Losing New Orleans

13 December 2005 |permalink | email article

On Sundayís ìMeet the Press,î during conversation about the continuing impact of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans, Timeís Mike Allen visibly stunned panelists by noting that President Bush has not visited the city since Oct. 11, two months to the day.

When Bush flew into the city soon after the worst natural urban disaster in American history, using the floodlighted St. Louis Cathedral and Jackson Square as stagecraft, he promised to ìdo what it takesî to rebuild New Orleans. ìThere is no way to imagine America without New Orleans. This great city will rise again.î

Despite the shuck and jive, the unimaginable is now possible. New Orleans has slipped from the administrationís priority agenda and the city that put Anderson Cooper into the prime-time anchor chair at CNN now gets scant media attention after just over 14 weeks.

On Nov. 20, the Times-Picayune of New Orleans carried an extraordinary editorial on its front page demanding the nation, and especially the federal government, not abandon the flood-ravaged city. A week later, the paperís editor, Jim Amoss, in an Op-Ed piece for the Washington Post reprised Bushís words. ìThenì, he wrote, ìthe lights went out, and the president left. Vast swaths of the city have been left in darkness ever since.î

ìRebuilding New Orleans is our breakfast-table conversation, our lunchtime chatter, our pillow talkÖWe want word from Washington that a great city will not be left to die,î describing the flooding as a ìfederal engineering failure with multi-billionñdollar consequences.î

Sundayís New York Times editorial said ìwe are about to lose New Orleans,î describing the current construction as a ìrudderless ship,î focusing on the levee system and suggesting that rumbles about the proposed cost of better levees have grown louder in Washington. ìOnly the office of the president is strong enough to goad Congress to take swift action.î

The price tag for higher levees is well over $32 billion ñ just 1.2% of this yearís estimated $2.6 trillion dollar budget. Compare that with total allocations for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the war on terror, which have topped $300 billion.

The newsweeklies buzz about fresh new ideas the president would like to accomplish in 2006. Adjusting his billion-dollar infrastructure priorities to favor the Gulf Coast and New Orleans - not Iraq or Baghdad ñ would be a small step toward redeeming his promise to the Big Easy. Today, betrayal is the operative word.

434