Mr. Bush comforted victims in Poplarville, Miss., and Baton Rouge, La., but he found himself ensnared in a dispute with Louisiana's Democratic governor, Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, who learned of Mr. Bush's trip from news reports.
"There's a lot of work to be done," Mr. Bush told a group of mostly black victims at a makeshift shelter, the Bethany World Prayer Center, in Baton Rouge. He said that Americans' response to the disaster had been "amazing" and that "this country is going to be committed to doing what it takes to help people get back on their feet."
The president's trip, an effort to calm the region and part of a major White House campaign to stem the political damage from the hurricane, came as rescue teams in New Orleans searched for thousands of residents who remained in the city, many having ignored pleas to evacuate. The city's No. 2 police official, W. J. Riley, said his officers were trying to convince people that staying behind was pointless because "this city has been destroyed, completely destroyed."
As has been true for days, the death toll was assumed to be disastrously high, but estimates remained little more than guesses -- perhaps educated, perhaps not. Officially, the Louisiana toll climbed to 71. The mayor of New Orleans, C. Ray Nagin, said the figure might well reach 10,000.
But there was some positive news yesterday. Army engineers said that after having dumped hundreds of bags filled with cement, sand and pieces of ruined roadways, they had closed the breach in the levee at the London Avenue Canal.
Late yesterday afternoon, state officials said that another crucial levee, on the 17th Street Canal, had also been patched up.
With those barriers at least temporarily restored, engineers began draining the flooded streets and sending the water back into Lake Pontchartrain, but carefully, using portable pumps set up at near the lake on the 17th Street canal. Gregory E. Breerwood, a city engineer, said, "We intend to take it slowly so we don't overtax the pumps themselves, because they have not been in service for a while."
West of the city, in Metairie, residents were permitted to return, if only for a day, to salvage what they could from their flooded houses.
In Baton Rouge, Governor Blanco greeted Mr. Bush as he arrived, but only after her press secretary called to alert her at 6 a.m. as she waited on a plane to take off from Baton Rouge for Houston. The press secretary, Denise Bottcher, said in an interview that she had first learned that Mr. Bush would be in Baton Rouge from news reports late Sunday and early yesterday, even though CNN had been reporting the president's trip to an unspecified location in Louisiana as early as Saturday.
"We're so busy, I can't sit down to watch TV," Ms. Bottcher said, adding. "Why should I get that news from CNN?"
Ms. Bottcher said she then called the White House yesterday morning, "and they extended an invitation."
Dana Perino, a White House spokeswoman, said the White House reached out to Ms. Blanco's office on Sunday and made contact with her yesterday morning.
Ms. Blanco and Mr. Bush have been at odds over the deployment of the National Guard in Louisiana, and both sides pointed fingers. On Friday night, Ms. Blanco refused to sign an agreement proposed by the White House to share control of National Guard forces in the state with federal authorities. "She would lose control when she had been in control from the very beginning," Ms. Bottcher said on Sunday.
The Times-Picayune, Louisiana's largest newspaper, published an open letter to Mr. Bush on Sunday that called for the firing of every official at the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
"We're angry, Mr. President, and we'll be angry long after our beloved city and surrounding parishes have been pumped dry," said the newspaper, which endorsed Mr. Bush for president in 2000 but made no endorsement in 2004.
At the Bethany World Prayer Center in Baton Rouge, the president's first stop of the day yesterday, some evacuees from the hurricane ran up to meet with Mr. Bush, but many hung back and looked on. One of them, Mildred Brown, who had been at the shelter since Tuesday, told The Associated Press: "I'm not star-struck; I need answers. I'm not interested in hand-shaking. I'm not interested in photo ops. This is going to take a lot of money."
One evacuee from New Orleans, Richard Landres, a lumberyard worker, was more positive about Mr. Bush. "I think he's doing what he can do," Mr. Landres said, according to a White House pool report.
Mr. Bush was flanked as he spoke by Mayor Kip Holden of Baton Rouge and T. D. Jakes, a conservative African-American television evangelist with a megachurch in Dallas who has been courted by the White House as a partner in reaching out to the black vote.
"I want to thank my friend T. D. Jakes for rallying the armies of compassion to help somebody like the mayor," Mr. Bush said.
