Bush tours Katrina- damaged Gulf Coast

BAY ST. LOUIS, Miss. -- President Bush, visiting the hurricane-ravaged Gulf Coast Thursday for the first time in three months, hailed marked improvement despite warnings to lower his expectations about the pace of recovery.\n"I will tell you, the contrast between when I was last here and today is pretty dramatic," Bush said. "From when I first came here to today, New Orleans is reminding me of the city I used to visit."\nThe president met privately with small business owners and local government officials in the New Orleans visitors bureau, located in the Lower Garden District neighborhood that was not flooded. The area suffered little impact from the storm, and his motorcade passed stately homes with very little damage.\nBush praised the city's success in bringing much of its infrastructure back. He touted it as a "great place to have a convention" and as an attractive tourist destination.\n"It's a heck of a place to bring your family," said Bush, seated before a colorful mural depicting jazz musicians, a river boat and masked Mardi Gras revelers. "It's a great place to find some of the greatest food in the world and it's a heck of a lot of fun," he said.\nAfter meeting with Mayor Ray Nagin and other elected officials, Bush was restating his commitment to rebuild during a speech in the crumbled town of Bay St. Louis, Miss. There, trees still lay snapped in half, debris is strewn across the landscape and people are living in tents and trailers in front of homes with missing roofs and shattered windows.\nMany commercial buildings were destroyed. Some of those still operating among the wreckage displayed yard signs that said, "We are staying!"\nBush's message was that although recovery will be long and expensive, the federal government is in it for the long haul, said White House spokesman Trent Duffy.\n"The destruction down there looks like it just happened yesterday," Duffy said. "It's easy for people outside the region to forget the challenges they still face."\nWhite House Chief of Staff Andy Card said Wednesday that although the emotions from the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina have passed, there is still need for government help. He said he warned Bush to be prepared to see lingering destruction.\n"I had to manage his expectations this morning, because while there has been great progress, there continues to be great need -- indescribable need," Card said in a speech to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.\nCard said the Gulf Coast economy is struggling and only about half of the 90 million tons of debris from Hurricane Katrina in August has been cleared.\nIn New Orleans, many neighborhoods are still abandoned wastelands, with uninhabitable homes, no working street lights and sidewalks piled with moldy garbage. The levee system is as vulnerable as ever. Barely a quarter of the 400,000 people who fled have come back, demographers estimate.\nBush said from the visitor's bureau that the federal government has made $85 billion available so far to hurricane recovery, $25 billion of which has been spent.\nHe rapped Congress for diverting $1.4 billion of the levee rebuilding money to non-New Orleans-related projects. \n"Congress needs to restore that $1.4 billion," he said.\nBush hasn't been to the coast since a trip to Louisiana and Mississippi Oct. 10 and 11.\nHe was initially criticized for a slow federal response to the disaster, then made eight trips to the region in six weeks, and the White House hardly went a day without an event or mention of the challenges there.\nThen Bush shifted his focus to Iraq and a series of recent speeches designed to defend against growing criticism of the war. Eager to show that his attention to Katrina victims continues, the White House announced last month that the government would pay to rebuild New Orleans' shattered levee system taller and stronger than before.\n-- Associated Press writer Jennifer Loven contributed to this report from New Orleans.