NAGIN WINS IT

From the New Orleans Times-Picayune:

Nine months after Hurricane Katrina swamped his city and transformed him from virtual shoo-in to ripe target, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin surged to a second term Saturday, besting Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu to maintain leadership of a city still languishing in ruin.

Nagin, a former cable television executive who ran as a political outsider four years ago, overcame withering criticism of his performance in the months since the Aug. 29 storm. Acknowledging that the effort to restore basic municipal services has been painfully slow, Nagin blamed the lack of progress on a failure of state and federal government to come to the aid of a city reeling from the worst urban natural disaster in American history.

With his victory, Nagin kept alive a 60-year win streak for incumbents and continued the era of African-American leadership in the mayor's office, which began when Landrieu's father, Moon Landrieu, left office in 1978.

Nagin's re-election means he will remain at the helm of a daunting recovery effort through 2010, removing an air of uncertainty that even he admitted during the campaign has slowed the rebuilding process.

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Strangely, this election wasn't about politics. Well, okay, it was about politics, but not about political issues. As the article observes, Landrieu's and Nagin's policy positions were identical, so voters weren't choosing between different visions of how New Orleans ought to be reconstructed. Instead, as the conventional wisdom goes, this was a referendum on Nagin. Indeed, the Big Easy's Mayor had come under heavy criticism concerning the way he handled the Katrina crisis, before, during, and after. Apparently, he got enough New Orleanians to believe that he did, at least, an okay job, despite the months of mouthing.

And that's kind of my take on it, too. Certainly, what happened with Katrina was a massive, system-wide failure, and Nagin most definitely made mistakes. But I think that Houston's clusterfuck of an evacuation when category 5 Rita was headed in their direction made it obvious to all that evacuating a major city is a problematic concept at best--really, what all cities need is much better oversight and coordination from the Feds, but then, I'm just an actor, so what do I know? The bottom line for most voters in regard to this "referendum," I think, is that Nagin was on the ground during the entire Katrina story, right in the middle of things, all by himself doing his best to kick ass. Landrieu wasn't there. Blanco wasn't there. And Bush just kind of did a fly-by. I think that's how Ray Nagin re-earned his position.

Overshadowing all of this, however, is race. The final analysis is still out, but, in the end, the Picayune seems to think that between the primary and runoff Nagin managed to get enough white votes, twenty percent, to do the trick. Consequently, the election wasn't decided along a strict white-black line. That's a great thing because it will make governing the city that much easier. But it's also great, to me, because I'm of the opinion that only an African-American mayor can assure that New Orleans' enormous black population will get, at least, a shot at a fair shake. Landrieu is a Democrat, yes, but he's also a product of the old and entrenched Louisiana white power structure. As liberal as Democrats seem to be, white Democrats have a tendency, like all white Americans, to overlook and underemphasize the problems facing black Americans. And white Democrats, in the South anyway, usually look to the problems of white citizens first, blacks later. Sometimes much much later. Or never. Let's face it: most black New Orleanians have yet to return because they can't. Their neighborhoods still lie in ruins. Many of these African-Americans, because they are poor and politically powerless, do not have the lobbying resources that whites have. Even with Nagin on the job, I still fear that the needs of whites will be met first, leaving blacks to pick up the scraps dropped from the table. But with Nagin on the job, I am less fearful.

Congrats Mayor Nagin.

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