Bruised New Orleans Takes Stock of Obama
This story is by CBSNews.com political reporter Brian Montopoli.
As a presidential candidate, Barack Obama said that he would dedicate himself to helping New Orleans and the Gulf Coast recover from the horror of Hurricane Katrina, which took 1,800 lives, caused more than $40 billion in damage and displaced more than one million people.
"This will be a priority of my presidency," he said in February of last year. "And I will make it clear to members of my administration that their responsibilities don't end in places like the Ninth Ward -- they begin there."
On Thursday, roughly four years after Katrina hit, Mr. Obama makes his first trip to New Orleans as president. (As the White House has been quick to point out, he made five visits to post-Katrina New Orleans before taking office.) There has been some grumbling about the length of the visit, which will include a visit to a charter school and a town hall event and last about four hours.
The Times-Picayune of New Orleans compared the president unfavorably to former President George W. Bush, writing, "Say what you will about [Bush] and his administration's handling of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath - the man knew how to put together a post-Katrina White House visit to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast."
Republican Louisiana Sen. David Vitter, meanwhile, said that "if the town hall is the only major event of the visit, I truly think it will be deeply disappointing to most citizens." Vitter suggested the president needed to take helicopter tours and spend more time in the area to better understand the situation. (On the battered Mississippi coastline, meanwhile, residents are miffed that the president isn't visiting at all.)
But while Mr. Bush may have visited the area 13 times after the storm, he has not exactly been lauded for doing so: Instead, his administration's performance in the wake of Katrina is widely remembered as a tragic failure. For residents of the storm-battered region, presidential visits ultimately matter less than presidential action - and it is on that front that Gulf Coasters are now starting to take stock of Mr. Obama.
"I think you can be judged on what you've said you're going to do for New Orleans and for the Gulf, or you can be judged on what you've done and what you're continuing to do," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said Tuesday. "I think if people judge us on the latter, which is what matters to people that live in that region, I think they know the difference."
So how, then, has the new administration's performance been? The reviews, at this early point, are mixed. Yet the general consensus seems to be that the new administration represents, at the very least, an improvement over the last one. In August, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, a Republican with a national profile, said he respected the Obama administration's new Federal Emergency Management Agency chief, Florida's Craig Fugate, and his team.
Jindal told the Associated Press that "a sense of momentum and a desire to get things done" had emerged - and he noted, pointedly, that Louisiana governors previously didn't have "very many positive things" to say about FEMA. (When Katrina hit, of course, Michael Brown headed the organization - and Mr. Bush offered him an ill-advised "heckuva job" for his performance.)
The AP also reported that Doug O'Dell, who had been Mr. Bush's recovery coordinator, said in August that "problems that were insurmountable under previous leadership are getting resolved quickly."
Officials at Southern University at New Orleans have hailed the administration for helping the school rebuild; the White House has spurred movement on dozens of stalled projects and reversed a rule that important buildings like fire stations can't be built in areas considered vulnerable. Tourism, population and jobs levels have all been rising, and the city is now America's fastest-growing, according to U.S. Census Bureau statistics.
The new administration has also created a mediation program between federal funders and local government to forge agreement on how much money should be released for specific projects - a longtime sticking point.
"A couple of times [in the past], I have just gotten up and pushed my chair under the table and walked out, but I will say that in 2009 we haven't done that; 2009 has a very different feel to it - very much a partnership," Jindal's recovery chief, Paul Rainwater, told National Public Radio.
Photo Essay: New Orleans Right After Katrina
Photo Essay: New Orleans Now
Yet it would be a mistake to view the news from New Orleans as uniformly positive - or assessments of the president and his team as uniformly sunny. On Galvez Street, one of the main thoroughfares in the battered Ninth Ward, grass and weeds have made the road nearly impassable, as NPR reports. Many homes still haven't been rebuilt; rats and mosquitoes still swarm in overgrown lots. Across the city, according to August figures, there were more than 60,000 properties abandoned or blighted.
The Army Corps of Engineers, meanwhile, is not close to completing its $15 billion 100-year flood protection system for the city. Late last month actor and New Orleans resident Harry Shearer complained on Huffington Post that the administration is ignoring a report that hydraulic pumps installed by the Corps are not up to snuff. "My headline, phrased in question form earlier this year-'Obama to New Orleans: Drop Dead?'--is ready to be repunctuated," he noted dryly.
In August, a report from the Institute for Southern Studies found that "many Gulf Coast advocates give the administration low marks for their Gulf recovery -- and they don't think Washington has lived up to its promises to make rebuilding a priority." The Obama administration received a D+ in the report. That's better than the Bush administration's D-, but certainly nothing to brag about.
Still, as both critics and supporters are well aware, it is currently somewhat premature to judge the administration's performance on a number of issues tied to Katrina. And the real test, of course, will come if and when another serious hurricane hits the region. Until then, residents are gearing up for a presidential visit that will provide a reminder that the rest of the country has not forgotten them.
On Monday, Principal Doris Hicks of the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Charter School expressed her joy about the president's planned visit to her school.
"He chose us, and it really feels good that he chose us," she told students over the school loudspeaker, according to the Times-Picayune. "I'm excited, I'm ecstatic, and I know you share in the excitement. We can hardly wait until Thursday."
By Brian Montopoli