NEW ORLEANS — Barack Obama was met mostly with cheers in his brief and tightly scripted trip to this storm-ravaged city -- his first as chief executive. But he and his team were also repeatedly reminded of the daunting trouble awaiting anyone who would dare promise to fix the mess wrought by Hurricane Katrina.
On his way to a Lower 9th Ward charter school, the president's motorcade passed several of the more than 91,000 homes in the metropolitan area that remain in disrepair more than four years after the flood.
In front of one of them, a simple sign had been posted, presumably for the president: "Four years later . . . "
But when he arrived at the school, he was greeted ecstatically. And in the Lower 9th Ward, a pair of women jumped up and down in the wake of the president's limo, hugging each other, screaming, "I saw him!" During a brief lull at a town hall meeting, one woman shrieked, "I love you, Obama!"
Across town, Obama's Education secretary, Arne Duncan -- one of three Cabinet members along for the trip -- met with students and local officials at John McDonogh Senior High. Paul Vallas, the head of the city's Recovery School District, spoke of the hundreds of millions in rebuilding funds he was still hoping to receive from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Other local officials at the school said that New Orleans' radically reimagined schools desperately needed funding for dropout prevention and early-childhood education. A student said there was no zinc available for experiments in her Advanced Placement chemistry class.
The day's main event was the town hall meeting at the University of New Orleans, where the president got a taste of the kind of impassioned criticism that politicians working on the post-Katrina landscape have been known to face. As Obama rattled off the list of dignitaries in the room, the crowd burst into a chorus of boos for Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal. There was also an echo of boos for Mayor C. Ray Nagin, a Democrat.
Obama laughed and offered some comfort to the Republican governor: Some days, he said, "I get that too."
And even from the friendly crowd came a cutting question for the president. Complaining about the pace of federal aid, one student told Obama: "I expected as much from the Bush administration, but why are we still being nickeled and dimed in our recovery?"
