New Orleans’ other winner

The New Orleans Saints’ Super Bowl trophy provides a much-needed rallying point for a city still coping with battered housing, infrastructure and businesses, but the Big Easy united in a more significant fashion the day before the Saints’ upset victory. On Saturday, voters in New Orleans overwhelmingly elected Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu as their next mayor, giving him a mandate to push past the political and social barriers that have slowed the city’s recovery. The election results, along with a pair of multibillion-dollar construction projects that may soon get underway, give long-suffering residents reason to be optimistic about their city’s future.

Landrieu, the son of former New Orleans Mayor “Moon” Landrieu, took 66% of the vote in the 11-candidate field, winning all but one of the 366 precincts in Orleans Parish. When he takes office in May, he will be the city’s first white mayor since his father (who desegregated city government) left office in 1978. Yet the goodwill he inherited hadn’t been enough to propel him into office in two previous runs, including a loss to his embattled predecessor, C. Ray Nagin, in 2006. Landrieu’s sweeping victory Saturday signaled that competence, not race, was the defining issue for black and white voters alike.

New Orleans’ homeowners have already benefited from roughly $4 billion in federal aid. The new mayor, however, will have to move the recovery forward at a time when governments at all levels have little or no cash to spare. Nagin, a political neophyte when he was elected in 2002, lacked either the skill or the inclination to create the kinds of public-private partnerships the city needs to finance much of its redevelopment. Nor was he able to build a consensus behind plans to reshape the city in a more concentrated and sustainable way.

Landrieu is better prepared for these tasks -- he’s more politically experienced and deft than Nagin. He also comes into office with fresh political capital, which could help the efforts to clear blighted properties and make room for a major new Veterans Administration hospital. Work on that project and a new teaching hospital in Mid-City may begin this year, depending on the outcome of some lingering land-use disputes. The sooner they do, the better -- they promise to bring thousands of jobs and pump billions of dollars into the local economy. As the city’s post-Katrina experience has shown, money alone won’t guarantee its recovery. But the two big projects can give Landrieu a tail wind, helping him make the tough decisions his predecessor didn’t.