by Gary Rivlin
Landrieu studied political science in college but also acting. He tried making it in theater before entering law school at Loyola University New Orleans. He was twenty-seven years old when voters sent him to Baton Rouge to occupy the same seat in the state legislature that both his father and older sister (whose place he took) had occupied. Landrieu was thirty-four the first time he ran for mayor in 1994, in an election he lost to Morial’s brother Marc. Landrieu conceded that election by driving to the Morial campaign party at around 1:30 a.m. to offer his congratulations face-to-face. In 2003, Louisiana elected him lieutenant governor.
Landrieu rushed to New Orleans after the flooding, the man of action venturing out on a skiff to help with the rescue. “It’s important from my perspective for people to understand that leaders do what they’re supposed to do,” he said. (And if he had pictures of himself taken out on the water rescuing people, that’s what politicians do.) His own home remained dry, but three of his eight siblings owned homes in Lakeview. All three moved temporarily to Monroe, Louisiana, four hours north, to stay with a sister living there. His parents’ home in Broadmoor, the home in which they had all grown up, also flooded. His parents, too, would temporarily move to Monroe.
Mitch Landrieu turned forty-five two weeks before Katrina. He was trim with short-cropped gray hair and piercing blue eyes. His thick, butterscotch New Orleans accent seemed equal parts old South and movie tough guy. A disciplined politician, he demanded loyalty from a tight circle of advisers, yet he also exuded a warmth and a candor that set him off from other career politicians. Sitting for an interview with a reporter eleven days after the storm, Landrieu shared some ideas he had for reviving New Orleans. They included the creation of something akin to the Tennessee Valley Authority, if not a cabinet-level post to oversee the rebuilding of the ravaged Gulf Coast. But then Landrieu, self-aware and willing to make fun of himself, added that he was just making this stuff up. “Don’t believe anything anyone is telling you,” he said. “No one can really know what they’re talking about yet. Just let things go in one ear and out another.”
RAY NAGIN PHONED JOE CANIZARO to hit him up for a campaign contribution. Canizaro had been generous with Nagin in the past: Would he support him now in a tough reelection?
Canizaro responded curtly. He didn’t mention how he’d put his relationship with the president on the line for New Orleans. He didn’t bring up the hundreds of thousands of dollars he had spent underwriting the planning process. Instead he spoke about his efforts, and those of his fellow Bring New Orleans Back commissioners, and how they felt that their work had been for naught. “I said to him, ‘Mr. Mayor, you’ve taken no leadership. You’re not doing anything to implement any part of this plan we all worked so hard on.’ ” Later, Canizaro would imagine what else he could have told Nagin: how neighborhoods needed to better understand their topography, how there was money to relocate people for their own safety if only Nagin would give the commission’s plan a chance. Instead Canizaro closed the conversation by declaring an end to their working relationship. “I just said, ‘You and I are now finished.’ I told him, ‘I’m not going to help you anymore,’ and that was the end.”
Canizaro felt more sympathy than anger toward Nagin. Like Ron Forman, he believed he was looking at a man whose greatest crime was his inaction. “The mayor’s answer is that people know best, and so anyone who wants a permit is free to build wherever they want,” Canizaro said. On paper it might sound perfect: the citizens decide where to rebuild and the city responds accordingly. “You know the people who are going to suffer are those who can least afford it,” Canizaro said.
At first Canizaro saw himself as a modern-day Haussmann (Paris) or Robert Moses (New York), the visionary who knocks down entire blocks of a city when he believes it’s for the public good. But he was also a white man in a majority-black city. “This was a case where we could not play God,” he said. “We would have created a revolution.” Canizaro was comfortable where they had ended up by the time he presented his plan to Nagin: citizen councils in the flooded neighborhoods working with panels of local experts paid for by the government. Canizaro felt certain the president would make available the billions they would need to implement a plan that might have the authorities buying out thousands of homeowners.
