After leaving Gulf Coast, post-Katrina, recovery out of the State of the Union altogether this year, the president was in New Orleans yesterday for a series of photo-ops. His remarks to a local charter school were especially enlightening.
“I thank you all for giving me a chance to come. There’s nothing more illustrative of the issues that this community faces than to think that that blue line represented water and destruction. And yet, we’re now dry, we’re on dry land, recovering. And so I’ve come back to New Orleans, Louisiana, to remind people that the federal government still knows you exist, still knows you have issues, and wants to work with your leadership to address those issues.” (emphasis added)
I’m sure it was reassuring to the children and their parents to know that the president still believes they “exist,” but some of the audience should be forgiven if they remain skeptical.
Eighteen months after the storm hit, approximately 110,000 Katrina victims still live in trailers or receive rental assistance. “More than half of Orleans Parish’s public schools and nearly 70 percent of its child-care centers remain closed while the limited hospital emergency rooms are ‘saturated’ with patients.” Only 17 percent of New Orleans’s public schools have reopened.
Looking back at the speech Bush delivered in Jackson Square in September 2005, this wasn’t supposed to happen.
Update: Moreover, this is the kind of thing the White House should know to avoid.
One thing Bush likes to do in the Gulf Coast is hand out American flags to families rebuilding their houses. Long before he shows up, Bush’s advance team scouts the non-hostile property owners in a neighborhood, and later, the president drops by and gives the family a flag. The White House thinks this makes for good pictures — and maybe it did, a month after the storm. But a year and half later, with the region still a mess and so many people displaced, it seems a little tone-deaf to be handing out flags — politically, it does invite comparisons to what Bush isn’t doing in the region.
You think?
