Ray Nagin's Complacent Citizenry

I hadn't planned to have much to say today about last night's Nagin show. But since, the Mayor took the opportunity to marginalize his critics with a Nixonian appeal to the "silent majority", I thought we'd take a closer look at that claim.

One of the biggest challenges to our rebuilding together is that there is a whole lot of negative noise in our community. Not everyone, but a segment that is very skilled at getting their opinions and perspectives in the public domain. They dominate the news, the blogs, and talk radio. They are the people on the fringes - the 10% on the far right and 10% on the far left. They most often are heard above the remaining 80%, the rest of us who don't subscribe to their very narrow ways of thinking. But the voices in the middle, the reasonable ones, get drowned out by the extreme distortionists.

If the Nixon reference isn't working for you and you want something a bit more up to date, go ahead and cue up the Glenn Beck "We surround them" tape if you like. It's the same maneuver and we'll come to its meaning in just a minute.

But first, I really must take issue with the Mayor's sloppy terminology. The entire concept of a "right" and a "left" makes very little sense in the context of New Orleans politics. There are numerous small organizations, concerns, and loosely based centers of power that affect the local political landscape but they tend to center around family or business associations or other arcane specific interests. One thing we can say for certain is that none of them are rooted in an easily defined ideology. The Mayor adds to this distortion by pulling some percentages directly from his ass and applying them to his imaginary archetypes. But the Mayor isn't really offering us a political analysis, he's just using alternate terminology to disparage what most of us recognize as an engaged citizenry.

In much the same way his administration has discouraged citizens from emailing their elected representatives through hostility toward the privacy rights of individuals who do so, Nagin is further frowning upon citizen involvement in municipal affairs by labeling as "extreme" anyone who takes a more than casual interest in following and commenting on the goings on.

For a Mayor elected in 2002 on a platform of bringing more transparency and interactivity to government, the message he is leaving us with in his final year is really quite remarkable. At the end of his term we find ourselves in a situation where citizens are warned that they contact their elected officials at their own risk and that the small percentage who follow and engage with the news are "extreme distortionists."

After 8 years, it seems that Mayor Transparency now prefers a city in which 80% of the populous quietly and complacently sits aside while waiting for its "Atlanta moment" (whatever that means). Just last year, Nagin's former aide and then congressional candidate Kenya Smith told a room full of people he was "outraged" at the high level of "citizen complacency" in New Orleans. Until now I didn't realize the philosophical divide in place between Smith and his former boss. It's only the phony numbers, they still seem to agree on.