New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin's 'Honeymoon' May be Over By Glynn Wilson NEW ORLEANS, La., Dec. 6 — In the public life of a politician, there are turning points in time like a momentum change in a football game. One team may be winning for three quarters. Then in a flash there is a fumble, an interception, a long run or pass reception, and the underdog comes out on top. Election night on Nov. 14 may have been one of those major turning points for New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin. His shining bald head towered over the crowd at the Astor Crown Plaza on the corner of Bourbon and Canal Streets as he entered the room just minutes before Bobby Jindal came out to concede defeat at what turned out to be the loser's party in the Louisiana governor's race. Mayor Nagin's physical presence, in a sharp blue pin-striped suit, with a scarf and overcoat draped over his shoulders, was more commanding than the exterior he wore during his campaign for mayor in the spring of 2002 when he wore the mask of a humble, even affable, outsider. Mr. Nagin's good looks and charm — and go along, get along ways — has turned into charisma in office, and he is mostly loved by city hall insiders. Yarrow Etheredge, the mayor's director of environmental affairs, said Mayor Nagin is as good a man and as clean a politician as his reputation has been so far. "He is as good as he seems to be," she said. "He is very open to people's suggestions and ideas, without being easily swayed." After a year and a half in office, marked largely by high hopes and local media support, Mayor Nagin has surely endured one of the longest so-called honeymoon periods in Louisiana political history, according to Dr. Arnold R. Hirsch, a distinguished professor of New Orleans Studies and Urban History at the University of New Orleans. But because of his break with tradition by endorsing of a losing Republican candidate, and for his promotion of that endorsement on the official mayor's office Web site, Mr. Nagin's honeymoon "may well be over," Dr. Hirsch said. "People are going to start asking questions," he said. "It's about time when people are going to want results." The Times-Picayune newspaper, which endorsed Mr. Nagin in his race for mayor on its front page last spring, recently carried a story giving credence to the accusation that he may have used his official position for politics in a way that could be unethical. Mr. Nagin's staff dismissed the charges and said the mayor did nothing unethical. Patrick Evans, a spokesman for the mayor, said the Jindal endorsement did not tell anyone how to vote "So many people were asking about the mayor's decision-making process, posting it on the Web was just an efficient way to disseminate that information," Evans said. On whether his precedent-breaking support of a Republican would negatively affect the relationship between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, and between his administration and other Democrats, especially the large African-American community in New Orleans, Mr. Nagin himself dismissed the question blithely. "I don't know. I'm open to working with anybody," he said. "We'll see what happens." Marlin Gusman, a New Orleans city councilman and former right-hand man to Nagin's predecessor Marc Morial, portrayed locally as Mr. Nagin's chief adversary, said he has doubts about Mr. Nagin's ability to lead now. "Sometimes I think Mayor Nagin does things just to be different," he said, campaigning along with U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu for Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, a 60-year-old Cajun grandmother, barnstorming the state on election day in a Winnebago. "I certainly don't think when you count all the votes that a majority of the people in this community are going to be following behind him," Mr. Gusman said. "A leader has to lead his people." "I'm a little concerned about an endorsement of someone who seems to have adopted the right as his standard bearer," he said, looking away at the crowd of Democratic Party supporters carrying signs and cheering for Ms. Blanco, with rap music booming in the background at a major intersection in East New Orleans. On the campaign trail and in televised debates, Mr. Jindal openly touted his faith and his conversion from Hinduism to Catholicism when he was a student in a Baton Rouge high school. He also supported public display of the Ten Commandments, a hot button political issue in much of the South. He ran a series of radio ads taking a strong stand against abortion, gun control, gay marriage and Hollywood, not issues most black, Democratic mayors in U.S. cities would normally embrace. Mr. Jindal's conservative Christian stands, and his testimonial of coming back home to turn his state around, were not enough at the end of the day to propel him into office, leaving Mr. Nagin in a potentially precarious political position. Nagin's endorsement didn't work to turn New Orleans voters out for Mr. Jindal, Dr. Hirsch said, so how that effects Mr. Nagin's ability to turn New Orleans' economy around, and Ms. Blanco's ability to turn Louisiana around, are now under the political microscope. "He proved the claim he was making all through his political life that he's not a real politician," Dr. Hirsch said of Mr. Nagin, only partly in jest. "He didn't do terribly well with that," he said. "It was done in an inexpert way, which confirms his outsider status." Whether that will damage the relationship between the governor's mansion and city hall in New Orleans and negatively affect the business climate is probably minimized, he said, by the city's clout in the legislature. Other issues related to political reforms still linger that may have more of an impact on Mr. Nagin's tenure and reputation, Dr. Hirsch suggested. Mr. Nagin — who likes to point out that he was born in Charity Hospital, the public hospital here for the poor, and who used his own fortune in his campaign amassed as a businessman who headed up the cable television company Cox Communications — came into office promising to eliminate the corruption hovering over the city and state's business climate like a black cloud of doom. Mr. Nagin got a strong, fast start out of the blocks by working with the district attorney's office to make a series of high publicized arrests of individuals taking kickbacks in the auto inspection program and the taxi cab licensing division. "He got a big public relations boost from the local media, and then things seemed to calm down and he almost disappeared from public view," Dr. Hirsch said. "I kept waiting for the second shoe to fall, and it seemingly never did." Rooting out corruption in a city like New Orleans may take time, he said. "But at some point you have to produce, and there are some rumbles about that." On the up side, he said Mr. Nagin is "personable, a pleasant guy, bright and seems to have the city's interests at heart rather than narrow, private interests." "I would like to think we're on the right track," he said. "But I'm reserving judgment until I see some more concrete results." Glynn Wilson is a free-lance journalist based in New Orleans. An edited version of this story first appeared in the Dallas Morning News, Dec. 6, 2003
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