Katrina: After the Flood (39 page)

Three weeks before the election, a protest march was held 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.

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.”

I.
“I stayed low-key,” Sally Forman said of her involvement in her husband’s campaign. “Which was really weird. I was so active and here I was on the sidelines.”

18

THE MARDI GRAS WAY OF LIFE

The city held its first jury trial that June, more than nine months after the storm. The main holdup had been the flooding of the city’s massive criminal justice complex in Mid-City. Defense attorneys and local prosecutors squared off in a pair of borrowed federal courtrooms, but that was reserved for procedural hearings, not trials. “It’s like the final step,” an Orleans Parish DA told the Associated Press on the first day since Katrina that a pool of prospective jurors gathered for a trial. The backlog of criminal cases stood at around five thousand.

The justice complex was still a long way from being fully operational, but the caseload seemed certain to swell. The National Guard left in February, and crime picked up again in New Orleans. The city was home to less than half its pre-Katrina population, and the New Orleans Police Department was back at around 80 percent strength, but officers still needed to patrol the same geographic area. Looting was rampant in more barren parts of the city, and FEMA trailers were everywhere. The city averaged six murders a month through the first three months of 2006, but those numbers doubled in April and May. In June, five teens were shot dead while driving a sport utility vehicle on the outskirts of the
central business district. Three bodies were found inside the vehicle; the two others had been shot dead in the street while trying to escape. The mayor asked the governor to send a National Guard regiment of three hundred and Blanco complied, but not without a lecture about the need to impose a strict curfew on the city’s juveniles. New Orleans police chief Warren Riley countered that the curfew was unenforceable when they had no place to lock up young offenders. The National Guard would remain in New Orleans another two years.

The Convention Center reopened that June in time to host the American Library Association. Mardi Gras had proven a boon for the city treasury, as had the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, which featured Dave Matthews, Jimmy Buffett, Paul Simon, Elvis Costello, and Bob Dylan. Yet Jazz Fest—officially now the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival Presented by Shell—ended in early May. With the exception of the big summer R&B celebration
Essence
magazine had been holding in New Orleans since 1994, Jazz Fest represented the end of tourist season—and
Essence
had moved its big annual party to Houston that year. The city’s hotel and restaurant owners were happy to see seventeen thousand librarians descend on New Orleans at a time of year when the temperatures typically topped ninety degrees, but the next big convention was the National Association of Realtors in November. Even the most optimistic forecasts predicted it would be two years before the city’s convention business was restored.

June 1 marked the start of the new hurricane season. FEMA had a new director: the acting director the Bush administration had been working hard to replace. By one count, seven people turned down the FEMA directorship before the president made permanent the appointment of R. David Paulison. Paulison was best known as the FEMA official who, after September 11, urged all Americans to stock up on duct tape and plastic sheeting to guard against terrorist attacks.

The region’s battered levee system had been more or less restored to its former state as the city braced itself for the new hurricane season. One million tons of Mississippi clay had been carted in to replace the silt that had washed away when the levees collapsed. Several giant steel gates were added at the mouth of each of the city’s three biggest drainage canals. But $800 million later, New Orleans was safe so long
as nothing stronger than a Category 2 hurricane hit the coast. The city, the
Times-Picayune
’s Jed Horne declared, was “one storm away from extinction.”