NEW ORLEANS — President Obama came to this once-stricken city on Thursday to make a case for his entire presidency: that when disaster strikes, the federal government should help not only to rescue the stranded but also to rebuild better and fairer than before.
“The project of rebuilding here wasn’t just to restore the city as it had been,” Mr. Obama said to several hundred people at a new community center in the once-devastated Lower Ninth Ward. “It was to build a city as it should be — a city where everyone, no matter what they look like, how much money they’ve got, where they come from, where they’re born, has a chance to make it.”
The president explicitly linked New Orleans’s recovery from Hurricane Katrina, which struck 10 years ago this month, to the nation’s recovery from the 2008 recession.
Along with his efforts to change the nation’s health care market, the twin recoveries fit Mr. Obama’s vision of a government that tackles tough problems with bold moves and big investments. To fix the economy early in his presidency, he pushed for an $832 billion stimulus package and a partial takeover of the banking and auto industries. To fix health care, he backed a 1,990-page bill that transformed the business of selling health insurance. And to fix New Orleans, he oversaw a huge, coordinated federal response that invested $71 billion in levees, hospitals and schools.