Later in Baton Rouge, Mr. Bush spoke for an hour and a half with Ms. Blanco and members of Louisiana's Congressional delegation in a meeting that Ms. Bottcher described as "very positive" and that other participants called blunt. The elected officials said Mr. Bush mostly listened.
Representative Bobby Jindal, a Republican who represents New Orleans, said afterward that while the tone of the meeting was polite, "there was a lot of frustration."
"It was not hostile," Mr. Jindal said. "It was honest."
The trip was Mr. Bush's third survey of the region in the past week. He was in New Orleans and Biloxi, Miss., on Friday, and he flew over the area in Air Force One as he returned from an extended vacation on Wednesday.
Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, said Mr. Bush did not go to New Orleans yesterday because he had visited it on Friday. On that visit, however, he did not go to the Superdome or the convention center, where tens of thousands of largely poor and black victims had been desperate for food and water for days, and some older evacuees had died in their wheelchairs. Mr. Bush did speak at the New Orleans airport and visit the repair work under way at the 17th Street Canal, where he met with workers, some of whom had lost their homes.
Mr. McClellan also said Mr. Bush steered clear of New Orleans yesterday because he did not want to disrupt continuing relief efforts.
"Today, he wanted to visit citizens of New Orleans who have been evacuated and are in need of continued assistance, as well as volunteers who are helping them," Mr. McClellan said in an e-mail message.
Yesterday afternoon, Mr. Bush spoke at a community college to residents of Poplarville, a small town about 40 miles inland that was badly hit by tornadoes accompanying the hurricane, then took a walking tour of a suburban street. Branches and trees littered the sides of roads, and electricity was still out, with water coming back slowly, but the damage was nothing like the destruction Mr. Bush saw on Friday in Biloxi.
"Out of this despair is going to come a vibrant coast," Mr. Bush told the crowd at the Pearl River Community College. "I understand if you're saying to yourself, 'Well, it's hard for me to realize what George W. is saying because I've seen the rubble and I know what has happened to my neighbors.' But I'd like to come back down here in about two years and walk your streets and see how vital this part of the world is going to be."
Some residents said Mr. Bush's visit to Poplarville had lifted their spirits. "He said the worst was going to be over," said Dawn Stuit, 48, a real estate agent, who had spoken to the president on the street and said that he had kissed her cheek. She said she was feeling better yesterday because her electricity would be restored soon. "I think the president visiting had something to do with the power coming back on," she said.
Other residents viewed the president's visit with anger. "If it takes them a week to figure out that people need food and water, maybe they need to step back and fire themselves," said Robert Duke, 43, waiting in a gas line in Poplarville. "Some of them need to go to jail over this."
In New Orleans, the city took a few slow steps on the arduous journey toward recovery. Power was even restored in some neighborhoods.
Mayor Nagin, who had raged against the federal government days ago for what he called its slow response to the crisis, struck a more positive tone, despite his estimate of the large number of dead. "We're making great progress now," he said on the "Today" program on NBC. "The momentum has picked up. I'm starting to see some critical tasks being completed."
After days of looting and reports of murders and rapes, the New Orleans police and military troops asserted control. "We continue in lockdown," said Mr. Riley, assistant police superintendent. "I feel the city is very secure," he said. "Chaos is moving to being organized chaos. It's better now."
A major issue, he said, is clearing the city of remaining residents to prepare for the cleanup. "Our officers are telling people there's absolutely no reason to stay," Mr. Riley said. "There are no homes to go to, there's no hotels."
Social services officials in Louisiana said yesterday that about 114,000 people had taken refuge in shelters stretching from West Virginia to Utah. The largest number, 54,000, remained in Louisiana, but almost as many were in Texas. Officials also said that in the last three days they had received 90,000 applications for food stamps from hurricane victims. Typically, they said, they process 1,300 applications a day.
Long-term problems facing people along the Gulf of Mexico were raised by former Presidents George Bush and Bill Clinton. As in the aftermath of the Asian tsunami, they were asked by President Bush to help raise money for evacuees.
"Recovery is going to take years," former President Bush said in Houston as he and Mr. Clinton announced the creation of a new fund.
Mr. Clinton touched on the need to find jobs for people who had left their homes. "One of the things we have to ask is: What could we do to give incentives for people to get jobs where they have to relocate," he said. "A lot of these people will be out of their homes a year or more."