Our back pages

So after Superstorm Sandy hit and Obama and Chris Christie got together and had a nice moment on the beach, it was all good, right? Maybe not so much:

Seventeen months after Congress authorized up to $16 billion to fix homes wrecked by superstorm Sandy, tens of thousands of people still are living in damaged houses or paying rent on top of a mortgage as they wait for rebuilding help.

About 15,000 New York City residents are seeking aid, but city officials say only 352 have so far received a check or city-provided home construction.

But how could that be? The nice moment and all. Remember when the Leader of the Free World said this?

The day after the storm, for instance, President Barack Obama said, "My message to the federal government: No bureaucracy, no red tape."

No aid, either, apparently:

Allison Galdorisi and Claire Watson are trying to hold on. Their bungalow in Staten Island's New Dorp Beach neighborhood was inundated. They need $173,000 to repair and elevate the home.

They applied for aid in June, but their case was held up until November by paperwork issues. In December, they learned they had been placed in the second tier of New York City's three-tier distribution system, behind people with lower incomes whose homes might have been less damaged.

They don't know when reconstruction will begin and are paying for both a mortgage and a rental home. "I'm going to be using all of my insurance money to pay rent and expenses," said Ms. Galdorisi, a 49-year-old real-estate appraiser.

Huh. Go figure. The invaluable Walter Russell Mead noticed something else, too:

Stories like this used to get a lot of ink when George W. Bush was in the White House and the press couldn’t say enough about the botched recovery after Katrina. But now that the greatest President since Lincoln occupies the Oval Office, trivial stories like agonizingly slow hurricane recoveries bore our enlightened press corps to tears.

There is a clear message here: if you hate bad news, vote the straight Democratic ticket. True, bad things will still happen, but instead of rubbing your nose in them day after day, the press will say as little about them as is humanly possible. 

Hey, we have much more important topics to discuss.