“Oh, Miss Acorn,” said Nagin with a smile, “Are you still mad at me?”
“Hell yeah!” she shot back. “Is the water certified in Lower Nine?”
Nagin’s smile faded.
“You can’t see the good in anything,” he said.
“No, I can’t,” said Gueringer, “because my community is still being locked out. And I’m still angry.”
Nagin tried to reassure her about the water. “I’m working on it, I’m working on it, we have people down there every day.”
“No, you don’t,” Gueringer snapped. “I know you’re lying to me, Mr. Mayor.”
Nagin walked away. (His staff later said he needed to get to an appointment.)
The blame game for New Orleans’s sorry state is many-sided. The Bush administration, the governor’s office in Baton Rouge and city hall all share some responsibility for the slow state of reconstruction. So does the culture of New Orleans it-self. When San Francisco was destroyed by an earthquake in 1906, the raw, capitalist spirit of the place was regenerative. New Orleanians have traditionally been more fatalistic and classbound. (Though San Francisco, too, was plagued by racial division: the city fathers originally wanted to use the earthquake as an excuse to drive out Chinese immigrants, until the Empress Dowager of China personally protested and the California governor intervened to halt the forced relocation plan.) Even though Congress has appropriated more than $100 billion for the recovery effort along the Gulf Coast, New Orleans is only now just beginning to get serious money for rebuilding.
Nothing in Ray Nagin’s career as a cable-TV executive or first-term mayor of a smallish (and shrinking) American city prepared him to cope with the rough equivalent of an atom bomb detonating off the coast. He can’t be faulted for shoddily built levees, or a vacationing, clueless White House, or the Force of Nature. Even so, he is the theater commander in the battle to save New Orleans, and the war is still not going well.
It is very difficult to be in Nagin’s shoes. He is intelligent and independent and not corrupt, qualities not always associated with Louisiana fat-cat politics. But he can be ineffectual, too eager to please and too easily distracted. He lacks the dominating personal force of a Rudy Giuliani pulling New York together on 9/11. Nagin can be touchy about invidious comparisons with New York: questioned about the slow pace of rebuilding in his own city, he gave NEWSWEEK his controversial anniversary talking point–“They still have a big hole in the ground after five years.”
Tough words, but it should be noted the damage wreaked by Katrina to New Orleans far surpassed the lasting physical impact of the downed Twin Towers. A year after the storm flooded New Orleans and killed more than a thousand people, the city has lost more than half its population. Water and electrical service are still out in some low-lying areas, garbage collection is spotty, many schools and hospitals are still closed, and the city buses don’t run regularly or on time. Whole blocks still look as though they were bombed. On a sultry afternoon in late August, along Florida Avenue near the now repaired Industrial Canal, gawkers stopped to photograph a house sitting on top of a car. The Gray Line bus company runs a Hurricane Katrina Tour, which charges tourists $35 a day to look at some of the worst-hit spots. (A NEWSWEEK Poll found that 58 percent of Americans are “dissatisfied” with the progress on rebuilding New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.)
There are, in some ways, two New Orleanses. The city’s original crescent, “the sliver by the river” of high ground along the Mississippi, was not badly damaged by Katrina. Housing prices are booming and even Donald Trump is looking to invest. But the lower-lying areas stretching toward Lake Pontchartrain are still battered.
The sense of anger and suspicion among Lower Ninth residents, many of whom believe they are being conspired against by white uptown developers, has been a burden for Nagin. His attempts to deal with that sense of alienation bring into sharp relief the mayor’s uncomfortable place in the Big Easy. He has always had a foot in both worlds of New Orleans, rich white as well as poor black. His almost unique position could have been a blessing, allowing him to bridge deep divides, something he has failed to accomplish.
Nagin has no deep roots in any one part of New Orleans. He was born in Treme, a middle-class neighborhood traditionally populated by Creoles, who sometimes “passed” for white in the Jim Crow days. The son of a janitor, Nagin himself grew up poor, and for much of his upbringing, he lived in Algiers, a blue-collar community across the Mississippi that is regarded by old New Orleanians as Over There. After getting a baseball scholarship at Tuskegee Institute and an M.B.A. at Tulane, he became a successful businessman. He was the candidate of the elite and the business community when he ran for mayor in 2002. He won 80 percent of the white vote and 20 percent of the black vote, good enough to carry a city that was roughly 70 percent black, 30 percent white.
