Green Articles
Clinton: Storm recovery will be a top priority
Ex-president touts wife's agenda, record
By Michelle Krupa : Times-Picayune : February 09, 2008
Long before she declared her candidacy for president, U.S. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton strongly supported Gulf Coast recovery efforts, and if elected, she would make rebuilding a central plank of her domestic agenda, former President Clinton told a crowd at Dillard University on Friday.
Speaking as his wife's surrogate on the morning before the state's primary, Clinton said no member of Congress outside the Louisiana delegation has done more to help the state recover from the 2005 hurricanes than Hillary Clinton, who represents New York and is in a tough campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination.
"I hope a lot of people will be there for Hillary as she has been there for you," the former president said during a 50-minute speech at Lawless Memorial Chapel on Dillard's Gentilly campus.
Clinton addressed a crowd of about 200 people as he kicked off a 12-hour swing through the Bayou State. After leaving New Orleans, Clinton made a stop at a restaurant in LaPlace, then headlined events in Baton Rouge, Lafayette, Lake Charles and Monroe.
Though Clinton drew echoing applause from the Dillard crowd when he cited his wife's proposals for providing universal health insurance coverage and reducing expenses tied to borrowing money for college, the scene inside the chapel -- a quarter of the wooden pew seats never filled up -- stood in contrast to Thursday's visit to New Orleans by her main opponent, U.S. Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, who drew more than 3,500 people to a packed arena -- and 500 outside -- at Tulane University.
The disparity may have owed to advertising for the events: Word of the time and location of Obama's speech was widely known a full day before the candidate arrived, while details of Clinton's visit circulated Thursday evening.
Several attendees Friday said they wished Hillary Clinton, who in May delivered the commencement address at Dillard, had returned to the campus that took on 8 feet of water when the federal levees breached.
"I'm disappointed that she didn't come herself," said Brandon Love, 21, a political science major from Metairie.
In plugging his wife's campaign, the former president stayed away from broad emotional declarations, focusing instead on the intricacies of issues at the heart of the platform. Nodding to his New Orleans audience, he said that if elected, Hillary Clinton would work to organize a catastrophic insurance market so victims of disasters can avoid the wind-versus-flood debates that delayed payments for many homeowners after Katrina.
As the first presidential candidate to unveil a comprehensive Gulf Coast recovery agenda, his wife also would offer financial incentives "to accelerate the pace at which construction and reconstruction are done because that will grow the economy and that will create jobs so that maybe you all will be able to stay here," Clinton told the audience of mostly college students.
Clinton also took a swipe at the message of "change" that has fueled a surge in the Obama campaign in recent months. He noted that unlike her opponent, Hillary Rodham Clinton has spent a long career as a lawyer and a politician working to improve laws related to issues such as the protection of child abuse victims and the rights of special education students.
"You need to think about what you think is most important in a president: Is it more important to have someone who represents change because they've not been involved in past struggles?" he asked. "Or is it more important to have a president who's a world-class change-maker?"
Sitting in the front row with their 15-month-old twins, Michele Allen-Hart and Jody Hart said they attended Friday's event to support their candidate's positions on the Iraq war and the protection of constitutional freedoms. They also saw the event as an important historical moment for their children, Jody Hart said.
"It sure would be good to show them pictures of themselves at a campaign rally for the first woman president," he said.
After the Dillard speech, Clinton stopped briefly at Bully's Halfway House, a restaurant in LaPlace, where deputies from the St. John the Baptist Parish Sheriff's Office had gathered to greet him in a nearby gravel lot.
When the former president emerged from his caravan, Sheriff Wayne Jones thanked him for providing money to the Sheriff's Office in the 1990s through the federal Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, known as COPS.
"You helped us a lot back then," Jones said.