Obama takes another swipe at Bush, predecessors

by Roman Lewis
NEW ORLEANS — President Barack Obama, marking the 5-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, visited Xavier University in New Orleans today, hailing the school and the city's comeback from the storm of the century.

"Because of you – all the advocates and organizers here today, folks who are leading the way toward a better future for this city ... because of you, New Orleans is coming back," Obama told the crowd.

Indeed, Xavier and the people whose collective effort helped return students to classrooms barely four months after several feet of water flooded the campus is a testament to the value of looking beyond the past and to the future, of putting differences aside and working together.

And Obama, flanked by cabinet members and most of Louisiana's congressional delegation, recognized that in his speech.

"There is no need to dwell on what you experienced and what the world witnessed," Obama said.

And I agree.

Yet, barely a minute after that statement Obama described Katrina as not just a natural disaster but as "a manmade catastrophe -- a shameful breakdown in government that left countless men, women, and children abandoned and alone."

While there's merit to that argument, in the spirit of moving forward and working together would not the president have been better served by using today's anniversary as an opportunity to bridge the ideological and racial divide? Not perpetuate that divide by once again casting blame on his predecessors, with a particular wink to the Bush Administration?