It looks like New Orleans is back on the Presidential radar scope, if this Reuters article is to be believed.
“The president is committed to the rebuilding of New Orleans and the whole Gulf Coast,” Mrs Bush said during a visit to hand out Christmas gifts to children from New Orleans.
She said reconstructing levees and bringing back several hundred thousand displaced residents was a “long-term” project.
“I don’t think people around the country have a clear understanding of how big the devastation is,” she said.
This appears to be in response to increasing criticism that the White House hasn’t been acknowledging New Orleans recently and that Congress has been stingy with the purse strings. See, for example, this NYTimes editorial, as well as the reader responses to it.
While I’m not normally one to shy away from criticizing this administration, I do think there’s a decent chance that Bush is getting an unfair rap on this one. Given the mindboggling scope of the devastation, the reconstruction process is going to be slow, and not particularly sexy in the eyes of the media. Just because the media hasn’t been spending much time on the ongoing presidential response to Katrina, it doesn’t mean that there isn’t one. If a story is not flashy enough, or easy enough to comprehend, it’s unlikely to attract the eyes of the masses, and therefore it’s unlikely to attract much media that seeks to put advertising in front of those eyes….
