NEW ORLEANS (AP) – After a three-month absence from the hurricane-ravaged Gulf Coast, President Bush offered a fresh commitment to the region’s long, expensive rebuilding and spoke optimistically about progress in a New Orleans seething over proposals for bringing back the still-ruined city.

Bush dropped in on two of the towns hardest-hit when Hurricane Katrina slammed ashore Aug. 29 – New Orleans, the majority of which was flooded after levees failed, and Bay St. Louis on the Mississippi coast, most of it shattered into sticks by the punishing winds.

The president liberally laced remarks in both places with references to the many daunting problems that remain – a lack of housing in New Orleans, the slow pace of Small Business Administration loans, problems with homeowner insurance payments, the urgent need for bridge rebuilding.

“People in faraway places like Washington, D.C., still hear you and care about you,” he said in the gymnasium at St. Stanislaus College in Bay St. Louis. “I recognize there’s some rough spots …. We’re going to work to make them as smooth as possible.”

Bush also promised Gulf Coast residents that his administration is learning the lessons of its too-slow and much-criticized response to Katrina. “We want to know how to make it better,” he said. “I just want to assure you, we are, we are.”

In New Orleans, especially, the president played booster in chief. Before a colorful mural of jazz musicians, a riverboat, masked Mardi Gras revelers and crawfish, he suggested it as a great place for a convention and as an attractive tourist destination with “some of the greatest food in the world and some wonderful fun.”

Bush praised the city’s success in getting services like electricity and water mostly on line, said new federal tax incentives will encourage businesses to create jobs and insisted stronger promised levee protection will make the city both safer and more attractive for investment. All those things, he said, will help turn New Orleans back into a “shining part of the South.”

“I will tell you, the contrast between when I was last here and today is pretty dramatic,” a smiling president said before meeting privately with local government officials and small business owners.

But many of New Orleans’ neighborhoods still are abandoned wastelands of uninhabitable homes and sidewalks piled with moldy garbage. Barely a quarter of the city’s former population of nearly half a million has returned yet and it’s not clear how many more will.

Though the president’s motorcade route wound past some previously underwater areas and a smattering of damaged buildings, his meeting was held in a gleaming visitor’s center in the Lower Garden District neighborhood that never suffered serious damage.

And Bush’s visit came one day after initial city rebuilding proposals were unveiled to residents who reacted angrily, particularly to the suggestion that worst-hit neighborhoods have just four months to prove they should be rebuilt.

Some of the president’s language in New Orleans recalled the more pilloried statements from his first stop in the region four days after Katrina struck.

On that visit, he laughingly lauded the increasingly desperate city as great because it was where he used to “enjoy myself – occasionally too much.” On Thursday, he said the New Orleans of today “is reminding me of the city I used to come to visit.”

Bush also called the city “a heckuva place to bring your family” – a reminder of his endorsement of then-FEMA chief Michael Brown. “Brownie, you’re doing a heckuva job,” Bush said then to the man who was seen by many as the face of the clumsy and who eventually gave up his post amid the criticism.

In Bay St. Louis, Bush drove past thousands of snapped trees, debris still hanging from limbs and lots emptied of their buildings. There are almost no intact structures – concrete foundations are virtually all that is left on most lots – and little evidence of new construction.

The president emphasized progress.

“We’ve come a long way in four months,” he said across the street from enormous piles of broken lumber. “And a lot more is going to happen in the next four months and the next four months.”

Bush made eight trips to the Gulf Coast in the six weeks after Katrina hit. Lately, the president has been eager to show his attention to Katrina victims has not faded and Thursday’s trip was intended to signal that Katrina recovery ranks in the top tier of his priorities for 2006.

The president ended the day headlining a fundraiser in Palm Beach, Fla. He helped scoop up $4 million for the national Republican Party and various GOP candidates at the sprawling oceanfront mega-mansion of homebuilder and Washington Redskins co-owner Dwight Schar.

AP-ES-01-12-06 1841EST