Canizaro recognized that he had sided with the planners, the Ivy Leaguers, and other pointy-headed experts his ideological comrades loved to ridicule as thinking they knew better than everyone else. He was a friend of George Bush who believed in limited government. Nagin was a Democrat representing a majority-black city where Democrats outnumbered Republicans six to one. Yet Canizaro was disappointed government wasn’t playing a more central role in the rebuilding. “You don’t rebuild a city by letting everybody do as they please,” Canizaro said. “That’s why we have zoning laws. That’s why we have rules around historic preservation.” In the broken city of New Orleans, the black mayor adopted a free-market, almost libertarian approach, and the rich Republican developer could sound almost socialist, talking about government-funded citizen councils and the firm hand the city needed to play on behalf of the collective good.
PUBLIC HOUSING RESIDENTS WERE holding protests, demanding their right to return home, with more demonstrations over everything from bulldozers to Charity Hospital. FEMA was again in the news that March when it was revealed that ten thousand trailers it had stockpiled in Hope, Arkansas, were unusable in a floodplain, according to federal guidelines. Battles took place over the election itself. It was a wonder that television and the local newspapers had any room at all for their small bits of coverage of the candidates and the issues.
Only a militant few demanded that the electorate be confined to those residing in the city. Yet how does a municipality conduct a fair election with tens of thousands of registered voters scattered across the country? Nagin bought billboard space in Houston and traveled there as well, declaring, “It’s a local election on a national stage.” He also made campaign stops in Atlanta, Memphis, and Baton Rouge. Civil rights groups demanded that the authorities set up satellite voting facilities in any community home to a sizable number of evacuees. If the US government could help Iraqi expatriates scattered around the world vote in that country’s elections, advocates said, they could do the same for Katrina evacuees.
Al Ater, Louisiana’s secretary of state, proposed establishing voting sites out of state. The response was legislation to block Ater’s office from setting up remote voting facilities even inside Louisiana. The bill never advanced, but it also ended any talk of out-of-state polling places. “It’s almost so obvious that there’s a concerted plan to make this a whiter city,” said Stephen Bradberry, ACORN’s lead organizer in New Orleans. “You don’t want to believe it because it would be too disturbing.” In the end, Ater set up satellite voting centers in ten locales around the state, including several in border towns nearer such places as Houston, Birmingham, and Memphis. He also set up a half dozen “supersites” in flooded parts of New Orleans such as New Orleans East and Lakeview (but not the Lower Ninth).
Using the change-of-address cards people sent to the post office, Ater sent voter information packets to as many evacuees as possible. That at least gave the addresses of the polling places and included the deadline for submitting an absentee ballot. But the documents, which included a section warning of the fines and potential jail time confronting anyone providing false information, no doubt scared some people from voting. Those living on public assistance, for instance, had been encouraged to obtain a local driver’s license to qualify for any in-state help where they were living. Had they given away their right to vote by claiming an address outside the Orleans Parish limits? Voting absentee was a two-step process at a time most every evacuee no doubt felt overwhelmed. Interviews with evacuees after the election revealed that, despite Ater’s best efforts, many believed they could vote only if they showed up in New Orleans on election day.
Three weeks before the election, a protest march was h
eld at the foot of the bridge leading to Gretna. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton were there, as were Congresswoman Maxine Waters, Bill Cosby, and Bruce Gordon, the president of the NAACP. The signs ACORN handed out to the predominantly black crowd read IRAQ HAS FAIRER ELECTIONS. Both Nagin and Landrieu attended the rally, but only Nagin marched. Only Nagin was invited to share the stage with the other dignitaries.
The election was New Orleans’s chance to have the public conversation that the Bring New Orleans Back Commission barely did. “We’re debating whether property rights should trump everything or not,” Nagin had imagined himself telling Martin Luther King. “We’re debating how should we rebuild one of the greatest cultural cities the world has ever seen.” Yet most of the candidates proved as reluctant to have those debates as Ron Forman. One candidate proposed that they move the University of New Orleans closer to the French Quarter because “kids like to study downtown.” A former member of the City Council, a white Republican named Peggy Wilson, vowed to do everything in her power to ensure that the “pimps, drug dealers, crack addicts, and welfare queens” don’t return to the city—and if people didn’t get the point the first few times she brought it up at candidate forums, she ran ads making similar promises. Mitch Landrieu took a stance at the first debate: “To shrink the city’s footprint is to shrink its destiny.” Rob Couhig, a white Republican in the race, made the opposite argument: the city must shrink in size. But they were the exceptions in a race where the candidates instead promised to tear down all the big housing projects and vowed to block the building of a temporary FEMA trailer park in any community that opposed it.
Forman approved a thirty-second spot casting Landrieu as a free-spending liberal who saw higher taxes as the answer to every problem. But he proved himself too genteel to win at hardball politics. He nixed an ad casting Landrieu as soft on crime because as a state representative years ago, he had supported legislation giving judges the freedom to send first-time teen offenders to alternatives outside of prison. (“I liked that program,” Forman said.) And he nixed another ad focused on a spike in violent crime in Nagin’s first three years in office. “I knew these guys,” Forman said. “I couldn’t do it.”
TEN DAYS BEFORE ELECTION day—and nearly eight months after Katrina—the federal government released its flood-elevation maps. Speculation in advance of the announcement anticipated a rule requiring homeowners to raise their homes seven or eight feet above the ground in low-lying areas. Others worried that they’d need to raise their homes by ten feet or more if they wanted to qualify for the federal government’s flood-insurance program. Yet the federal recovery chief, Donald Powell, announced that homes and businesses in the most badly damaged parts of New Orleans would need to be raised between one and three feet.
The announcement caused more confusion than relief. The new flood-elevation maps freed tens of thousands of people from what the Times-Picayune called “rebuilding purgatory,” but the wait struck many homeowners as pointless. They had gotten six feet or eight feet of water. Some had ten or more feet. What good would it do if a home flooded by eight feet of water in 2005 got five feet of water the next time? FEMA, said Sean Reilly, a member of the state’s Louisiana Recovery Authority, had “simply abdicated” its authority.
The number, however, wasn’t quite as random as it might have sounded. Ivor van Heerden at LSU’s Hurricane Center said that if the levees hadn’t failed—if they had merely been overtopped rather than breached—maybe three feet of water would have been in the streets.
MUNICIPAL ELECTIONS ARE HELD on Saturday in New Orleans. Turnout was high in Uptown and the sliver-by-the-river precincts, but not in large swatches of the Ninth Ward or Gentilly, where fewer than one in five people voted. The 2006 mayor’s race was probably the most important in the city’s history. Yet barely one-third of the electorate voted; twenty-five thousand fewer people cast a ballot in 2006 compared to 2002. Most of the missing voters were black.
Nagin took first with forty-two thousand and Landrieu took second with thirty-two thousand votes. Nagin fell short of 50 percent of the total vote, so a runoff would be held one month later. Forman took a distant third, yet his nineteen thousand votes exceeded the total received by the remaining twenty-one candidates. Forman drew few votes outside Uptown, the Garden District, or Lakeview. Landrieu, by contrast, picked up votes all over the city. Forman immediately endorsed Landrieu, surprising his wife. “He didn’t even talk to Ray,” she said of her husband.
Nagin didn’t bother vying for his old supporters, most of whom had probably voted for Forman. The mayor captured 65 percent of the black vote in the first round of voting and just 7 percent of the white vote. Yet rather than reach out to whites in the runoff, he used the city’s business elite to burnish his credentials in the black community. At a news conference held the day after his first-place finish, he mocked the likes of Jimmy Reiss, who said New Orleans needed to change or a lot of the people he knew would abandon the city. “Where are they going to find another New Orleans of 1840?” the mayor asked. “Businesspeople are predators. If the economic opportunities are here, they’re going to stay.” For good measure, he promised to mail a postcard to anyone claiming to give up on New Orleans. Or maybe he’d just say hello, he said, the next time one of them flew home on a private jet for Mardi Gras or a Friday lunch at Galatoire’s.
