Letter from New Orleans: Three months after Hurricane Katrina's epic flooding, New Orleans is a broken city, abandoned by America.
TV news celebrities who flocked here for the disaster backdrops are gone. The sweeping recovery Mr Bush promised in a speech at Jackson Square produced a backlash.
Faced with a soaring debt from tax cuts and the Iraq war, Republicans recoil from the cost of his promises.
Louisiana senators Mary Landrieu, a Democrat, and David Vitter, a Republican, floated a $250 billion aid measure "that surprised even jaded Washington veterans with the extent of its overreach into unrelated special interest projects", confides one veteran insider.
Congress allocated base funds for emergency services, and to investigate the failure of earthen levees that were to protect the city, maintained by the Army Corps of Engineers.
A National Science Foundation investigation has concluded that the Army Corps and its subcontractors did not dig deep enough in securing a key floodwall.
"This is the largest civil engineering disaster in the history of the United States," Robert Bea, a University of California, Berkeley, consulting professor told the Times-Picayune newspaper.
Meanwhile, the Federal Emergency Management Agency failed to provide interim housing for tens of thousands displaced to other states. New Orleans, which had 450,000 people, has 100,000 back in their homes.
Entire neighbourhoods are dark at night; no people, no power, ghost towns. Many people clamouring to return cannot. They have no place to live; their streets have no electricity.
The "target neighbourhoods", as Mayor C Ray Nagin calls those that have rebounded, lie on dry ridges of the sub-sea level terrain, notably the French Quarter, the elegant Garden District, quaint Algiers and leafy Uptown.
Life in these areas is quasi-normal, with supermarkets, restaurants, even wine stores. Drive a few minutes from anywhere dry and you'll see mounds of debris, trashed buildings, the signs of shattered lives.
Moon Landrieu (the senator's father) was the visionary mayor of the 1970s when the Superdome was built. His house is on a dark Uptown street. Dark too is the home of Fats Domino, who sold 100 million records, in the working class Ninth Ward.
Entergy, the utility company, lost much of its infrastructure and filed for temporary relief from creditors. Day by day power trickles back while the economy starves. Federally-paid contractors pour in from other states, taking jobs that would help locals get on their feet.
Leadership collapsed from the White House to the governor's mansion in Baton Rouge to City Hall. Bush makes periodic remarks about needing to help "the people down in Katrina" (we are a new geography), but the recovery fades as he promotes the Iraq war.
Governor Kathleen Blanco's petrified presence on TV early in the crisis has locals calling her "Mee Maw".
Blanco appointed a blue-ribbon Louisiana Recovery Authority after Mayor Nagin appointed his Bring New Orleans Back Commission, the two ventures encompassing some 35 experts. Nagin got the Urban Land Institute, a Washington think-tank financed by property developers, to produce a sweeping design for a "new" city with parks supplanting dead houses. Congressional parsimony suggests a future of tour busses through dead neighbourhoods of our Pompeii on the Mississippi.
Nagin's criticism of Washington during the flood softened into a lack of urgency after dinners with Bush. The mayor vacationed in Jamaica over Thanksgiving with his wife and children, who attend schools in Texas.
Our public school system is being slowly dismantled. A charter-school movement of parents seeking grassroots involvement has won support of the legislature, auguring good schools in the better neighbourhoods, a question mark in poor ones.
The old city was 62 per cent African-American, with half of those at poverty level. Violent crime has plummeted; the new city is much whiter. Academics say that when masses of poor folk leave they're unlikely to return. Optimists here who say "now we can get it right" (a city with all the culture, plus better schools and infrastructure) seem oblivious to the need for workers at the hotels, casinos, bars, restaurants on which tourism thrived. They need places to live.
The hard part comes in those spontaneous reunions, as you stand in line and ask: "How did you do?" Some say: "We came out okay". Others take longer, with choked pauses, to tell you about houses that took eight feet; furniture trashed; books, clothes, family photos now mounds of muck; kin scattered; battles with insurance adjusters.
Will the levees fail next year? Who will return? We live in the country that put men on the moon.
Jason Berry is a journalist living in New Orleans