New Orleans: President Barack Obama strolled on Thursday through a historic African-American community in New Orleans, savouring the city's fortitude 10 years after it was ravaged by Hurricane Katrina.
Obama was in New Orleans to praise its "extraordinary resilience" a decade after the storm devastated the "Big Easy" and shattered Americans' confidence in government.
With shirt sleeves rolled up, the president greeted residents among the new pastel paint and wood-shuttered windows in Treme, crediting partnerships between local, state and federal government for the resurrection of the historic neighbourhood.
"Like so much of this area it was devastated during the storm," Obama said, as he took in a revitalised Magic Street.
"Now just because the housing is nice doesn't mean our job is done.
"This is a community, obviously, that still has a lot of poverty... But the fact that we can make this many strides 10 years after a terrible, epic disaster, I think is an indication of the kind of spirit that we have in this city."
He then headed to lunch at Willie Mae's Scotch House, famous for its fried chicken, where the president was to eat under the overhead fans with a group of local young men, and New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu and Congressman Cedric Richmond.
Obama had landed at Armstrong International Airport early Thursday, greeted by Louisiana Governor and Republican presidential candidate Bobby Jindal, Senator Bill Cassidy and Landrieu.
In the afternoon, Obama went to the Lower Ninth Ward, a poor neighbourhood which Katrina made as synonymous with New Orleans as Dixieland jazz or Mardi Gras on Bourbon Street.
"This new community centre stands as a symbol of the extraordinary resilience of this city and its people," Obama is expected to say later, according to excerpts released by the White House.
"You are an example of what's possible when, in the face of tragedy and hardship, good people come together to lend a hand, and to build a better future."
Obama's trip was intended to mark the rebirth of a city eulogised by Tennessee Williams as the "last frontier of Bohemia," but which in August 2005 became a nightmare of death and looting.
More than 1,800 people were killed and one million more displaced when Katrina barrelled in from the Gulf of Mexico, destroying levees and submerging 80 percent of the city in effluent-tainted storm water.
Americans watched shocked as stranded survivors waited day after day on rooftops for government help that was painfully slow to come.
Obama contrasted that troubled initial response with more successful efforts to resurrect New Orleans: An allegory of what happens when government gets it wrong, and what happens when government gets it right.
"What started out as a natural disaster became a manmade one – a failure of government to look out for its own citizens," he is expected to say.
The implicit contrast is between his administration's efforts to get New Orleans back on its feet and George W. Bush's initial vacillation.
The storm surge scarred the city, but also forged a high watermark of criticism of Bush's administration.
A photograph of a concerned but detached president Bush viewing the damage from Air Force One has become emblematic of the politics of the crisis.
But Obama risks looking similarly out of touch if he too strongly talks up New Orleans' recovery.
That message "would resonate more with the city's white residents than with its black residents," said Michael Henderson, of Louisiana State University.
According to a recent LSU poll, the vast majority of white people in the city believe Louisiana has mostly recovered from "the storm."
Three in five black residents, however, say it has not.
Strong local support for Obama and his Democrats will prevent a backlash, even if his message "does not fully mesh with many residents' own views or experiences," said Henderson.
Obama is expected to echo words he spoke as a senator: "New Orleans had long been plagued by structural inequality that left too many people, especially poor people of colour, without good jobs or affordable health care or decent housing.
"Too many kids grew up surrounded by violent crime, cycling through substandard schools where few had a shot to break out of poverty."