As with many holiday romances, the big reunion between President Obama and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie down at the Jersey Shore on Tuesday didn’t really compare to the original event. Partly it was the weather. If you’ve ever spent a wet, windswept weekday in Beach Haven or Seaside Heights, you’ll know it can be pretty dismal. Partly it was the advance work. Why did the White House (or Christie’s office?) choose Asbury Park as the location for Obama’s speech? After all, it’s well north of where Hurricane Sandy did the worst damage, and—as one local wag commented on the Newark Star-Ledger’s Web site, it’s been a disaster area since the nineteen-seventies. (Actually, there’s been quite a bit of gentrification and redevelopment along the shorefront recently, but Hurricane Sandy didn’t have much to do with that.)

On the rebuilt boardwalk at Point Pleasant, the odd couple did what many other frustrated vacationers have done before them and hit the amusement arcades, where, sad to report, the President didn’t fare too well. Trying his hand at Touchdown Fever, a game that involved throwing a football into a tire, he tried and failed several times, only to watch Christie step up once and hit the target. Still, for the famously competitive Obama, all was not lost. The operator of the stall presented him with a stuffed bear in a Chicago Bears sweatshirt, which Obama held up for the crowd, looking suitably bashful.

It was all pretty harmless stuff, and, undoubtedly, much of the motivation for it was political. After weeks of dealing with scandals, the most recent of which—the story about the Justice Department’s investigation of leaks to the press—has seen many in the media turn upon him, the President had every reason to seize upon the opportunity to reprise last October’s post-Sandy visit with Christie, which just about sealed his reëlection victory over Mitt Romney. Christie, too, has his own motivations. In running for his own reëlection this year, he’s already casting the re-opening of the Shore in time for the summer season as one of his big campaign themes.

And that, as far as I am concerned, is fair enough. In fact, it’s a good thing. Because behind the photo op, there was an important message that goes well beyond day-to-day politics, and which needs repeating before the cameras: government can work. It can set itself targets and achieve them on time. If you don’t believe it, take a drive down to the Shore.

Last fall, amid the devastation that the great storm had wrought, Christie promised he’d be back come Memorial Day to re-open the resorts for the summer, and Obama pledged that the federal government would do everything it could to support and facilitate local rebuilding efforts. In view of the enormous difficulties faced in reconstructing New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, or, closer to home, the long delays we have seen in redeveloping the World Trade Center, there were grounds for skepticism. Some of the Shore’s famous beaches had been virtually swept away; many boardwalks, and the businesses that lined them, were wrecked; thousands of homes were destroyed. Power and transport links were down.

On this occasion, though, the doubters have been routed. Despite some local difficulties and delays, many of them linked to private-insurance disputes, the reconstruction effort has gone along pretty much as planned. The beaches and boardwalks are, for the most part, back. Power and transportation have been restored. Most businesses, including the amusement parks, have been rebuilt. In rebuilding houses damaged by the storm, progress has been slower, partly because the official flood-plain map, which determines the areas where homeowners can get insurance at reasonable rates, is being redrawn. But as Christie said on Friday and Obama repeated Tuesday: the Shore is very much back and open for business.

Hooray for that. In a country where bashing anything with the word “government” attached to it is all-too-often a bipartisan pursuit—witness the so-called I.R.S. “scandal”—here was an example in which the government did what it said it would do.

Of course, it wasn’t just the government; it never is. In any big and successful infrastructure project, you invariably find a combination of both public and private enterprise. The government’s role is to provide a guiding hand—to clear away obstacles that private entities can’t deal with, and, where necessary, to provide public financing. In this case, it did all of the above. Congress provided the money; the state and local governments provided the leadership on the ground; and FEMA—an agency that, during the aftermath of Katrina, became a byword for bureaucratic ineptitude—provided a range of supportive services, including financial assistance to those affected by Sandy.

Seven months after the storm struck, according to a recent update on FEMA’s Web site, the agency still has nearly two thousand employees working on Sandy-related projects; in the past seven months, it has handled more than two hundred and fifty thousand requests for help, and it has approved almost a billion and a half dollars in claims. At the peak of its efforts, the agency was operating more than seven hundred emergency shelters for displaced persons in sixteen states. Today, all of the shelters have been closed, but FEMA continues to play a vital role in the recovery process. Not bad for an organization that for some time yet will be associated in the public mind with Katrina, and with its former leader, Michael “heckuva job Brownie” Brown.

Under Craig Fugate, the emergency-response veteran of Florida who has headed the agency since 2009, FEMA’s reputation has steadily improved. To his credit, Fugate, rather than trying to hog the glory for the federal response to Sandy, has described it as a team effort. In testimony to Congress in March, he said that “FEMA also works with many other federal and state agencies, such as the U.S. Small Business Administration (S.B.A.) and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), to assist disaster survivors. Finally, we rely on the whole community’s participation, including the help of the public to prepare for disasters.”

Successful teamwork—that’s a description you don’t hear applied to the government very often. And it’s surely something well worth a photo op, or two.

Photograph by Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP.