by Glynn Wilson
Dodging the cavernous potholes in the streets of New Orleans on the way home from Mayor Ray Nagin’s victory party at the Marriott Hotel on Canal Street last weekend, I began to think about all the problems of governance that seem to plague us in what historians may refer to as “the Bush years.”
The words of one New Orleans resident - a native of Walker County, Alabama, who got out - echo in my head: “Fix the streets, dammit. I would vote for anyone who would just fix the streets.”
On and off for the past half a century, the United States has teetered back and forth between electing politicians who bash big government and those who strive to make government work.
What will the country’s political landscape look like at the end of the election cycle in 2006?
Before Hurricane Katrina’s deluge overwhelmed New Orleans, Nagin had three years to fix the streets. His administration did find about $100,000 hidden by the previous administration and paved a few. But the response in the wake of Katrina showed that government was not prepared at the local, state or national levels, even though experts had warned for years about the inevitability of “the big one.”
This makes New Orleans resident and historian Douglas Brinkley mad.
Brinkley appeared on C-SPAN’S “Washington Journal” this week. Even nine months after Katrina, he still appeared to be mad not only at President George W. Bush and Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco. He is still mad at Nagin for hiding out on the 27th floor of the Hyatt Hotel for a week and then disappearing to a house in Dallas, Texas, for five days at the height of the disaster’s aftermath.
In a rare timely narrative from a historian, Brinkley wrote a book about that week, The Great Deluge, which became a campaign issue when it came out before the 2006 hurricane season opened on June 1.
Nagin bashed the book during the final days of the campaign and made national news out of it, according to the Washington Post.
“Nagin denounced the book without reading it,” Brinkley said. “If he had ignored it, I don’t think it would have become an issue. People love the food fight - it was suddenly the Tulane professor from Uptown versus the mayor. It got framed as a square off.”
You can read excerpts from the book in Vanity Fair magazine.
The blurb?
As Hurricane Katrina bore down and weather experts sounded the alarm, every hour counted. Yet Mayor Ray Nagin waited to order a mandatory evacuation, FEMA director Michael Brown held off on readying adequate relief, and Governor Kathleen Blanco and President Bush exchanged form letters instead of urgent phone calls.
The kicker?
In the span of one week last summer, the United States was changed, and not just along the battered coastline of the Gulf of Mexico. The nation, eventually, could always bounce back from a natural disaster. Instead, the Great Deluge of New Orleans had turned out to be a disaster of another sort - one that, through breached levees and massive governmental incompetence, the country had actually brought upon itself.
During the C-SPAN interview, Brinkley was hammered by a few callers for pointing out that Nagin was a Republican, not a Democrat, as he was identified by virtually every national pundit on cable TV.
In a story for the Dallas Morning News that appeared on December 6, 2003, I tried to point out that Nagin’s honeymoon was about over. In the gubernatorial runoff campaign between Lt. Gov. Kathleen Blanco and Bobby Jindal, Mr. Nagin endorsed Mr. Jindal, the Republican, which was part of the problem that led to a lack of cooperation between the city and the state after Katrina.
But voters in New Orleans felt Nagin endured the Katrina crisis with them. So enough of them voted to give him a second term and a second chance to lead - to fix the streets and bring New Orleans back.
Now with new elections looming this summer and fall, a key question is: Will Americans turn out at the polls to vote for candidates who seem to have the ability to get the job done, to fix the streets?
Or will the reactionary, anti-government forces continue to tip the balance in elections to the likes of the conservative Republicans who now hold the power in both houses of Congress?
A lot of liberals I know are totally disengaged from politics. They tell me this all the time when they read my Web site and see that we tend to focus on politics more than science or something else. I tell them we do this because it is important now, perhaps more important than ever.
What this country looks like in the future will be up to the brighter voters, who should stop being cynical and get back involved in the political process. They have the power to turn the tide, if only they will get themselves informed and work to make a difference.
One final story to bring this back home to Alabama. Another friend who follows this site sometimes said something astounding the other day.
This is someone who is having a hard time making enough money these days, who did quite well during the days when Bill Clinton was in the White House and the Democrats still held power in at least one house of Congress.
He reads the Birmingham News at work and listens to talk radio all the time. But he did not even know there was such a thing as public radio and public television low down on the radio and TV dial. And he scoffed when I urged him to watch For the Record on Alabama Public Television.
“Why do I need these idiots to tell me what’s going on,” he said.
Well, he depends on the Birmingham News and listens to the uninformed idiots on talk radio. And he will most likely vote for Don Siegelman in the Democratic Party primary June 6, even though Siegelman is still on trial in Montgomery and looking more and more guilty with each government witness.
That is not the way to change things. We hope people wake up and decide to vote for candidates who will show up for work every day - and fix the damn streets.
