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Barack Obama, then a senator running for president, during a campaign stop in New Orleans in August 2007. Mr. Obama will return to New Orleans on Thursday for the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.Credit Alex Brandon/Associated Press

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WASHINGTON — Eight years ago as a senator running for president, Barack Obama visited New Orleans, a city still battered and broken two years after Hurricane Katrina, and made the kind of extravagant promises that candidates often make to get elected.

“America failed the people of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast long before that failure showed up on our television sets,” Mr. Obama said at the time. “America failed them again during Katrina. We cannot — we must not — fail for a third time.”

He promised to reconstruct the city’s health care infrastructure with new facilities and incentives for doctors, said he would rebuild schools and provide local children with better educations than ever, and vowed to rebuild the local economy.

On Thursday, Mr. Obama will return to New Orleans to mark the 10^th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and face the kind of reckoning presidents must confront near the end of their tenure: How did reality stack up against his campaign promises?

Many of Mr. Obama’s promises have been fulfilled, according to political analysts and lawmakers in both parties, although he can take only partial credit. New Orleans’s economy is thriving, a new $1.1 billion hospital has opened with another being constructed, the school system has been overhauled, and the city is now protected against a 100-year storm with a $14.5 billion levee system that is far better than its predecessor.

Continue reading the main story 10 Years After Katrina The New Orleans of 2015 has been altered, and not just by nature. In some ways, it is booming as never before. In others, it is returning to pre-Katrina realities of poverty and violence, but with a new sense of dislocation for many, too.

Local, state and congressional officials have had as much or more to do with the region’s recovery, a point Mr. Obama’s own listing of accomplishments acknowledges with more than a dozen references to “partners.”

But the recovery was also helped by a federal spending spree authorized during both the George W. Bush and Obama administrations — nearly $71 billion in assistance to fund projects both small and large across the region. South Louisiana received more money for capital projects than the entire state would normally spend in 60 years.

Of course, many of the city’s pre-storm problems persist. Its poorest residents have received few benefits from its revived economy, the school makeover may not be quite as successful as boosters claim, and some advocates worry that a new hospital will cater to a rich clientele at the expense of services to the poor.

Still, if all the local, state and federal intervention had failed, Mr. Obama would have been blamed for an expensive flop. And there were reasons to believe that failure was likely: The region’s economy and its health and school systems had been performing poorly for years, said Allison Plyer, executive director and chief demographer of the Data Center, an independent research organization that focuses on Southeast Louisiana.

“Disasters are known to accelerate pre-existing trends,” she said, adding, “so that didn’t bode very well for New Orleans, which was doing poorly prior to Katrina.”

But the response to Hurricane Katrina managed to break that trend. During the worst of the national recession from 2008 to 2010, the New Orleans area lost just 1 percent of its jobs compared with 5 percent nationally, according to a recent report by Ms. Plyer’s center. And by 2014, the region had 5 percent more jobs that it did in 2008, compared with an increase of just 1 percent nationally.

Perhaps even more important, New Orleans became a center for jobs in technology, media and electric power generation, hot sectors that were scarce in pre-Katrina New Orleans. Start-up companies are flourishing, venture capital investment has increased substantially, and the tourism sector is doing well, with passenger traffic at Louis Armstrong International Airport up 22 percent from 2008 levels, compared with an increase of just 5 percent nationally.

“This president has been spectacular in his partnership with me and the rest of the people of New Orleans in rebuilding this great American city,” Mayor Mitch Landrieu said in an interview this week. “From the day he stepped into office, this president has been all in.”

The gusher of federal aid transformed the health sector, with the city’s crumbling Charity Hospital replaced by a new $1.1 billion University Medical Center, and a new Veterans Affairs hospital and new rehab hospital that are underway. Dozens of new community clinics have opened in 60 sites around Greater New Orleans compared with just a handful operating in 2004, providing desperately needed and mostly free primary care under a federal program.

A novel $1.8 billion lump-sum grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency allowed New Orleans to rethink its school system from scratch. Officials created a nearly all-charter system that, while still suffering from vast differences in outcomes between black and white children, has far surpassed the pre-Katrina system in test scores and state rankings.

The education secretary, Arne Duncan, called Hurricane Katrina “the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans,” a provocative remark that many say proved accurate.

Former Senator Mary L. Landrieu, a Democrat from Louisiana and the mayor’s sister who helped push through much of the legislation funding these efforts, said that after a poor start during the Bush administration, the coordination between the local, state and federal authorities for rebuilding efforts had improved substantially. That was because Mr. Obama instructed his cabinet to do everything it could for the area, she said.

“And to my knowledge, every single one of them did, and I worked closely with almost all of them,” she said.

Indeed, such praise is widespread and bipartisan. Even aides to Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, a Republican now running for president, declined to criticize the president’s rebuilding efforts.

The intense effort allowed the Obama administration to distinguish itself from the administration of Mr. Bush, whose poor initial response to Hurricane Katrina was widely criticized. But Mr. Obama benefited from having a change at City Hall with the 2010 election of Mr. Landrieu as mayor, said Ed Chervenak, director of the University of New Orleans Survey Research Center.

“Once Mitch Landrieu came in, you could really see things getting done,” Mr. Chervenak said.

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