A Storm Survivor, Political Reputation Intact
By JOYCE PURNICK
Published: September 21, 2005
BATON ROUGE, La., Sept. 20 - Hurricane Katrina has given the nation a new political celebrity, the mayor of beleaguered New Orleans. And like they say with pride here about most everything, Mayor C. Ray Nagin is just plain different.
A former business executive, Mr. Nagin is a Democrat who lashed out at Republican Washington, likes to cuss, has begun treating the president whose administration he lambasted as a buddy and makes no secret of his differences with the state's governor, Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, also a Democrat. Mostly, he seems to be unapologetically making it up as he goes along, as he did on Monday when he (temporarily) defied official advice to slow the reopening of his city.
After Vice Adm. Thad W. Allen of the Coast Guard and President Bush very publicly advised caution, Mr. Nagin backed down and reversed his order to have people return gradually. He retreated with sword raised. "There's only one mayor of New Orleans and I'm it," he said, attributing his reversal to a "new event" - the prospect that Hurricane Rita might head for the Gulf Coast.
That kind of bravado is classic Nagin, an unorthodox politician of 49 who was a top cable executive before he ran for mayor three years ago. His pre-storm, tenure was seen as a little bumpy as he learned on the job, but not fatally so. Post-storm, Mr. Nagin has made a virtue of being consistently inconsistent. Why fast-track the return of people to a city short on power and potable water, even as he talks about putting safety first?
Those who know Mr. Nagin and know New Orleans attribute his rush to three factors: Nagin chemistry, politics and race, with a dash of civic pride thrown in.
"There's a lot of pressure to get business going again in New Orleans, and he got ahead of himself," said James W. Nickel, a lobbyist here and former state Democratic chairman.
Mr. Nagin, who declined to be interviewed for this article, maintains that politics was not his motive in trying to reopen his city quickly.
Few who know the politics of New Orleans, a predominantly black city with a powerful white business core, harbor any doubt that he was responding to pressure from the entrenched white business community, and perhaps, too, from black elected officials worried that their constituents would not return unless assured their city was up and running.
Mr. Nagin needed the votes of both constituencies to win election, but white voters held the margin of victory. When he ran for mayor, business executives embraced him as a reformer. He got into the runoff after the black vote split and then went on to a slim victory.
"Candidates running for other offices got more votes than he did," the City Council president, Oliver M. Thomas Jr., said on Tuesday. Mr. Thomas has viewed the mayor's conduct post-storm with some skepticism, including his latest flip-flop. "You can't keep jerking people's chains," Mr. Thomas said.
Others cite mistakes. Mr. Nagin did not get everyone out, did not fire up the school buses for evacuees, did not have enough food or water for them in the Superdome or the convention center, did not protect people adequately and let the looters loot so he could make rescues the priority.
He had to answer for flying to Dallas the second weekend after Hurricane Katrina to visit his evacuated family and for meeting there with white businessmen from New Orleans. This infuriated many of the city's black lawmakers and businessmen, worried about being left out of the rebuilding loop, despite Mr. Nagin's assurances to the contrary.
And of course there was the famous flash of Nagin temper on the Thursday after the storm, when he railed at the federal authorities, "Now get off your asses and do something." In most cities, the public would say, Sure, but why didn't you do it first? But in New Orleans, Mr. Nagin was seen as putting the blame squarely on Washington and as alerting the world to his city's emergency.
Instead of facing political oblivion, Mr. Nagin has emerged as something of a folk hero, a familiar figure with his distinctive shirts and shaved head.
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