John Edwards, who ran for president in 2004 on the premise that there are "two Americas" and he's the one to unite them, launched his second campaign for the White House recently at a construction site in New Orleans. He'll be well-positioned in the coming debate over Katrina. He has spent the better part of four years stumping around the country on the need for a new war on poverty. And for many Americans, Katrina provided proof positive that there really are two Americas--one wealthy and savvy enough to help itself even in the most desperate of situations, and a second constantly and consistently abandoned by the first, especially in its hours of need.

President Bush hasn't maneuvered himself into a defensible position in this debate. It's not because he lacks compassion or hasn't opened the federal purse to those hit by the storm. To date, the federal government has allocated some $110 billion for recovery and reconstruction. The Small Business Administration has cut tens of thousands of checks. And the Federal Emergency Management Agency announced recently that it is extending deadlines for tens of thousands of people displaced by the storm and still living in federally subsidized housing. They'll now have Uncle Sam as a benevolent landlord until at least August, some two years after the storm came ashore.

Mr. Bush's problem is that he's sitting in the Oval Office at a time when the nation has forgotten what functional inner cities look like and how, precisely, to build and rebuild them. That's understandable for a president who won the White House by winning 97 of the 100 fastest-growing counties in America. Those counties are predominately suburban and often populated by residents who've fled the inner-city core of their metro areas. As residents have fled the inner cities, politicians and public policies have followed them. Today, our political leaders expend more energy on issues confronting suburban soccer moms--roads, "smart growth," schools--than in reconstituting our downtowns.

Rudy Giuliani, another White House contender, does not suffer from the affliction that has left our political class paralyzed in fixing our urban areas. Even before the terrorist attacks on New York in 2001, he won national acclaim precisely for imposing order on what was becoming an uninhabitable city. But even he merely cleaned up a city by returning it to how it should have functioned all along. That is to say, he started locking up criminals and enforcing quality-of-life offenses. Reinventing a city or rebuilding it from the ground up is something altogether more difficult than anything Mr. Giuliani faced in New York. Without a broad consensus on what the city should look like, rebuilding will move at about the pace construction has proceeded at the World Trade Center site. More than five years on and only in recent months has anything meaningful begun to happen at the bottom of the pit.

All this may be for the good. But New Orleans got off to an inauspicious start this year. A crime wave swept the city, culminated in a spree of six murders in a 24-hour period. One Times-Picayune headline read "The Criminal Came Back," a characterization Mr. Nagin doesn't dispute. He says each time federal officials threaten to shut off housing subsidies for displaced New Orleans residents, a new wave of criminals turns up on the city's streets. It comes down to a question of where the criminals would prefer to be homeless, he said, in a place they know, or in Atlanta, Dallas, Houston or one of a handful of other cities still hosting storm refugees. He says he's working to get a handle on the violence, but a few weeks ago thousands of city residents lost patience with him and marched in protest. At least one carried a sign calling for Mr. Nagin to be recalled.

With crime, public housing and growing political discontent with his leadership in mind, I put this question to the mayor: At what point will former New Orleans residents displaced by the storm be considered residents of their new cities?

Mr. Nagin's response suggested that he hasn't been asked the question very often and doesn't yet have a good response to it. He paused, blinked and then said that the coming year will be pivotal in determining who will return to the city. But until New Orleans reaches a point at which it's no longer a captive of those who fled and instead becomes a magnet, a functional city in is own right, there's likely nothing President Bush could say from the podium in Washington that will restore the Crescent City to its former beauty.

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