Via the NYT: New Orleans Facing Election and New Order

Mitch Landrieu, the state’s lieutenant governor and son of the city’s last white mayor — Moon Landrieu, who left office in 1978 — is expected to announce any day his entry into a race that will help define a radically reshaped city.

Among other opponents, he will face Mayor C. Ray Nagin, whose popularity here and elsewhere has withered under criticism of his performance during Hurricane Katrina and his recent remarks about the future racial makeup of the city.

Of course the burining question is: who would want to be Mayor of New Orleans?

And regardless of the demographics, or the diaspora of the city’s citizens, one would have to think that Nagin would be quite vulnerable to electoral defeat. With Landrieu running it is probably a good idea for the Mayor to start updating his resume.

And Nagin sounds a bit too much like someone with a vested interest in calling doubt upon the process:

“I’m all for having elections, but I want to make sure that they’re fair elections,” the mayor said on Wednesday. “And the fact that, as mayor of the city of New Orleans, I still do not have the FEMA list that will allow me to communicate with my citizens who are spread out over 44 different states to at least let them know that they can come back causes me to pause as far as whether we can have fair elections or not.”

The tone has a certain Third World quality when spoken by the person who has the most to lose if the process goes forward.

Further, the idea that the dispersed citizens of New Orleans are all still of a mindset as to be thinking about mayoral elections, or that they are all going to be coming back, is an incorrect one. While I am sure that there are people who are still planning on coming back, the bottom line is that every day that they are somewhere else, doing whatever they are doing in building new lives for themselves, the chances decrease significantly that they will ever move back to New Orleans.

The time has come to start working with whom and what are in the city, rather than taking a mindset of waiting for some mythic Return to the Way it Was, because that isn’t going to happen.

If anything, whatever return that there is going to be is going ot take time and the people who are living there now deserve the normal electoral process, not democracy in limbo.