Bush Plan a Solid Start, but Key Is in the Execution

Give President Bush this: standing in an empty Jackson Square on Thursday night, he finally said the words the country had been waiting three weeks to hear. The federal response to Hurricane Katrina was inadequate, and he is responsible for it.

The speech went further than contrition. A Gulf Opportunity Zone, worker recovery accounts, urban homesteading — whatever one thinks of the specifics, this is a president proposing to spend federal money on a scale that recalls the New Deal, aimed at a region and a population his party's policies have rarely favored.

The poverty plank deserves particular note. It took a televised catastrophe for a national leader to say plainly what statistics have said quietly for decades: that the poor — disproportionately black, disproportionately without cars, savings or flood insurance — cannot evacuate themselves out of a hurricane's path.

But the history of grand federal promises is a history of execution. The same administration that could not deliver ice to a convention center in five days now proposes to rebuild a region of 90,000 square miles. The money will flow — Congress has already approved $62 billion with more coming — and the temptation to hand it to the usual contractors without strings will be enormous.

Three things will tell us whether the promise is real. First, whether the spending carries real accountability — an independent inspector general with teeth, not a press release. Second, whether displaced residents get a say in what is rebuilt, or merely a view of it. Third, whether the poverty rhetoric survives contact with the appropriations process.

The president said Thursday night that America cannot imagine itself without New Orleans. He is right. The harder test is whether Washington can imagine a bureaucracy capable of keeping the promise.