NEW ORLEANS—Visiting residents on tidy porch stoops and sampling the fried chicken at a corner restaurant, President Barack Obama held out the people of New Orleans on Thursday as an extraordinary example of renewal and resilience 10 years after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.
“There’s something in you guys that is just irrepressible,” Obama told hundreds of residents assembled at a bustling new community center in an area of the Lower 9th Ward that was once under 17 feet of water. “The people of New Orleans didn’t just inspire me, you inspired all of America.”
He held out the city’s comeback as a metaphor for what’s happening all across a nation that has moved from economic crisis to higher ground.
“Look at what’s happened here,” he declared, speaking of a transformed American city that was once “dark and underwater.”
