John Kerry: “last Friday, May 5, at the invitation of Senator Landrieu, I went down to New Orleans, LA, for a second trip to the…”

“last Friday, May 5, at the invitation of Senator Landrieu, I went down to New Orleans, LA, for a second trip to the State since the hurricane. I wanted to have a chance to be able to get around the city, meet with people, and measure the recovery effort up close and personally now that we are 8\1/2\ months since Hurricane Katrina. Let me, first of all, express my gratitude to Senator Landrieu who has been tireless, as I know Senator Vitter has. They both have been pushing hard for their State, as they ought to. But I particularly want to thank Senator Landrieu who spent the day with me and who, together with me, sat through a small business roundtable with a great many small businesspeople in New Orleans who were struggling to make things work in the aftermath of the hurricane. She took me around New Orleans East, and we drove through on the interstate, able to see on both sides of the interstate the still- current state of abandonment of so much of the city. The statistics somehow don't really convey what is happening there and what is not happening there. I know Washington is a tough place to make anything mean anything right now. We are caught up in an awful lot of partisanship, and there is a lot of back and forth and not a whole lot that is going on legislatively as a consequence of that, though we all hope there is going to be a breakthrough on the immigration bill in the next days.…”