Presidents Visit, Secretaries Bring Checks

It's been a week since President Barack Obama spent his half day in New Orleans, but the visit deserves a postscript, beginning with, all together now, a huge sigh of relief that he left when he did.

When his itinerary was announced--a visit to a Ninth Ward school, a town hall meeting and take-out lunch from Dooky Chase's--it was greeted by a chorus of dismay that he was giving short shrift to the four-year-old Katrina recovery effort, that he needed to go to Chalmette and Lakeview and--don't forget Rita--Lake Charles.

Moreover, the complaints went, he was completely ignoring the ongoing disaster of coastal erosion by not helicoptering over the open waters of the gulf to view where the land used to be. The salt in the wound was that he was departing early for a Democratic Party fundraiser in San Francisco.

In cool hindsight, though, consider the flip side of be-careful-what-you-ask-for, which is be-glad-for-what-you-didn't-get. Had the president stayed overnight, he would have wakened to the headlines of the yahoo justice of the peace in Tangipahoa Parish who refused to marry interracial couples out of concern for the children of those unions.

With the traveling national press corps panting, Obama, the most famous son of an interracial marriage, would have felt compelled to offer a teachable moment on the sin of intolerance, to the terminal embarrassment of the state.

But with the president gone, official first responder duties appropriately fell to Gov. Bobby Jindal, who publicly castigated the hidebound JP and called for revoking his license.

So the state should have counted its PR blessings when Air Force One winged westward toward the setting sun. Better yet, it should appreciate the real blessings he left behind. While Obama was making nice with his inspirational message to schoolchildren, across town his administration was making a huge difference in the lives of 19,000 Louisiana families.

In what otherwise would have been the day's lead story, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan approved the release of $600 million in additional grants for low- to moderate-income households to close the gaps between their Katrina/Rita Road Home grants and the inflated costs of repairing and rebuilding their houses.

It comes to an average of $34,000 per household, above the $50,000 cap on additional grants, which will go far toward finally getting many of the poorer storm victims back in their homes, long after their plight had faded from public attention.

That's how it works: presidents visit, cabinet secretaries bring checks. As far as Louisiana Recovery Authority Director Paul Rainwater is concerned, more gets done from a trip by a Cabinet secretary than when Air Force One touches down. "I love having cabinet secretaries here," he said. "I can talk real stuff and we can move things."

Their boss may be a day-tripper, but both HUD Secretary Donovan and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano have spent days on the ground here in the last year and more time back in Washington making the state's case on a number of issues.

Rainwater says about $1.3 billion worth of drawn-out disputes with the Federal Emergency Management Agency were promptly settled by the new administration. He looks forward to successfully negotiating another $3 billion in 3,000 disputed projects in the coming months.
A major example is the arbitration process that should finally break the four-year-old impasse with FEMA over replacing Charity Hospital in New Orleans.

"They (Obama administration) supported Sen. (Mary) Landrieu's idea of independent arbitration," said Rainwater. "The former administration did not." Resolution is expected by early next year, a far better alternative than spending years more in court fighting FEMA.
If the arbitration panel's decision is short of the $492 million the state claims it is due, the president has told the governor he would be open to discussing additional funding.

Should it come to pass that way, instead of a presidential visit, Air Force One could simply circle the state Capitol, drop the check and keep on going-- and no one with a lick of sense would complain.