is federal aid for a major U.S. disaster. That’s part of the human condition. But most misspending occurs on the state-government level — where McDaniel has served since 2008 without, that I recall, ever raising any major alarm about state Katrina spending — and on the local and individual level. Government leaders in McDaniel’s native Jones County got in some hot water with the feds over Katrina debris removal contracts.

Cochran’s defining achievement was securing an unprecedented program that provided Mississippi $5 billion to help repair and rebuild 40,000 homes and apartments damaged or destroyed by the storm.

And he also helped set up the Katrina Fraud Prevention and Detection Unit that then-state auditor, now Gov. Phil Bryant, helped lead. Fraud levels for the housing programs tracked about 1 percent, and HUD adopted them as “best practices” to be emulated nationwide.

And speaking of McDaniel’s Jones County, it should be noted that many people consider it to have been the hardest hit by Katrina outside the Coast area. Twelve people died there, nearly 1,000 homes were severely mangled or destroyed and thousands more damaged. An expert once told me it appeared part of Katrina’s eye ripped while passing over Jones County and spawned severe straight-line winds and tornadoes.

McDaniel’s predecessor in the state Senate, now State Auditor Stacey Pickering, and other Jones County officials at the time were concerned their inland area was being overlooked and were calling for federal help.

Would McDaniel, if he were in the U.S. Senate, have told them, “That’s a tough one, let me think about it and get back to you?” Of course not.

The McDaniel camp has fertile ground to say six-term Sen. Cochran has been in Washington too long. For days now they’ve been blanketing inboxes with Cochran comments that he doesn’t know much about the tea party or Chris McDaniel (how dare he?), and comments he made in 2008 about Barack Obama being a nice guy and the commonwealth probably wouldn’t self-destruct if he were elected.

And Cochran has a long record on federal spending he has to defend.

Fair ’nuff.

But I’ll repeat what I said in this column back in October:

“The future of the state of Mississippi hung in the balance. Nearly a third of its economy was shut down. Whole cities had been obliterated. Without federal aid, the state would face an instant depression and recovery would take a generation … All other issues and politics aside, any Mississippian that faults Cochran for doing all he could do to help his state in its hour of need needs to have their head examined.”