New Orleans Mayoral Hopeful Visits Texas

Candidates for mayor usually don’t waste time stumping in other cities, much less other states. But New Orleans mayoral hopeful Mitch Landrieu was cheerfully working a Texas crowd Monday evening -- the latest sign that winning the April 22 election to lead the woebegone Crescent City would require extraordinary campaign tactics.

More than six months after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, only about a third of the city’s nearly half-million residents have returned. In fact, Houston is still housing an estimated 150,000 New Orleans residents.

As a result, canvassing for votes in the mayoral race requires that, in addition to visiting the Garden District and the French Quarter, candidates hop aboard airplanes and endure long drives to reach potential voters scattered in Atlanta, Houston, Dallas and Memphis. One grass-roots group working with evacuees in Houston, the Metropolitan Organization, has estimated there are 45,000 registered New Orleans voters here.

So there was Louisiana’s Democratic lieutenant governor at the Good Hope Missionary Baptist Church near downtown Houston, holding what his campaign called a “round-table discussion with evacuees.” It was Landrieu’s first campaign appearance outside Louisiana since announcing his run for mayor but, his aides pointed out, his third visit to evacuees in Houston.

Landrieu jumped out of a Lincoln Town Car and hugged a group of cheering children who were hoisting Landrieu-for-mayor signs. But once inside the church, the candidate was confronted by a less photogenic reality: Only a few dozen people had bothered to show up. Most were Texas and Louisiana legislators, political aides and community activists.

Landrieu proceeded to press the flesh with as many as possible.

“It’s not nearly as hard as getting back to work, or getting your house back in order,” Landrieu said when asked by reporters about the difficulty of waging such an unorthodox campaign. “It might well be the most publicized election in our city’s history,” he added.

Landrieu, the son of Maurice Edwin “Moon” Landrieu -- a popular former New Orleans mayor -- is considered a leading challenger to incumbent C. Ray Nagin.

Ron Forman, a civic leader and official with the Audubon Institute, also is thought to be a viable contender, and the two are expected to siphon away some of Nagin’s support among business leaders -- his core supporters during his initial run for mayor.

Nagin is widely seen as vulnerable as a result of his post-hurricane leadership and a series of verbal gaffes that made him the butt of national jokes, including a Martin Luther King Day speech in which he called for New Orleans to become a “chocolate city.”

“I have a profound respect for Mayor Nagin. I like him, I think a lot of people like him ... [but] that mayor’s office needs someone who understands what leadership is,” Landrieu said Monday.

Noting that his campaign against Nagin -- who is black -- has been interpreted by some as an attempt by white politicians to recapture leadership of a majority black city, Landrieu drew applause when he said the race was about uniting a fractious city. He vowed to bring warring politicians together and to press the federal government for more money for housing and levee repairs.

Under rules approved by the Louisiana Legislature to ensure the broadest possible voter participation, evacuees can cast absentee ballots; visit satellite voting centers set up around Louisiana to cast early ballots; or come into town on election day to vote.

Michelle Paul, an organizer with the Metropolitan Organization, said the group would hand out registration forms and collect and mail them once they have been completed. Paul said the organization was coordinating with similar groups across the country to develop a common agenda of what most evacuees want.

“In every area where we have a sister organization working with evacuees, whether it is Atlanta, Memphis or San Antonio, we are going to have videoconferencing to hold the candidates accountable to the people who are not currently in New Orleans,” Paul said.