Bush Marks Katrina's 2nd Anniversary

President Bush points towards two bridges rebuilt after Hurricane Katrina as he speaks about the Mississippi rebuilding efforts Wednesday, August 29, 2007, in Bay St. Louis, Miss. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci) (Evan Vucci - AP)

The president pointed to bridge construction, levee fortification and reopened schools.

"There's been a lot of progress made, and that's what people have go to understand," he said, the ongoing rebuilding of a vital two-mile bridge connecting in Bay St. Louis and Pass Christian, Miss., visible behind him. Two of the span's lanes finally were completed in May, with the other two slated for November _ well after a parallel railroad bridge was completed by the private sector, to locals' dismay.

Kim Griffin, a New Orleans native and the designer of a bronze angel statue to be erected at the center of a Katrina memorial, said Bush's visit was uplifting. "As long as he was in the city, he was showing he cared, and that's important right now," she said.

Presidential candidates from both parties weighed in, decrying the government's performance and promising better. Democrat John Edwards, who launched his campaign from New Orleans, was the most scathing. "If George Bush's government were as good and decent and focused as the people of New Orleans, whole parts of the city would not still look like the storm just hit," he said.

Choosing a charter school and a new mixed-income housing development as his backdrops in New Orleans, the president appeared to showcase the city as a laboratory for how his belief in smaller, more market-based government could remake a community.

"The hurricane was disastrous for many reasons, but it also gave a great opportunity for a new way forward," he said.

For instance, the city's underperforming public school system has trended since Katrina toward reformed traditional schools and charter schools, which comprise a large chunk of the schools to reopen this fall. Accordingly, Bush took the opportunity to extol his belief in competition and choice in public school.

The River Garden housing complex gave the president a chance to show off another hotly debated effort by the federal government: replacing New Orleans' rundown projects with developments that have a mix of housing types and income levels.

Katrina was commemorated at dozens of locations around the city, across southeastern Louisiana and in Mississippi.

In Gulfport, Miss., Gov. Haley Barbour urged people to see the positive. On the neatly manicured town green of Biloxi, Miss., about 100 people prayed and sang in the shadow of a Katrina monument. Services were held at New Orleans' historic St. Louis Cathedral in the French Quarter. Mourners tossed a wreath into the water near the spot where a levee breach led to the inundation of the Lower 9th Ward.

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin presided over the tolling of bells to remember when levees were breached, sending water pouring into the city. "We ring the bells for a city that is in recovery, that is struggling, that is performing miracles on a daily basis," said an emotional Nagin at the Katrina memorial groundbreaking in a local cemetery.

But across town, also at 9:38 a.m., Bush chose a moment of silence as the appropriate way to mark the levee disaster. He was accompanied by Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco, who chose him over joining Nagin, her fellow Democrat.

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Associated Press writers Mary Foster, Cain Burdeau, Alan Sayre and Stacey Plaisance in New Orleans and Becky Bohrer in Biloxi, contributed to this report.