We have to get along with the politicians here, no matter whether they have an (R) or a (D) after their name. We don’t have any choice, because if people down here didn’t work together, nothing would ever get done. That’s true to some extent for local politics around the country. Politics takes a backseat to progress, not the other way around. Washington could learn a thing or two from that.
Without question, the most consequential political person in my life these days is the mayor.
I can live with a half-ass governor. I could even live with kind of a crappy president like George W. Bush. As long as a president doesn’t do much, and doesn’t do really stupid things, he can cause only so much harm. But a mayor matters, man. At every level.
When I first got down here, my first thought was, you can rebuild all the damn houses you want in the Ninth Ward, and it’s not going to save the city. If we don’t have some political leadership in this city, we’re done.
I decided I needed to get some data and find out what really was happening with the city. People were saying New Orleans was hopelessly racially divided. There was a lot of bad blood, a lot of anger to go around over Ray Nagin’s whole “chocolate city” remark. So we did some research. I tapped my class at Tulane, but we did most of the work through Democracy Corps, the nonprofit I founded back in 1999 with Stan Greenberg.
Ultimately, we discovered some really interesting things about New Orleans. First of all, it has the most female-heavy electorate of anyplace I’d seen anywhere in the world. Females make up 58 percent of voters. Among African Americans, it’s 62 percent. Part of that, unfortunately, is because of the high male incarceration rate. The other thing is, there’s staggering church attendance among black females. It’s almost like 70 percent once a week or more. For white males, it’s more like 20 percent.
We also found that Mitch Landrieu, a Democrat and the son of a former New Orleans mayor, was in a commanding position to be mayor. He’d run twice before, in 1994 and 2006, and lost both times.
He had said he wasn’t planning on running again. But I really kept at him that year. Every time I’d see him, I’d say, “Look, you have to do this. The city needs you. You’re going to win.”
He’d say, “Oh, I don’t want to drag my family through this again.”
I’d say, “Man, you can’t not do it.”
Privately, I was thinking, If this guy doesn’t run, this place is screwed. I had to convince him to run. It was literally almost a selfish impulse. I’d just moved my kids down South. I’d bought a house. I didn’t want to live in a New Orleans that doesn’t have a strong and competent mayor. There was an element of panic.
I’d been around the world. I’d seen the political landscapes in Colombia and Venezuela, in Israel and Nigeria. I knew what a difference real leadership made. And I wanted that for New Orleans. I knew that it mattered profoundly. And maybe the smaller the place, the more it matters.
I told Mitch, “Look, Mary is going to be for you. She’s going to round up the Republicans for you.” And Mary was behind him, a thousand percent. She knew he had the talent to do it, that he was the right guy for the job.
When he finally threw his hat in the ring, we did a lot of the data work for his campaign. Hell, we ran part of the operation from our dining room table. When he won with more than 65 percent of the vote, it came as no surprise to me at all. But it was still a big relief.
First of all, the attitude here has totally changed in recent years. They’re still having a terrible time with the murder rate. There’s plenty other problems. But they’ve really done some remarkable things.
There are really able people running the various city departments, but just like any other place in the middle of a recession, we’ve seen some tough fiscal times.
They’ve cleaned up the cabs. The airport has improved drastically. The city’s image has completely changed for the better. We’re hitting bigger tourism numbers than pre-Katrina.
Mitch came in and did what’s easier said than done, but what he needed to do, which was raise taxes and cut spending—and not by a little bit. He’s putting the city on more solid ground. He pays attention to the details, right down to the potholes. It’s still far from perfect, but then no city ever is.
I’m certain about this much. Mitch was elected on Saturday, February 6, 2010. The Saints won the Super Bowl the next day. Of the two, which was the most important? Not even close. The mayor.
Don’t get me wrong. New Orleans was a lot happier place because the Saints won. No doubt about it. Having a great football team is a blessing, and that win came at an important time for the city. It was a hell of a celebration, and I think people felt good about themselves, good for the players, good about the city. But it ain’t real life.
Give me a choice between a great football team and a bad mayor versus a bad football team and a great mayor, and I’ll take the great mayor any day.
Because in the end, what I’ve really come to learn—and this applies all over the world—is that it really matters who’s running the show. If you’re a company, a city, a country, a newspaper, a university—I don’t care. It just matters.
MARY
DINNER PARTIES IN WASHINGTON, as everybody knows, end at ten-thirty p.m. on the dot. As a general proposition, it is very rare to go to bed after midnight and come downstairs in the early morning to find your dinner guests still in your living room, deciding to cheer you up with a competition to see who can squirm under your coffee table the quickest—and somebody has a stopwatch.
If that sort of thing happens, you know you are in New Orleans.
JAMES
MARY AND I BOTH have managed to make friends in New Orleans who are outside of politics—actual, normal, interesting human beings who don’t wake up thinking about the latest Gallup polls or debating who might win the Iowa primaries in 2016.
That’s been an incredibly healthy development and something I’m not sure was ever quite possible in Washington, considering the nature of that city and our chosen profession. There, politics is the industry. It’s the first topic, the middle topic and the last topic of conversation. That’s not so unusual or surprising. If you’re in Hollywood, people talk about entertainment. If you’re in Detroit, people talk about the auto industry. It’s not that people in New Orleans aren’t political or don’t have a point of view, it’s just that it’s much easier to go to a dinner or to a party and actually not talk politics.
That kind of change, in my opinion, has been especially good for Mary. Conservatives, for whatever reason, tend to politicize everything. They politicize what kind of car they drive. They politicize French fries. One time, at the 1996 Republican convention, I heard Newt Gingrich politicize beach volleyball. He was introducing Olympic beach volleyball gold medalist Kent Steffes, and he said, “A mere forty years ago, beach volleyball was just beginning. No bureaucrat would have invented it, and that’s what freedom is all about.” How the hell do you even think something like that up? I would never look at a beach volleyball game and see something political. But that’s how it goes. Almost every conversation in Washington carries the risk of having a political meaning that it wouldn’t have anywhere else.
In a way, it reminds me of when I was a teenager in Carville, and I grew so tired of people talking about race. It’s no surprise it was such a hot topic, considering the seismic shift that was taking place in the country and considering I lived in a town that was 80 percent African American. But you heard about it everywhere you went. I remember thinking, Shit, can we have another conversation? And I didn’t mean like grand conversations about equality and justice and the dignity of man. I meant, can we talk about literally anything else? The latest LSU Tigers game? School? Anything. I found it so tiresome after a while. I didn’t understand why we couldn’t just move on. That’s similar to how I came to feel about the political talk in almost any social setting in Washington. Can we please just
have another conversation? In New Orleans, you can always have another conversation.
Another truth I discovered is that despite the reputation to the contrary people do not booze very much in Washington, as a rule. You go to a party, and people are having wine spritzers or whatever. It’s always the same scene. People are looking around to see who is there. People are trying to work the room—“Good to see you, Bob. How are you, Bill?” If there are journalists there, they’re always kind of working, sniffing out potential stories. People are careful not to get too tipsy. They are worried about embarrassing themselves or saying the wrong thing. Compare that to New Orleans. Here, if you host a party, you’d better have two bottles of brown whiskey with you, because they’re coming after it.
The restaurants—same story. They’re generally way quieter in Washington. People eat gently. They talk in hushed tones. They dress well. I remember going out to eat in New Orleans the first few times after we moved back and thinking, This is the way people are supposed to sound. There’s not much of a social penalty here for laughing a little too loudly or talking a little too loudly or cursing a little too much. If somebody slips up and says the wrong thing, people don’t hold it up as some sort of faux pas. They tend to shrug it off and say, “Oh, he was just drunk. What the hell?”
The conversation doesn’t start and end with politics. You can let your guard down. That’s been a good change for both of us.
MARY
OKAY, I know you are sick of hearing about my critters (but not as sick as James is of living with them). And while I don’t feel a need to justify my adoration for all critters—large or small, mammal, amphibian, invertebrate or winged, domesticated, wild or feral—I would like a chance to explain how profound this connection and affection can be.
I have yet to encounter any creature in any category in any environment that didn’t fit into the timeless order of things. You don’t have to believe Noah to know the truth of a natural order. Ask Darwin, or even those crazy Malthusians. And it just so happens that the animal kingdom is a very reliable guide to the human kingdom.
You can do all the focus group studies and social networking spying you like. But how people interact with critters is a far more precise gauge of behavior, whether it’s entire populations or individuals, than any poll or census data.
In my own field, you can bellyache forever about insolvable partisan bickering, but I know one powerful unifier that transcends political devotion: critter love. In his groundbreaking book, The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt notes liberals presume all liberals are animal lovers and are always surprised to meet conservatives who are equally passionate about animals and so-called animal issues. (For the moment, I will forgo any diatribes on the closed and intolerant minds of liberals for the purposes of making my larger point.)
And my larger point is: people make instinctive (and correct) presumptions about other people based on their attitudes regarding animals. Yes, I know about Hitler and his dogs. And for every dog-loving Nazi, there is a cat-impaling Saddam Hussein—just like those neighborhood punks who tormented kittens and puppies and grew up to be junkies and perverts.
Those individuals aside, animals are an indispensible guide to people you might otherwise miss an opportunity to know or love.
One of the things that I most loved about our home in Virginia was its proximity to a fantastic dog park, which I renamed immediately “Dog Shit Park.” (It was my walkway to the grocery store and Starbucks, so it wasn’t an entirely 100 percent positive experience that so many dog owners don’t bother to pick up after their canines.) The mitigating factor was all those happy, yapping dogs living large and loving life so nearby. They ran. They barked. Their exuberance was infectious. And they filled the whole park before and after the workday.
Even better than watching the dogs was witnessing the park’s transformational power on people. All the dog people were delighted and animated and engaged with each other at Dog Shit Park. They laughed. They connected. Their eyes sparkled with warmth and humanity. Yet, so many of these same folks were less than friendly if you encountered them at the grocery or Starbucks.
