This is a GREAT ARTICLE ON OBAMA AND NEW ORLEANS from the Times-Picayune.
In part…
But his administration has shown a dogged dedication to bending the federal bureaucracy in what Flozell Daniels Jr., president and CEO of the Louisiana Disaster Recovery Foundation, describes as a “kinder, gentler” direction.
With “federal agencies finally working as partners and not adversaries, ” Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-LA, said, “in its first seven months, the Obama Administration has made significant progress toward making the Gulf Coast recovery effort quicker and more efficient.”
“I would say what they have demonstrated in this first year is a low-key but genuine commitment to accelerate the business of recovery, ” said Amy Liu, deputy director of the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program, which publishes an annual New Orleans Index, detailing the city’s progress since Katrina.
Or as the president put it in an Oval Office interview in advance of the fourth anniversary, of Katrina: “In terms of rebuilding, two of my best Cabinet members, Secretary Napolitano of Homeland Security and HUD Secretary Donovan, have been spending an extraordinary amount of time thinking about how to deal with the blockage of assistance in the region.”
