Pres. Obama Grilled About Slow Recovery in New Orleans

President Obama visited New Orleans today and was challenged during a town-hall-style forum about why it continues to take so long to restore schools, universities and hospitals. “Why is it four years after Katrina we’re still fighting for money to repair our devastated city?” Gabriel Bordenave, 29, a Loyola Law School graduate, asked. “I expected as much from the Bush administration. But why are we still being nickeled-and-dimed?” President Obama, on the defensive, said that many people in New Orleans were “understandably impatient,” and that he inherited a large backlog of problems from President George W. Bush.

“These things are not going to be fixed tomorrow,” the President told Mr. Bordenave. “We are working as hard as we can, as quickly as we can.” He added, “I wish I could just write a check.” When someone in the audience shouted, “why not,” Mr. Obama replied, “There’s this little thing about the Constitution.”

President Obama went on to say that “we’ve got to go through procedures” in assessing, for instance, the cost of restoring New Orleans’s main hospital. But he said his administration had freed up $1.4 billion in aid and told Mr. Bordenave, “That may not sound like a lot of money to you, but it’s real money.”

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