PLast week, President Bush gave another one of those speeches his wordsmiths carefully craft with his legacy on their minds. And what a legacy they’ve dreamed up: capturing Osama Bin Laden “dead or alive”; “Mission accomplished” in Iraq. We can now add to this list of empty promises Bush’s grand words from New Orleans.

“Let us rise above the legacy of inequality,” the president declared of the racialized economic depravation that has long been the true hallmark of both New Orleans and the Gulf Coast at large.

He ticked off a host of big ideas for achieving that mission, adding up to what observers have estimated to be $200 billion worth of initiatives.

But sun had barely risen the next day before it became clear just how little action we could expect from his words.

Bush refused to discuss rolling back the tax cuts for the nation's most wealthy that he shoved through Congress, and instead told lawmakers to find spending cuts in social programs to pay for the massive rebuilding initiative -- a fanciful goal that even House Majority Leader Tom DeLay suggested would be hard to achieve.

In fact, the administration's ongoing assault on social programs is a large part of why Katrina's devastation has been felt so powerfully. Even before the storm hit, Mississippi had the highest poverty rate in the nation and Louisiana had the second highest.

Although the president acknowledged the housing crisis the storm has created, one of his
administration's longstanding legislative priorities has been to scale back rental assistance to poor families nationwide. In keeping with that goal, Bush's relief plan hasn't even nodded in the direction of distributing such vouchers.

Instead, he proposes donating federal land for people to build new homes on, funded either by a "favorable mortgage rate" or the largesse of nonprofit builders. That's a useful but entirely insufficient response. The average unemployment insurance in the three affected
states brings a family of four's income to only about half the poverty line.

The president also called for the creation of economic empowerment zones to create jobs. But here again, the administration's vision is limited to tax cuts -- an estimated $1.7 billion for businesses that take advantage of the newly dubbed "GO Zone." As a number of economists
have already pointed out, such initiatives have rarely proven to generate economic activity in
areas businesses hadn't already targeted.

Meanwhile, the president's plan does little to face the region's already acute health-care crisis. Bush has pledged only to negotiate, on a state-by-state basis, whether states can lift rules limiting who qualifies for Medicaid, and then only through January.

Survivors who don't happen to be disabled, children or parents of kids under 18 won't qualify unless the rules are lifted.

At the same time, the administration is working to strip Medicaid -- already nearly bankrupt in most states around the nation -- of $10 billion in federal funds over the next five years.

"I know that when you sit on the steps of a porch where a home once stood, or sleep on a cot in a crowded shelter, it is hard to imagine a bright future," the president told Katrina's survivors. "But that future will come."

These were odd words from an administration that has done woefully little to date to brighten those same people's future.

As long as the vision remains limited, the words will remain hollow.

A version of this op-ed was syndicated to newspapers around the country through The Progressive Media Project.