Katrina seemed to catch Nagin, like the rest of his city, by surprise. He was slow to order an evacuation, and during the storm he had little communication with the Feds (or, for that matter, his own city council). He gained national attention by ranting on a local radio show that the state and federal authorities should “get off their a—s and do something.” Normally, “I’m a pretty even-keeled guy,” he told NEWSWEEK. “I don’t get too high or low.”
Nagin is not easy to read. At meetings, he’ll frequently slouch to one side or lean his arms and torso way up on the table. The people involved with Nagin’s latest plan to rebuild New Orleans, his “100 Days Initiative,” won’t describe the organization’s structure, not because they’re required to keep it confidential, but because, they say, the structure exists mainly in Nagin’s head. Nagin acknowledges that he has been called a “lone wolf,” though he rejects the caricature.
Nagin has a few longtime close advisers, but his administration has been a revolving door. He moves with grace, and is charming and easygoing, though cool and a little detached. He has been called “Mayor Hottie,” according to the New Orleans Times-Picayune, but he is hardly a swinger. A family man who likes to play golf, Nagin has been married for 23 years and has three children. He prefers not to show his hand too quickly, and always reserves the right to change his mind.
About a month after Katrina, the city’s movers and shakers met at a local restaurant, still serving on paper plates, to talk about New Orleans’s future. “The mayor was there for three hours, table-hopping,” recalls Douglas Ahlers, a local entrepreneur who became involved in city planning. “But instead of going around saying, ‘What do you need? What are you going to do? How can we help?’ it was as if it was just a regular Friday lunch in old New Orleans. I realized he wasn’t working the issues, just glad-handing.”
Nagin did create an ambitious-sounding Bring New Orleans Back Commission in late September and appointed a racially mixed (eight whites, eight blacks, one Hispanic) panel of local worthies to offer recommendations. The most forceful presence on the panel was a wealthy developer, 69-year-old Joe Canizaro, a “git-r-dun” type with close ties to the Bush White House. The commission brought in professional urban planners who suggested that a smaller, drier New Orleans might be healthier and safer. The planners suggested that parts of the lower-lying areas–which were disproportionately populated by African-Americans–be returned to cypress swampland. In an interview with NEWSWEEK, Canizaro said he believed that the mayor would act on the BNOB proposals. “I had no doubt,” he said.
Nagin now says that he never wanted the BNOB to be “his” plan but rather a forum for ideas that he could use or discard. When the plan was unveiled at a public meeting in early January, the hotel ballroom erupted with angry protesters. Conspiracy theories were racing through the black community that white developers wanted to drive blacks from the city and seize their property. (The Lower Ninth Ward, in particular, has a higher homeownership–about 60 percent–than most of the city.) Nagin began publicly backing away from the BNOB plan, insisting the Lower Nine would be rebuilt, or making ambiguous or contradictory remarks to a variety of different audiences. Canizaro was desperately trying to get Nagin to go to Washington and present the BNOB plan to policymakers and members of Congress, to show that the city would make wise use of federal dollars. Each time he asked Nagin, Canizaro said, Nagin would reply, “We’re going to do it.” But nothing would happen. “That was the height of frustration,” Canizaro recalled. “That’s when I realized the Bring New Orleans Back plan was in serious jeopardy.”
Nagin was already shifting into campaign mode–the election was scheduled for late March. A month after Katrina, Nagin had met quietly with his chief political adviser, Jim Carvin, a white man in a wheelchair who is a New Orleans institution (at 77, he has been the winning strategist in 10 straight mayoral races). In an interview with NEWSWEEK, Carvin recalled that Nagin was worried that he would be the fall guy for Katrina. Carvin says he told him that “we would get the black vote, and we would get enough of the black vote to win.” Carvin says he coached Nagin to chase the post-Katrina diaspora and assure them that they would get their city back: “Get out of town,” Carvin instructed the mayor. “Go to Houston, Atlanta, Birmingham. Talk to the displaced voters. Say, ‘I’m going to rebuild it’.”
