NEW ORLEANS – President Barack Obama came to this once-stricken city Thursday to make a case for his entire presidency: that when disaster strikes, the federal government should help not only to rescue the stranded but also to rebuild better and fairer than before.
“The project of rebuilding here wasn’t simply to restore the city as it had been,” Obama said to several hundred people at a new community center in the once-devastated Lower 9th Ward. “It was to build a city as it should be – a city where everyone, no matter who they are or what they look like or how much money they’ve got, has the opportunity to make it.”
The president explicitly linked New Orleans’ recovery from Hurricane Katrina, which struck 10 years ago this month, to the nation’s recovery from the 2008 recession.
“That’s the story of New Orleans, but that’s also the story of America,” he said.
Along with his efforts to change the nation’s health-care market, the twin recoveries fit Obama’s vision of a government that tackles tough problems with bold moves and big investments.
To fix the economy early in his presidency, he pushed for an $832 billion stimulus package and a partial takeover of the banking and auto industries.
To fix health care, he backed a 1,990-page bill that transformed the business of selling health insurance. And to fix New Orleans, he oversaw a huge, coordinated federal response that invested $71 billion in levees, hospitals and schools.
“There’s been a specific process of recovery that is perhaps unique in my lifetime right here in the state of Louisiana, right here in New Orleans,” he said in his speech.
Obama said the lesson from Katrina was that the vast human toll visited upon New Orleans could have been prevented. Some 1,800 people died, and hundreds of thousands were displaced.
“What started out as a natural disaster became a man-made one: a failure of government to look out for its own citizens,” Obama said in his speech at the community center, in an area once under 17 feet of water. And that failure was years in the making, he said.
Earlier in the day, Obama met with New Orleans residents and visited neighborhoods that were rebuilt since Katrina.
Obama told a group of residents he met while touring the city that he hopes to return to New Orleans after his presidency. He said he wants to go to Mardi Gras and sample some of the city’s other delights.
“Right now, I just go to meetings,” the Associated Press quoted Obama as saying.
