America's political culture may not be up to the task of rebuilding New Orleans.
BY BRENDAN MINITER
Tuesday, January 30, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST
In the State of the Union Address last week, President Bush spent a considerable amount of time making the case for the war in Iraq, but didn't mention Hurricane Katrina or New Orleans once. Now Democrats hope to make political hay out of the oversight.
This most recent kerfuffle over who cares more about New Orleans began just minutes after the president concluded his remarks. Virginia Sen. Jim Webb, delivering the Democratic response to the president, mentioned the city's recovery early in his speech. Later he upped the ante by hinting to reporters that funds being spent on the war should instead go to the Gulf Coast: "If we're putting all this money into Iraq and ignoring New Orleans, then we're doing something wrong."
Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco, a Democrat desperate to move her approval ratings out of the 20s as she runs for re-election this year, scored the president's speech for failing "to lift up our citizens." And Walter Leger, a member of the Louisiana Recovery Authority, dismissed the president's focus on the war by saying "we are at war here." The Times-Picayune reports he said this at a press conference last week as his face was "turning red and sweaty."
From the day the levees were breached, Hurricane Katrina was destined to become an issue in the 2008 presidential campaign. What we can see now is how the issue will take shape: Officials, occasionally losing their cool, will ask Why, Mr. President wasn't more done to help the poor flooded out of their homes?
John Edwards, who ran for president in 2004 on the premise that there are "two Americas" and he's the one to unite them, launched his second campaign for the White House recently at a construction site in New Orleans. He'll be well-positioned in the coming debate over Katrina. He has spent the better part of four years stumping around the country on the need for a new war on poverty. And for many Americans, Katrina provided proof positive that there really are two Americas--one wealthy and savvy enough to help itself even in the most desperate of situations, and a second constantly and consistently abandoned by the first, especially in its hours of need.
President Bush hasn't maneuvered himself into a defensible position in this debate. It's not because he lacks compassion or hasn't opened the federal purse to those hit by the storm. To date, the federal government has allocated some $110 billion for recovery and reconstruction. The Small Business Administration has cut tens of thousands of checks. And the Federal Emergency Management Agency announced recently that it is extending deadlines for tens of thousands of people displaced by the storm and still living in federally subsidized housing. They'll now have Uncle Sam as a benevolent landlord until at least August, some two years after the storm came ashore.
Mr. Bush's problem is that he's sitting in the Oval Office at a time when the nation has forgotten what functional inner cities look like and how, precisely, to build and rebuild them. That's understandable for a president who won the White House by winning 97 of the 100 fastest-growing counties in America. Those counties are predominately suburban and often populated by residents who've fled the inner-city core of their metro areas. As residents have fled the inner cities, politicians and public policies have followed them. Today, our political leaders expend more energy on issues confronting suburban soccer moms--roads, "smart growth," schools--than in reconstituting our downtowns.
Rudy Giuliani, another White House contender, does not suffer from the affliction that has left our political class paralyzed in fixing our urban areas. Even before the terrorist attacks on New York in 2001, he won national acclaim precisely for imposing order on what was becoming an uninhabitable city. But even he merely cleaned up a city by returning it to how it should have functioned all along. That is to say, he started locking up criminals and enforcing quality-of-life offenses. Reinventing a city or rebuilding it from the ground up is something altogether more difficult than anything Mr. Giuliani faced in New York. Without a broad consensus on what the city should look like, rebuilding will move at about the pace construction has proceeded at the World Trade Center site. More than five years on and only in recent months has anything meaningful begun to happen at the bottom of the pit.
On a recent visit to The Wall Street Journal offices in New York, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin told me about his vision for his city. He admits that at least in the short term parts of it will remain uninhabited, and he spent a lot of time talking about progress already made. The airport as well as the port, convention center and the parts of downtown most familiar to tourists are all near or above pre-Katrina levels. Moving forward, he hopes to build a denser city where residents live in apartments above a thriving commercial center. He stresses that everyone who formerly lived in the city will have a home to return to, and to that end he wants to rebuild public housing as part of a "mixed" development of high- and low-income residential communities. And his economic redevelopment team professes an understanding in the need for "magnet" industries--universities and the like--that attract an educated workforce.
All this may be for the good. But New Orleans got off to an inauspicious start this year. A crime wave swept the city, culminated in a spree of six murders in a 24-hour period. One Times-Picayune headline read "The Criminal Came Back," a characterization Mr. Nagin doesn't dispute. He says each time federal officials threaten to shut off housing subsidies for displaced New Orleans residents, a new wave of criminals turns up on the city's streets. It comes down to a question of where the criminals would prefer to be homeless, he said, in a place they know, or in Atlanta, Dallas, Houston or one of a handful of other cities still hosting storm refugees. He says he's working to get a handle on the violence, but a few weeks ago thousands of city residents lost patience with him and marched in protest. At least one carried a sign calling for Mr. Nagin to be recalled.
With crime, public housing and growing political discontent with his leadership in mind, I put this question to the mayor: At what point will former New Orleans residents displaced by the storm be considered residents of their new cities?
Mr. Nagin's response suggested that he hasn't been asked the question very often and doesn't yet have a good response to it. He paused, blinked and then said that the coming year will be pivotal in determining who will return to the city. But until New Orleans reaches a point at which it's no longer a captive of those who fled and instead becomes a magnet, a functional city in is own right, there's likely nothing President Bush could say from the podium in Washington that will restore the Crescent City to its former beauty.
Mr. Miniter is assistant editor of OpinionJournal.com. His column appears Tuesdays.
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