The point is not that animal lovers are saints or that non–animal lovers are terrible people. The point is that animals connect us to something timeless and healing, life-embracing and deep.
If you have been involved with a wounded warrior at Walter Reed Hospital or anywhere else, or a battered woman in a shelter, or a terminal patient in hospice, or a troubled kid in a crisis school program, you have seen how animals can often reach and help humans, sometimes much more fundamentally and profoundly than another human.
I could never live anywhere that is animal restricted. NOLA is famously animal loving. Who could forget all the stranded Katrina roof sitters who refused rescue without their beloved pets? Even so, my first and lasting favorite NOLA friendships were forged and fortified by animal fondness.
The first week we arrived in New Orleans, Julia Trawick, a self-professed bleeding heart liberal, put a flyer on James car and signed it “from another good Democrat,” presuming that he would want to engage her services as a dog-loving walker for the hounds she always saw him fussing with.
• • •
I usually roll my eyes at “good Democrats,” but Julia’s story was so New Orleans, I paused to pay attention. She had had a big job pre-Katrina, but the hurricane and its devastation transformed her from the inside out. She asked herself, What do I love most in life? Two things came to mind: dogs and New Orleans. From that epiphany, Julia never returned to her big job and, in a few short years, has established a mighty busy business doing what she loves: dog sitting. I love this woman. She is the kind of person who texts you videos of your beloved pups huddled together and sleeping peacefully while you are frantically on the road and missing home. And Julia does not discriminate among furry and feathered beasts: she loves rats, cats, dogs, birds and, of course, life. And what she gets from their love, she gives back. Who doesn’t want to have a Julia in their life?
Another story that illustrates the animal-loving people and culture of New Orleans has to do with Matty and her struggle with math when we first arrived at our new home. Catholic schools may have curricula similar to public ones, but they are more serious about the basics, such as math and grammar. There are no remedial classes; it’s sink or swim. But if you need extra help, there are some truly sainted teachers and tutors who are devoted. They will do whatever it takes to make sure you’ve learned what you need to learn. Without her amazing math tutor, Nina Kirk, I’m pretty sure Matty would still be retaking trigonometry.
I like math fine, but I was a little intimidated by Nina and initially didn’t want to chum around with anyone that smart in a subject I can’t really talk about—or, most days, grasp. But as it turned out, Nina is a big dog lover. Bingo. And then I learned that Matty’s incredible eighth-grade teacher, Miss Graf, also a math maven, is a cat savior and saver. She kept a house and yard full of cats that had been displaced by Katrina, which evolved eventually into a place where people dropped off felines with such regularity that Miss Graf started sending around APBs recounting the wonders of another stray or adoptee or foster kitty who needed a good home. Robbie and Witchy (aka Fat/Killer Cat and Bagpipes) were abandoned kittens found under a house, and a good neighbor, rather than just leave them there, unloaded them at Miss Graf’s.
Fully aware of James’s feline antipathy, but feeling bad about Miss Graf’s overcrowded kitty castle, I decided to take these two little ones and hide them upstairs until they were old enough to roam around the neighborhood. By then, James wouldn’t know they were actually our cats. He’d think they were two more local beasts that I left food for outside. And my plan almost worked.
It’s true. I had sworn to him—pledged an oath—Yes, sir, no more animals. But then Miss Graf sent around another APB about a recently discovered semiferal cat who had been living with a homeless person. When that in
dividual found proper housing, the cat had moved to a car, which resulted in a tail-cutting incident we don’t need to go into.
This cat had a few issues, and who wouldn’t. She was not a people person, let’s just say that. She hated the other cats and all dogs as well, probably due to her life as a drifter. After deciding I had to take her in despite her personality defects, I realized that she couldn’t be hidden in the attic. She wasn’t a kitten. But she was too crazy to leave outside. So I snuck her into my office.
But adult cats need to roam, and this one wasn’t going to sit in an office after years as a restless roadie. To make matters more complicated, this cat—like all other cats—was very attracted to cat haters. So every time I opened my office door, she made a beeline for James’s office and took over his big leather La-Z-Boy recliner, which no one—human or animal—was allowed to touch.
I named her Stubs, thinking it might help her recover from her recent indignity. So I was pretty confused when James called, screaming for me to get “Paula” off his throne and out of his life. Paula?
Gennifer Flowers, currently a lounge singer and previously a political pain in James’s butt, had just moved to New Orleans. I wondered if this had caused him to have a Paula Jones flashback or something.
I ran into his office where he was swatting at poor Stubs—James will never actually touch a cat, so he swings his arms and hisses at them to get them to move. Meanwhile, he was saying, “Hey, hey!” and “Hey, hey, Paula!”—and then in one of those Carville mind processes you never see coming, he had started calling her Paula, as in the song “Hey Paula.” The name stuck, so I took this as a sign that Paula could too.
Love & War Page 31
