Marc H. Morial

In his 2007 State of the Union address, President Bush didn’t offer much hope for New Orleanians — neither those who have returned since the city was ravaged by Hurricane Katrina, nor the thousands more who have yet to come home. Not a single reference was made in Bush’s speech to the tragedy that halved New Orleans’s population and left in the Gulf Coast region in ruins.

What a difference 18 months makes. It’s been over a year-and-a-half since the president vowed to restore New Orleans to its former glory in a poignant speech in historic Jackson Square, with much of the city underwater and the National Guard patrolling around.

But Capitol Hill Democrats are hardly great saviors of New Orleans. They too failed to reference Katrina in their response to the State of the Union and they put nothing in their vaunted “first 100 hours” agenda that addressed the rebuilding of the Gulf Coast region. Not until the press and activists noted the glaring absence of Katrina in the two parties’ recent addresses did they begin to do anything.

It’s very interesting that Senate Democrats would hold a field hearing on the rebuilding efforts in New Orleans shortly after the hubbub, and that presidential candidate Barack Obama would be present. CNN even suggested that the road to the White House in 2008 might just go though my hometown.

I can only pray that’s not true, and that lawmakers are paying attention to the debacle that is the Katrina recovery because they want to do something about it — not just reacting for fear it’ll hurt their political prospects. They should be there because it’s the right thing to do. The victims of Katrina cannot be forgotten and should never be used as some kind of political football being tossed around to win elections.

By most accounts, the rebuilding of New Orleans has been a slow and torturous process marked by insufficient coordination, unnecessary political infighting and a great deal of both human and institutional suffering.

Bush appointed Donald Powell the rebuilding czar, but failed to give him any power. Powell is merely a diplomat assigned to ensure that the local, state and federal governments play nice with each other. There is little coordination between the various agencies charged with cleaning up the city. Despite not being hit as hard by the storm, Mississippi is entitled to as much federal aid as Louisiana because Congress illogically decided to cap the amount of aid a single state could get.

Is there any wonder why New Orleans is still a wreck, or why its current and former residents are still suffering?

In a January column published in The New York Times, Bob Herbert summed up the situation perfectly:

“If you talk to public officials, you will hear about billions of dollars in aid being funneled through this program or that. The maze of bureaucratic initiatives is dizzying. But when you talk to the people most in need of help — the poor, the elderly, the disabled, the children — you will find in most cases that the help is not reaching them,” he wrote. “There is no massive effort, no master plan, to bring back the people who were driven from the city and left destitute by Katrina.”

It’s time to assemble America’s greatest minds and most powerful leaders and resolve to get the job done. I’m asking for the development of a 12- to 24-month action plan to reinvigorate recovery and rebuilding, as well as ensure greater coordination and collaboration going forward than there has been in the past.

I find it encouraging that the Congressional Black Caucus called upon House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., to create a select House committee on Katrina. Maybe this will light a fire in Washington under efforts to bring New Orleans back to life.

The collective leadership on the federal, state and local levels must work to ensure the survival of one of our nation’s greatest cities. Instead of finding fault and pointing fingers, we should get our collective wits around the table to address this debacle before it becomes our nation’s greatest shame.

In a recent editorial, The New York Times observed that the current state of New Orleans is a “sad monument to [the] impotence” of the world’s last surviving superpower. We’ve got plenty of resources for a war in Iraq, but when it comes to helping our own people, they’re off the radar screen. What does that say about our nation’s priorities?

I shudder to think that when we assess the Katrina tragedy a decade from now, we might realize, as the Times editorial notes, that “our grand plans were never laid, our brightest minds were never assembled, [and] our nation’s muscle and ingenuity were never brought to bear in any concerted way to overcome the crisis of the Gulf.”

Marc H. Morial is the president and CEO of the National Urban League.