Both Barak Obama and Hillary Clinton criticized President Bush’s response to Hurricane Katrina while speaking to the National Conference of Black Mayors on Saturday.

Clinton said she was angered when she saw images of New Orleans residents on their rooftops, begging to be rescued from the floodwaters that followed the August 2005 hurricane. She said Bush’s response was a display of “incompetence.”

“It is a great injustice that you would deny the resources to your own people, but that shouldn’t surprise us, because many people are invisible to this president,” she said in a morning speech punctuated with applause.

“When it comes to education in New Orleans, it’s not enough to just clean up damage from the storm. We have to clean up the damage from before the levees broke,” Obama said.

Asked what he would do for the city if elected, Obama said he would hope that the Bush administration would have addressed many of city’s the larger concerns by January 2009. “But I’m not optimistic,” he said.