Mayoral Race May Touch New Orleans’ Deeper Ills

With the entry of one of the state’s prominent politicians into the mayoral race, the campaign issues may move beyond rebuilding after Hurricane Katrina to the root causes of this city’s problems that stretch back generations.

And if he is elected, Louisiana Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu will be the first white mayor to hold that office since his father left the job in 1978.

In announcing his run Wednesday, Landrieu urged that a way be found to keep the state’s best resources at home and that New Orleans start thinking more like Atlanta and Houston when it came to development.

“We have to find way to stop sending our raw material, our raw talent, and our intellectual capital ... out into the world and letting somebody else add value to it and send it back to us and let us buy it,” said Landrieu, who announced his candidacy flanked by family members and political friends while standing on the Riverwalk, his back to the Mississippi River.

During his announcement, Landrieu was conciliatory toward Mayor C. Ray Nagin, who is running for reelection. But, Landrieu said, the city needs “leadership that can restore our credibility nationally and internationally.”

Landrieu enters the race as a candidate with high name recognition. And his prominence could move the political discussion beyond rebuilding levees, houses and businesses.

Landrieu “is a major candidate,” said Edward F. Renwick, director of Loyola University’s Institute of Politics in New Orleans. “Other people have to get known; he’s already known.”

The election will take place April 22, with a runoff May 20 if no candidate wins a plurality.

The election “has to be about reconstruction of levees,” Renwick said. “But then there’s more to bringing back New Orleans than building levees. There was a lot wrong with New Orleans before Katrina.”

Landrieu promised to “change the DNA of government” because “nothing short of total transformation is adequate for post-Katrina life.”

He urged a new focus on education.

“If we’re going to succeed in the 21st century economy, we have to have the brains, we have to be smart,” he said.

Before Katrina, the race was expected to be uneventful. But much of the city’s black majority electorate has not returned since the storm.

The race is now crowded with candidates, but only two, Nagin and the Rev. Tom Watson, are black; the rest are white. No one is predicting how many black voters will be here on election day.

A federal lawsuit to be heard today could require the city to place satellite voting booths in cities across America where New Orleans voters settled after Katrina.

Landrieu said he would campaign in those places where most Katrina evacuees had settled: Atlanta, Houston, Dallas and Memphis.

The next mayor will face many hard choices, he said, and that person will need “a mandate from the public. The public will have to know that that’s the person everybody chose.”

Landrieu is from a political family that is known for reform.

His father, Maurice Edwin “Moon” Landrieu, was mayor of New Orleans from 1970 to 1978. He earned respect from the city’s black community for standing up to segregationists. Later, he was secretary of Housing and Urban Development for President Carter.

Mitch Landrieu’s sister, Mary, is the senior U.S. senator from Louisiana.

Mitch Landrieu was a state legislator for 16 years before winning the lieutenant governor’s job in 2003.

“We’re into political dynasties,” Renwick said.

Less important positions -- sheriffs and assessors, for example -- also have routinely passed from one generation to the next within the same family.

New Orleans has seven assessors, Renwick said. “In pretty much all of them, the next generation would become the assessor,” he said.

Katrina offers a chance, Renwick said, to change some of the worst about the state’s economic and political culture -- with the mayor’s race offering the first opportunity for debate.

“If we can’t restructure now,” he said, “I don’t know what we have to have to do it.”