Surrounded by people driven from their homes, Bush told reporters: "This is a long-term project to help these people. And this country is going to be committed to doing what it takes to help people get back on their feet.

"All levels of government are doing the best they can. If it's not going right, we'll make it right," said the president, who on Saturday had declared the early response to Katrina "unacceptable."

Bush, on his second visit in four days to devastated areas of the US Gulf Coast, visited a prayer center here that was packed with people, shaking hands, signing shirts and hats, and telling them help was on the way.

"That's why I've come back," said the president, who took aerial and ground tours of afflicted areas on Friday.

Katrina left hundreds of thousands of people homeless after it swept through the Gulf of Mexico coastal region Monday. Officials say the final death toll will likely be in the thousands.

Bush also stopped in Mississippi, where he promised residents of the town of Poplarville: "Out of this despair is going to come a vibrant coast."

Absent from Bush's public schedule was a stop in the flooded city of New Orleans, now mostly evacuated, leaving the once vibrant jazz capital a fetid lake of decomposing corpses. The president saw parts of the city on Friday.

With much of the world aghast at the only superpower's plight and offering aid, Bush vowed: "We're going to show the world, once again, that not only we will survive, but that we will be stronger and better for it when it's all said and done."

The visit came a day after senior administration officials fanned out across the devastated region as part of a public relations offensive, as a new poll showed Americans sharply split on Bush's handling of the crisis.

On the ground and over the airwaves, Bush aides have been stressing that now is the time to discuss what can be done to help, not for a debate about the widely criticized response to the storm.

"In due course, if people want to go and chop heads off, there will be an opportunity to do it," Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said during a round of appearances on Sunday talk shows from a New Orleans suburb.

Bush has drawn fire for not cutting his August vacation short more quickly, and for going ahead with scheduled speeches on issues like health care even as local officials warned Katrina's death toll could run in the hundreds.

Authorities in the affected regions and other critics have also lambasted Bush for a lag in dispatching US troops and relief supplies to the afflicted region despite graphic television images of chaos and neglect.

A Washington Post-ABC poll published Sunday found the country sharply divided over how the Texas Republican has handled rescue and relief efforts, with 46 percent approving and 47 percent dissatisfied.

Fifty-one percent rated the federal response as not so good or poor and 48 percent said it was excellent or good. But two-thirds said Washington should have been better prepared.

Potentially just as damaging was reaction to the hot-button issue of gasoline prices. Seventy-two percent felt the oil companies were using Katrina to gouge prices and eight in 10 felt the government's response inadequate.

The political fallout from the country's worst natural disaster came at a time when Bush's popularity ratings were at the lowest of his presidency and his policies in Iraq faced mounting opposition.

US and foreign newspapers have pounded the government, and the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs was set to launch hearings this week into Washington's performance.

The fundamental question was why the first test of the country's vaunted homeland security policies, crafted after the September 11, 2001 terror attacks, failed so miserably.

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