Bush Says Katrina Recovery Just Starting

President Bush meets a group of soldiers after landing at Kessler Air Force base on Monday, Aug. 28, 2006 in Biloxi, Miss. President Bush on Monday marked the anniversary of the hurricane that still haunts his presidency with worries that a new tropical storm could bring the first test of his promise that the botched post-Katrina response will not be repeated. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci) (Evan Vucci - AP)

On Tuesday, the actual anniversary of Katrina, Bush has a half-day of events in New Orleans.

"There is a division over there," Thomas "Lynn" Patterson, who gave Bush a tour of his new home in Biloxi, said about New Orleans. "There's not the same division over here."

When Bush visited Patterson's neighborhood right after the storm, the 61-year-old was digging cars out of the muck. Patterson said Bush told him then that he wanted to make sure that people got the aid they needed.

"He hasn't forgotten it," said Patterson. "We don't expect him to pull out his wallet and write a check for us. He personally would do it if he could because he's a passionate guy."

When Katrina struck Biloxi, 100-mph-plus winds and a wall of water obliterated a bridge and splintered houses like matchsticks. Water topped rooftops. Entire neighborhoods were washed away.

Today, seven of the city's gambling emporiums, which employed 15,000 people before Katrina, have reopened or are close to doing so. Still, just blocks away from the gambling resorts, rebuilding is sparse. It's a city where buildings still carry spray-painted messages appealing for help from insurance companies.

Bush had lunch at the Biloxi Schooner Seafood Restaurant, where owner Joe Lancon fed the president and other government officials fried shrimp, stuffed crab and gumbo. Lancon reopened the restaurant in the west end of the city after losing two restaurants in Katrina's 28-foot tidal surge.

Asked if he wanted to rebuild at his original site closer to the water, Lancon replied: "Do I want to? Yes. Am I? I don't know. The water really kinda has me second-guessing whether I'm going to go back down there."

"It's going to take a while for Biloxi to get back to normal," said Lancon, a native whose grandfather was a shrimp peeler. "I would say maybe five years. It's a slow building process."

Nationwide polls give Bush low marks on Katrina. An AP-Ipsos poll earlier this month showed 67 percent disapproved of his handling of the disaster.

With Hurricane Ernesto bearing down on Florida, Democrats have been coordinating a political assault on the Bush administration's Katrina response, hoping to sway voters to cast ballots against Republicans in the upcoming congressional elections and beyond.

House Democrats on Monday toured devastated areas of New Orleans and decried the slow pace of recovery. "I think the American public is going to be very, very surprised to know this recovery is way, way behind what their expectations would have been," Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., said after a tour that took more than a dozen Democratic members of Congress through the heavily hit Ninth Ward.

"It's hard to believe this is the United States," said Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md.

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Associated Press Writer Mike Kunzelman in Biloxi contributed to this report.