Bush Legacy Tour

BATON ROUGE & NEW ORLEANS, LA-

We made a quick stop at Tulane University Friday afternoon.

Students at Tulane University viewing the Katrina exhibit.

NEW ORLEANS, LA:

New Orleans was a much-anticipated stop for the Bush Legacy Tour. Our exhibit on Katrina makes the strongest impact of all of our exhibits. All across the country, we have had people leave the bus in tears after seeing the images of hurricane victims flash across the screen and reliving the events before and after the levees broke.  Katrina is certainly seen as the defining failure of the Bush Presidency.  Driving a bus through New Orleans wrapped with Bush’s picture and a list of his failures on the side (Katrina being one of them) proved to be an interesting experience.  Most of the people we drove by stared in disbelief at the bus. Some people showed signs of approval after reading that it was by no means a positive Bush Bus.

We certainly did not expect to teach the locals at our event in the Lower 9th Ward on Saturday, anything they did not already know about the failed response to Katrina. The stop was symbolic and the purpose was to show that we will not let history forget about the Bush administration’s horribly botched response to Katrina or any of the other conservative failures of the last eight years.  The purpose of the Katrina exhibit and the stop in New Orleans was to show that a conservative government that is fundamentally opposed to government itself- is bound to fail at its most important priority-to protect its citizens.

Driving through the Lower 9th Ward, we see there is still much to be done to rebuild and that many of the homes have remained vacant.  Many still have the death count spray-painted on their front doors. It is common that families that return and rehabilitate their homes, leave the spray paint on to represent their loss and the fact that they had to do the rebuilding themselves. Yet, so many of the homes are left boarded up as only about 10% of the neighborhood has returned. Although Gustav showed a marked improvement in the federal government’s response, it appears that the government has washed its hands of the Lower 9th Ward. 

 The Bush Legacy will be defined by the response to Katrina. Long after George W. Bush is out of office, the people of New Orleans will be living with remnants of one of his administration’s biggest failures.

The bus in front of the Superdome.

The Bush Legacy Tour and one of New Orlean's "cities of the dead."

The bus at the Saturday morning stop in front of the 9th Ward Village Organization, in the neighborhood that has been an icon of the destruction of Katrina.

A children's mural inside the Lower 9th Ward Village Organization.