A More Enduring Legacy

Speaker Dennis Hastert has taken some flak over suggesting that perhaps it’s not worth the cost to rebuild New Orleans. Aside from the obvious hazards of its location, the price would be exorbitant: One projection to rebuild the city runs $20-100 billion.

I don’t know whether New Orleans can be rebuilt.

I don’t know whether it’s worth it, pragmatically speaking, to have New Orleans rebuilt.

I don’t know whether the city can be better protected than it had been in the past.

But I do know one thing. I know that rebuilding New Orleans would be a much more vibrant, more visionary, more vital legacy for Bush than the Iraq War, which cost at least $120 billion if not more and endangered if not destroyed many lives.

All that money, spent on firepower to supposedly help another country, while we now have people here who desperately need government intervention and have little to show at the moment.

A president who determines to put his money where his mouth is, a (this sounds banal) white wealthy president rebuilding a city mostly populated by the black poor, a city that otherwise will just be eerie ruins sitting in a bog and lost eventually to history.

A city that can be built from scratch in light of current economical and racial relations, a city that has a chance to be unified from the start instead of stuck with decades of poor planning and social slump.

I can’t imagine a more enduring legacy, or something that would shine in the hearts of democrats and republicans alike as an example of the affirmation of life, equality, and unity that the president has long preached but not really delivered on.

What is George W Bush made of? His response to New Orleans will reveal a great deal.