On Martin Luther King Day, just a few days after the blowup over the BNOB plan, Nagin made a speech that drew national headlines and not a few political-obituary notices. Speaking to a mostly black audience, he vowed that the city of New Orleans would once again be “chocolate” because “it’s the way God wants it to be. You can’t have New Orleans no other way.” Nagin says he knew what he was doing. “I wanted to be a little edgy because I knew that the national media … would pick it up and spread the word to displaced voters in other states.” ( “Chocolate City” is the name of a Parliament album that Nagin listened to in college.)
Nagin’s political instincts were spot-on. In a runoff election in May, he beat a white candidate, Mitch Landrieu, winning more than 80 percent of the black vote and about 20 percent of the white vote. Both candidates avoided the touchy issue of whether New Orleans needed to “shrink its footprint,” and vaguely promised a plan to rebuild the city if elected. At Sunday mass after the election, Nagin told reporters, “I’m on my boogie board, I’m just going to keep on riding.” He announced a “100 Day Plan” to rebuild the city, which immediately became the butt of jokes. Was it supposed to be a plan for rebuilding the city in 100 days, or was it going to take 100 days to release the plan? “The answer’s still out there; which one was it?” said a former Nagin adviser, who requested anonymity because he did not want to offend the mayor. Actually, the 100 Day Plan envisions a bottom-up approach: each community will come up with its own plan, and these plans will be knitted together in a larger plan. With less than two weeks to go on Nagin’s 100 Days, some communities, like middle-class Broadmoor, are far along, and some neighborhoods, like the Lower Ninth, are still basically nowhere.
Nagin himself has been out of town for much of the time, making speeches to various groups. His detachment vexes some local organizers. The Rev. Leonard Lucas Jr., the wealthy pastor of the Light City Church in Lower Nine, styles himself as Nagin’s black conscience. Devoted to getting jobs and federal money into Lower Nine, Lucas seized on the reconstruction of the Jackson Barracks, the local home of a Louisiana National Guard unit, as a chance to get contracts for minority-owned companies. Lucas persuaded Nagin to go to a meeting on the project, and crowed afterward, “We got the mayor onboard and he liked it. He didn’t like it–he loved it!” But then Lucas never heard back from Nagin. Now the reverend is bitter. “I’ve never seen a black man hate his people like that. All he did was sell his people out.” Calling Nagin a “white Republican,” he denounced the mayor for joining with the white business community in trying to drive blacks out of the city.
Nagin insists he’s trying to restore black neighborhoods but accepts that he is going to be a target of frustration. “I’m the mayor, I take those hits at times,” he says. Nagin worries about the effect of the rough publicity on his wife and kids, who only this past week were able to move back into their house, which was buffeted and flooded in the storm and is still not entirely repaired. (“My daughter went into her room, kissed the carpet, kissed her bed and kissed the wall,” says Nagin.) He has been tending to his own soul, reading a book called “Inspiration: Your Ultimate Calling,” a New Age spirituality book that asks readers to remember the “voice in the Universe entreating us to remember our purpose … " Nagin says his calling is to “find broken stuff … I do turnaround, I do fixes, I start up stuff.”
Nagin cannot run for a third term, and he is vague about his ambitions for higher office. “Every time I go somewhere somebody wants to throw a fund-raiser for me,” says Nagin. “So I don’t know, man, I’m raising money the easiest I’ve ever done in my life. I’m serious. I mean big money.” Asked if he’d like to be a national leader, he answers, “It depends, man, then I’d have to do the party thing. I don’t like any of those parties. I’d rather throw my own party.” Carvin, the mayor’s political adviser, says that Nagin “doesn’t like politics. He’s not comfortable with it. He’s not comfortable with the wheeling and dealing that goes on in politics.” Carvin, who has not seen much of Nagin since the election, is disappointed in his pupil. “He had a marvelous opportunity, having won the election against all odds, to try to pull it together and exhibit all the qualities that a leader should have,” says the old political hand. “And he just hasn’t done that.” Until he does, New Orleans will remain a smaller, sadder city.
