Viewpoint: Presidents visit, secretaries bring checks

It’s been a week since President Barack Obama spent his half day in New Orleans, LaPolitics columnist John Maginnis writes, but the visit deserves a postscript, beginning with, all together now, a huge sigh of relief that he left when he did. When his itinerary was announced — a visit to a Ninth Ward school, a town hall meeting and take-out lunch from Dooky Chase’s — it was greeted by a chorus of dismay that he was giving short shrift to the four-year-old Katrina recovery effort, that he needed to go to Chalmette and Lakeview and — don’t forget Rita — Lake Charles. Moreover, the complaints went, he was completely ignoring the ongoing disaster of coastal erosion by not helicoptering over the open waters of the gulf to view where the land used to be. The salt in the wound was that he was departing early for a Democratic Party fundraiser in San Francisco. In cool hindsight, though, consider the flip side of be-careful-what-you-ask-for, which is be-glad-for-what-you-didn’t-get. Had the president stayed overnight, he would have wakened to the headlines of the yahoo justice of the peace in Tangipahoa Parish who refused to marry interracial couples out of concern for the children of those unions. To read the full column, click here.