Meanwhile, of the 463,000 New Orleans residents displaced by Hurricane Katrina a year ago, fewer than half have returned home. A big majority of the city's black citizens remain stranded far from their neighborhoods, friends and families.

In southern Lebanon, Hezbollah is winning praise for its efforts. On the Gulf Coast, many of those who have managed to return home still feel abandoned, and those who are trying to put their lives together somewhere else feel betrayed. A USA Today poll last week found that 16 percent of Hurricane Katrina's victims say their lives have returned to normal. Two-thirds say the federal and state governments failed them.

Following the hurricane, George W. Bush took his time getting down to New Orleans. When he finally arrived, more than two weeks after the storm, he made a speech that included a big promise: "We have a duty to confront [New Orleans'] poverty with bold action," the president said. "We will do what it takes, we will stay as long as it takes to help citizens rebuild their communities and their lives."

In greater New Orleans, more than 100,000 homes remain ruined and empty. In the old black neighborhoods, a vast ghost town rots even as the French Quarter has started swinging again.

The president's pledge to rapidly launch "one of the largest reconstruction efforts the world has ever seen" turns out to have been made of the same stuff as his promise to quickly turn Iraq into a shining beacon of democracy.

As has been well documented, there is plenty of blame to go around. It was partly the city's fault when, shortly after the storm, Treasury Secretary John Snow refused to guarantee New Orleans' municipal bonds, forcing the city to lay off thousands of workers. And the state of Louisiana's past difficulties are partly responsible for the fact that the Bush administration refused to fork over a share of the income generated by its offshore oil and gas leases.

But a catastrophe of the scope of Hurricane Katrina calls for national leadership — and that has been sorely lacking.

The region's recovery must begin with the rebuilding of new levees, and that is clearly the federal government's responsibility. Help for the 200,000 homeowners whose insurance did not cover their losses must come from Washington. The public housing that sheltered the city's poorest inhabitants was — is — a federal responsibility.

In his speech in New Orleans, the president recognized that the disaster on the Gulf Coast revealed the tip of an ugly iceberg.

"There's some deep, persistent poverty in this region," he said. "That poverty has roots in a history of racial discrimination, which cut off generations from the opportunity of America. We have a duty to confront this poverty with bold action."

Yes. And one year later it is clear that he has failed — and we have failed — in this duty. In his State of the Union address six months later, the president did not mention domestic poverty, and the budget that he submitted a few weeks later contained no new initiatives directed at the poor.

Jimmy Carter, interviewed in Mother Jones magazine last month, was typically blunt and clearheaded. "There has been some verbal recognition of the plight of the poor, but when you look at the total commitment [to] the poorest people in the Katrina region, help has been pretty well absent," he said. "I think this has been a scandalous thing for the Bush administration, something that has been acknowledged not just by critics like me but by the Congress itself. The neglect of the poorest people suffering in New Orleans and other places has been a complete embarrassment."

The anniversary of the storm should be taken as an opportunity to demand better.