Katrina: After the Flood (38 page)

Then Mitch Landrieu entered the race.

IT HAD BEEN AN
agonizing few months for Ron Forman, starting with the disintegration of his relationship with Nagin. “The core group of people I work and socialize with are more the wealthy, the business
leaders, the philanthropic community,” Forman said. “I was ‘Ray’s guy’ to them.” He had stopped defending Nagin around October, but it was one thing to let someone know you’re disappointed in him and another to announce that you intend to take his job. He even sat down with Mitch Landrieu to try to convince him to enter the race. “But he tells me, ‘I think I can do more good in Baton Rouge than New Orleans,’ ” Forman said. “And I believed him.” Even after talking with Landrieu, Forman vacillated: “I told one person yes but then I’d tell someone else no.”

Sally Forman informed her boss what was happening shortly after the Chocolate City speech: “I told the mayor, ‘Unbeknownst to me, my husband has decided he’s running against you.’ ” The resignation letter she released to the media stressed the respect she had for Nagin, but privately she confided to people that the end couldn’t come soon enough. “Ray started to mistrust people around him, and some crazy things started to happen,” she said. “He started fighting. There were lines being drawn.”
^I

Ron Forman might have been the candidate of the Uptown blue bloods, but he wasn’t one of them. His father was a welder, his mother a bookkeeper. He was a Jew in a community known to harbor anti-Semitism; worse, after earning an MBA at Tulane, he went to work for Mayor Moon Landrieu—a figure cursed up and down St. Charles Avenue, the liberal who handed the city over to the blacks. But after two years working for Moon Landrieu, Forman was put in charge of the city’s zoo, a place so bad the
New York Times
had described it as a “ghetto for animals.” He’d earn the business community’s gratitude by transforming it into one of the city’s crown jewels. The zoo, along with the aquarium, which had been born under Forman’s tutelage (paid for by a tax on the city’s homeowners), attracted more than 3 million visitors a year, and Forman was helping make everyone rich. A likable, large-featured man always quick with a quip, he was invited to join Rex and became a fixture at events wherever the privileged and the well-connected gathered. “If you were mayor or in the council, you were my friend,” he said.

Forman pitied Nagin, whom he considered a friend: “We needed a Giuliani but that wasn’t Ray. He had to live with that each day and it took its toll.” It had once been a joke between Forman and Sally, the mayor’s tendency to describe himself as “percolating” on a problem. But it was no longer funny. “I’m not trying to sound heroic, but someone had to pick up the flag that Ray had left lying on the ground,” Forman said.

Running against Nagin felt awkward, but squaring off against Landrieu left Forman feeling “torn to pieces.” Moon had been an early mentor; Moon’s wife, Verna, chaired the zoo board. Forman had known Mitch since the younger Landrieu was a boy. His mother, Verna, would bring him to meetings and “he’d run around the boardroom, up on everything,” Forman said. “He was wild.” Forman was a fan of Mitch Landrieu the politician, who always knew he could count on a campaign contribution from Ron Forman. “This is someone I’ve been supportive of his whole career,” Forman said.

Forman thought about dropping out. He even broached the topic with some of his backers. “But by that point, I had already spent three hundred thousand or four hundred thousand dollars of their money,” he said. “I had made these commitments.” He hoped his money and his message, bundled with the
Times-Picayune
’s endorsement, would secure him a spot in the runoff, against Nagin or Landrieu.

Forman proved a lousy candidate. He’d flash a smile and give people a pat on the back but never said anything. Privately, he agreed with those who said that a city built for almost 650,000 needed to shrink following Katrina, but when speaking in public, he avoided talking about the future of the city’s flooded neighborhoods. “It became such a hot political subject that no one wanted to talk about it,” he later confessed. When the subject of the future of the neighborhoods came up, he’d talk generically about the New Orleans he loved. “What makes us rich is our diversity,” he would say. “Without diversity, we’re the suburbs.” It was critical that we give everyone a chance to come back home, he said, but offered no plan for doing so. He believed a lot of valuable ideas were hidden inside the Bring New Orleans Back Commission’s report, but he left that unsaid as well.

Forman’s campaign team broke the bad news to him a few weeks before election day. The election was a three-person race, as they had
expected, but Forman was running third in a contest that would pit the top two vote getters against one another in a runoff. “The hard part,” confessed Forman, “is when they tell you, ‘You have little of the black vote, you have a lot of the white vote, you have a lot of the wealthy vote. You’re being portrayed as the blue blood. And to change that, here are the ads we have about Mitch and Ray to bring down their numbers.’ ” He knew what the campaign professionals were asking him: How much did he want to be mayor?

THE PRESS WAS READY
to crown Mitch Landrieu the winner even before election day. How could he lose? Landrieu was a well-known son of Louisiana politics with nearly twenty years in politics. He was the state’s lieutenant governor. In a field of neophytes, Landrieu was a polished campaigner who had the media savvy to handle the extra burden of the
Washington Post
, the
New York Times
, CNN, and the hundreds of other out-of-town reporters who would be parachuting in to cover New Orleans’s 2006 municipal elections. The racial politics also seemed to break Landrieu’s way. He’d get his share of white votes and also do well in the black community. His voting record in the state legislature was that of an old-style liberal who cared about the downtrodden. More important was his father’s reputation as the man who opened City Hall to blacks in New Orleans. “There’s historically been a lot of carryover loyalty there,” said Silas Lee, a local pollster and Xavier University professor.

Landrieu had grown up not in Uptown but Broadmoor, a mixed community in the western half of the city. “We were playing baseball against one another since the fourth grade,” said Jacques Morial, the second-born son of the man who took Moon Landrieu’s place as mayor and the younger brother of Nagin’s predecessor.

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.