REMEMBERING KATRINA
President Obama visits New Orleans to mark a decade since the major hurricane.
President Obama greets residents in New Orleans during a visit marking the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. He praised the city’s recovery efforts while acknowledging there was more work to be done.
NEW ORLEANS — As President Obama toured the Treme neighborhood of this city on Thursday, admiring the neat rows of brightly painted houses on a street battered by Hurricane Katrina, a 92-year-old woman — a local icon — told him she was proud of all he had done.
Obama responded to the woman — Leah Chase, former chef and owner of the city’s famed Dooky Chase’s Restaurant — by nodding toward Mitch Landrieu. The president suggested more of the credit should go to the Democratic mayor.
“I’m just trying to make sure we give Mitch an assist,” Obama said as he marked the 10th anniversary of the Gulf Coast’s catastrophic hurricane, the costliest disaster in U.S. history.
Much has changed since the storm came, the levees broke and the city plunged into calamity — including Obama’s view of what it takes for a community to rise from such a blow.
The first time he saw the devastation Katrina had thundered down on New Orleans, he was a presidential candidate emphasizing the federal government’s responsibility to Americans in crisis. On Thursday, in his seventh year as president, he emphasized cooperation among local, state and federal officials, and collaboration with clergy, nonprofits and residents.
“Not long ago, our gathering here in the Lower 9th might have seemed unlikely,” Obama said to a crowd at a community center built to replace one destroyed in the Lower 9th Ward, the neighborhood whose destruction grew to symbolize the hurricane’s devastation and the view that the city’s black residents had been left behind.
“But today, this new community center stands as a symbol of the extraordinary resilience of this city and its people, of the entire Gulf Coast, indeed, of the United States of America,” he said. “You are an example of what’s possible when, in the face of tragedy and hardship, good people come together to lend a hand, and to build a better future.”
Obama echoed his 2008 concerns, recounting the Katrina story partly as a failure of government to look out for its citizens. But he framed it as a systemic failure that left some communities more vulnerable to the storm’s effects, and noted New Orleans had long been plagued by “structural inequality that left too many people, especially poor people of color, without good jobs or affordable healthcare or decent housing.”
And Obama and others acknowledged that while progress had been made, more work lay ahead.
“This recovery is at halftime,” Rep. Cedric L. Richmond (D-La.) told the crowd. “There is so much more left to be done.”
In the storm’s aftermath, much of the blame went to the U.S. government. President George W. Bush was castigated for federal emergency officials’ poor response and the shortcomings in the city’s levee infrastructure, built in part by the Army Corps of Engineers. Katrina became shorthand for the failed ambitions of Bush’s domestic policy in the way the Iraq war did for his foreign policy.
But the attitude toward Bush was gentler among those traveling with Obama on Thursday, a decade after rap star Kanye West blamed the city’s struggles after the storm on the Republican president, saying, “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.”
Democratic consultant Donna Brazile and writer Walter Isaacson, New Orleans natives who joined Obama, told reporters on Air Force One that Bush had gotten a bad rap for the response.
“I’m one of those individuals that believes that under President Bush’s leadership we got it right,” said Brazile, who is black. “It took awhile for the federal government to really figure out how to help us. And I think once the president made the decision that New Orleans would be rebuilt, despite some of the conversation on Capitol Hill that didn’t believe that the federal government should invest hundreds of billions of dollars into the recovery effort, the president made a commitment, and I think he kept his word.”
Brazile also praised former First Lady Laura Bush for committing to rebuild the city’s libraries, and predicted the ex-president would receive “a warm welcome” when he visited the city Friday.
She and Isaacson both noted the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund’s role in raising private money.
Obama’s tone was different too. In February 2008, he referred to Bush as a “president who only saw the people from the window of an airplane instead of down here on the ground.”
“When President Bush came down to Jackson Square two weeks after the storm,” he went on, “the setting was spectacular and his promises soaring.... But over two years later, those words have been caught in a tangle of half-measures, half-hearted leadership and red tape.”
Since then, Obama has himself struggled to move federal agencies in the direction he wants, but he praised his Federal Emergency Management Agency director on Thursday, saying, “I love me some Craig Fugate.”
Still, unable to inspire Congress to tackle problems in the way he’d like, Obama relies more and more on convening community stakeholders and promoting public-private partnerships.
As he toured hard-hit neighborhoods Thursday, he emphasized the possibilities when working together, saying, “Perhaps the biggest lesson to be learned from Katrina is making sure that there is trust and effective communication between citizens, government and civil society.”