Jonathan Alter does a service to all voters in a recent piece in Newsweek by doing what I wish more journalists did: holding politicians accountable.

Some readers told me at the time that this was naive–that the president, if not indifferent to the problems of black people, as the singer Kanye West charged, was not going to do anything significant to help them. At first this seemed too cynical. The week after the article appeared, Bush went to Jackson Square in New Orleans and made televised promises not only for Katrina relief but to address some of the underlying struggles of the poor. He proposed ‘worker recovery accounts’ to help evacuees find work by paying for job training, school and child care; an Urban Homesteading Act that would make empty lots and loans available to the poor to start over, and a Gulf Enterprise Zone to spur business investment in poor areas. Small ideas, perhaps, but good ones.

Well, it turned out that the critics were largely right. Not only has the president done much less than he promised on the financing and logistics of Gulf Coast recovery, he has dropped the ball entirely on using the storm and its aftermath as an opportunity to fight poverty. Worker recovery accounts and urban homesteading never got off the ground, and the new enterprise zone is mostly an opportunity for Southern companies owned by GOP campaign contributors to make some money in New Orleans. The mood in Washington continues to be one of not-so-benign neglect of the problems of the poor.

Wouldn’t it be great if major dailies everywhere put together criticism like this 6 months after the State of the Union and other major policy addresses? The politicians do wonders as far as roadmaps and bullet points, but who comes back and assesses progress down the road? Rarely these same politicians, rarely the media, and, unfortunately it seems, rarely voters. We try to do this in a limited way with Liberadio, and maybe we can improve the job we’re doing. Care to help?

hat tip: Howard Kurtz, who offers a nice prelude commentary of his own on the notion of anniversary journalism, which he largely (and correctly, in my opinion) derides as a crock.

This post was written by Freddie