Bush to Focus on Vision for Reconstruction in Speech

New York Times, September 15, 2005

By ELISABETH BUMILLER
and RICHARD W. STEVENSON

WASHINGTON, Sept. 14 - President Bush is to pledge in an address to the nation from New Orleans on Thursday night that the federal government will provide housing assistance to victims of Hurricane Katrina and also help reimburse the states for costs they have absorbed in taking in evacuees, a White House official said Wednesday.

The commitments are part of a series of initiatives that the president is expected to announce as he tries to recover from the political fallout over the government's handling of the storm.

The initiatives will encompass education, health care and other social services, with specific housing and job assistance for people who return to New Orleans to live. White House officials said the president would not call for any set-asides or quotas for minorities in reconstruction contracts.

The proposals were still in the planning stages on Wednesday night, and officials said the 9 p.m. address, the president's first major speech on the hurricane, would not be a State of the Union "laundry list" of proposals. Instead, they said, it would focus more generally on Mr. Bush's vision for the reconstruction of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, with the federal government playing a supportive role to what White House officials are calling a "home-grown" plan that must be created by city and state authorities.

"We're in the beginning of the rebuilding at this point, and there are a lot of ideas that people are expressing," Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, told reporters on Air Force One on Wednesday. "The president wants people to think big."

Mr. McClellan indicated that Mr. Bush would not use the speech to name a "reconstruction czar" to oversee the effort. A number of White House officials have advised the president to name such a czar, with Gen. Tommy Franks, commander of forces in the 2001 war in Afghanistan, being a favorite of Republicans who are pushing the idea.

White House officials also played down the notion that Mr. Bush would offer a "Marshall Plan" for New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, as the Senate Republican leadership called for in a letter to the president on Wednesday. "We stand ready to work with you to lay out a comprehensive approach to the coordination of relief and development efforts through a 'Marshall Plan' for the Gulf Coast as soon as possible," said the letter, signed by Senator Bill Frist, the majority leader, and others.

Instead, administration officials and a Republican close to the White House said Mr. Bush would offer some general principles about "building a better New Orleans" with stricter construction standards to try to avoid a replay of the recent catastrophe. Republicans said Mr. Bush would not mention a price tag, in large part because of budget and political pressures from House Republicans and other supporters angry about administration spending.

Republicans said Karl Rove, the White House deputy chief of staff and Mr. Bush's chief political adviser, was in charge of the reconstruction effort, which reaches across many agencies of government and includes the direct involvement of Alphonso R. Jackson, secretary of housing and urban development.

As of Wednesday, few if any members of Congress had been informed by the administration of the president's plans. But Congressional leaders nonetheless offered Mr. Bush advice on his speech.

"I want him to reassure the people that the big part of this fight is ahead of us, and he's going to make sure that the federal government does a better job, does its part," Senator Trent Lott, Republican of Mississippi, said in an interview on MSNBC on Wednesday night. "We're all to blame to a degree." Mr. Lott added that Congress should never have passed legislation, as the White House wanted, that made the Federal Emergency Management Agency part of the Department of Homeland Security.

"We went along with that, and I guess we'll have to go back and try to rewrite the history, but that should be an independent agency reporting only to the president of the United States," Mr. Lott said.