Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain on Thursday publicly disagreed with a pastor whose endorsement he sought.

During a campaign stop in New Orleans, he was asked where he stood on remarks by televangelist John Hagee, who placed the blame for Hurricane Katrina on a "homosexual parade" in New Orleans.

"It's nonsense," McCain said. "I don't have anything more to say. ... It's nonsense. I reject it categorically."

Hagee has also spoken out forcefully against the Roman Catholic Church, calling it a cult, and blamed the Jews for their fate in the Nazi Holocaust.

McCain was in New Orleans to take stock of still-hurricane-damaged areas of New Orleans and declared that if the disaster had happened on his watch, he would have immediately landed at the nearest Air Force base, drawing a sharp contrast to President George W. Bush's handling of the disaster.

McCain called the response to Hurricane Katrina "a perfect storm" of mismanagement by federal, state and local governments.

The Arizona senator walked a few blocks of the hard-hit Lower 9th Ward, passing tidy rebuilt stucco houses standing next to abandoned structures, their facades still spray-painted with the markings of rescue workers who went door to door nearly three years ago searching for bodies. Government-issued trailers still dot the neighborhood. McCain said his teenage daughter Bridget had been there with a volunteer youth group a few weeks ago to help in the recovery.

"Never again, never again will a disaster of this nature be handled in the disgraceful way it was handled," McCain declared, a pledge he repeated over and over during the day.

McCain is campaigning this week in what he calls "forgotten" areas of the country, and he assured residents that their situation was not lost on him.

"I've been going to places that are perhaps very cynical about government," he told students during a town hall at Xavier University. Trying to reach out for the votes of Democrats and independents, he pledged to be a president who would take action to erase that cynicism.

"As president of the United States, I'm not going to leave anybody behind," he said.