Nagin’s treatment by the white business establishment was a major reason the Tribune’s Beverly McKenna supported Nagin’s reelection. Nagin had been naive, she allowed. But she supported Nagin “with everything I had” in 2006 in no small part because of the way his former allies treated the mayor. “It was despicable what they did to him—so obvious and ugly and in your face. He was their candidate—until he wouldn’t go along with their plans—so they just tossed him aside.” Of course she’d stand beside the mayor after he stood up to his former allies. The Reverend Tom Watson, a black minister also in the 2006 mayor’s race, during one debate blamed Nagin for the death of the thousand-plus New Orleanians during Katrina. Yet Watson, too, would endorse Nagin and even loan the campaign his church for a voter turnout rally on the eve of the runoff election. “Be Concerned,” read the cover of the Tribune. “Be VERY Concerned. Get Angry. Get VERY Angry. Then Go Vote.” The capitalized words appeared in red. Nagin might have shunned the likes of McKenna and Watson during his first term, but neither wanted whites to seize control of City Hall.
The occasional voter told a reporter that he or she was “voting vanilla.” Others declared that they were voting chocolate. RE-ELECT OUR MAYOR read billboards the Nagin campaign leased in New Orleans and also Houston. So what if all the signs were in black parts of town? “This campaign is really not about me,” Landrieu said on the stump. “I’m just a vessel. I’m just a symbol.”
Landrieu ran as the unity candidate. “There’s been a lot of racial tensions that have been pushed by the national media, but the truth is on the ground—and you’re seeing it yourself—African Americans and whites really holding on to each other closely,” Landrieu said at one rally. He held up a picture taken just after the storm of a black girl holding hands with a white woman in a wheelchair. “If the storm showed us anything, it indicated in a very clear way we’re all in the same boat,” Landrieu said.
Yet surprisingly Nagin proved the better candidate. He was his affable, assured self during a series of voter forums. Landrieu appeared stiff and scripted—the cautious politician believing the election was his to lose. Where Landrieu was short on specifics, Nagin spoke about the intricacies of the city’s recovery efforts that had been his life for the past six months. The Times-Picayune endorsed Landrieu, but Robert Couhig, a white Republican who had taken fourth in the first round of voting with just over ten thousand votes, supported the mayor. To some, Landrieu was still the liberal in the race and Nagin the more conservative, probusiness candidate. Television ads for Nagin stressed the lack of scandal in City Hall—no small issue with all that money about to flow through New Orleans.
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bsp; Nagin attacked Landrieu at every opportunity. His foe was part of the Landrieu “dynasty”: the “Landrieu machine” would mean the return of patronage and favoritism to City Hall. Nagin had since Katrina presented his opponent plenty of potential ammunition to wage a counteroffensive. But the attacks never came. Pundits speculated that Landrieu was being the good brother and making sure he didn’t cause problems for his sister the US senator when she ran for reelection in eighteen months. Others argued he sought to protect his own reputation in the black community, while a third group cast the Landrieu camp as confident they could win without resorting to a negative campaign. But whatever the reason, Landrieu stuck to his unity theme. “WE’RE ALL NEIGHBORS,” read the full-page ad the Landrieu campaign bought in the New Orleans Tribune.
Voter turnout in the runoff crept up two percentage points to 39 percent. The electorate was 57 percent black compared to the low 60s it had been in recent elections. Nagin drew 83 percent of the black vote, almost as high as the 86 percent share of the white vote he had won in 2002. Yet hostilities toward Landrieu and the Landrieu name within the white community proved the difference. Nagin won 20 percent of the white vote—triple his percent in the first round of voting. The mayor won reelection by 5,000 votes out of 114,000 cast.
Nagin addressed the president at his victory party that night. “You and I have probably been the most vilified politicians in the country,” Nagin said. “But I want to thank you for moving that promise that you made in Jackson Square forward.” An appreciative George Bush phoned Nagin the next day to offer his congratulations. The president was “pretty excited,” Nagin said at a press conference later that day, adding, “I think the opportunity has presented itself for me to kind of go down in history as the mayor that guided the city of New Orleans through an incredible rebuild cycle.” To those who were surprised by his reelection, he offered that people “really don’t get Ray Nagin.” But that’s all right, he added, “Sometimes I don’t get Ray Nagin.”
