In late August, as the Democrats convene in Denver to choose their presidential nominee, residents of the Gulf Coast will be about to enter their fourth year of recovery from Hurricane Katrina. You wouldn’t know it from press coverage of the campaign thus far. While the Gulf Coast recovery has popped up in the news here and there, coverage of the candidates’ rebuilding agendas has been all but absent. There are plenty of questions for the political press to raise. New Orleans and other affected areas still struggle with issues of wetland restoration, mental health, evacuee resettlement, housing, schools, criminal justice, and infrastructure. We asked journalists familiar with the Gulf Coast recovery to suggest questions for Barack Obama and John McCain.

What will you do to solve the insurance crisis that has made rebuilding and recovery impossible for thousands of homeowners?

- Stan Tiner, executive editor of the Biloxi Sun Herald.

What would you do to address the mental and emotional health problems that continue to plague adults and children?

- Hazel Trice Edney, editor-in-chief of the National Newspaper Publishers Association’s News Service (a.k.a. The Black Press of America), has written about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

The New Orleans economy relies largely on tourism, a fact that has contributed mightily to the city’s slow recovery. Are there other industries you think New Orleans is particularly suited to develop? Would the federal government partner with New Orleans in creating a special incentive program, backed with major federal funding, to grow such development in the city?

- Sara Catania, a freelance journalist and former Los Angeles Times reporter, covered the effects of Katrina on New Orleans’s Vietnamese community.

The U.S. has no sensible national process for protecting New...

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