For the umpteenth time in the past fourteen months, post-Katrina New Orleans sits squarely in the path of yet another storm of national scrutiny. The flood and the recovery continue to color every aspect of life in New Orleans these days on both a material and psychic level... as well it should. As a result, any local event carrying a profile higher than that of your cat's dental check-up automatically gets plugged into the following narrative:
The eyes of the nation are fixed on New Orleans this week in anticipation of [EVENT]. As this will be the first occurrence of [EVENT] in the city since the catastrophic flooding last August, observers will be watching for signs of how this year's [EVENT] is indicative of the amount of progress made on the region's road to recovery.
Some events that have been framed in this fashion:
- Carnival 2006
- The 2006 Mayoral elections
- The 2006 convention of the American Libary Association
- Any and every holiday
- Any second-lining.... that is... any second-lining the police will allow
- The reopening of the Superdome
- Every single Saints home game since the reopening of the Superdome
- The first post-Katrina Chris Rose column about Britney Spears
Later this week, a nation will look on in rapt anticipation to learn if jeffrey's post-Katrina Thanksgiving Oyster Dressing is still up to snuff. Meanwhile we've got this train wreck of a congressional election to deal with.
Analysis of Southern politics going all the way back to V.O. Key has focused on the prevalence of personality rather than issue driven elections. Louisiana differs slightly from the one-party South of the Twentieth century due, in part, to the polarizing presence of the Longs. While typical Southern demagoguery consisted of personal (often humorous) inflammatory rhetoric and race-baiting as a means to maintaining an elite power structure, Longist demagoguery consisted of personal (often humorous) inflammatory rhetoric minus the race-baiting as a means toward empowering the poor and working classes and radically challenging the elite power structure. While nominally operating within the Democratic Party, the Longite and anti-Longite factions were, in fact, substantively opposed parties to a political debate more well articulated than anywhere else in the South.. and arguably the nation. Huey Long's gift to Louisiana politics was a sort of two-party system based around his populist progressive economic platform.
This bi-factional system has.. until very recently.. endured largely intact. Long's progressive standard was taken up in the early seventies by four time governor Edwin Edwards. Again, very discernible opposing economic factions of capital vs labor coalesced in relation to the polarizing personality driven politics of Edwin Edwards. Clever, charming, and undoubtedly crooked, Edwards buttered his bread with a populist program continuing to build highways and hospitals in Louisiana while the nation as a whole and the South in particular sunk further and further into a conservative anti-government backlash.
At the beginning of the Twenty-first Century, we find Louisiana style progressivism, like the Louisiana coastline, slowly eroding. Edwin Edwards is now in prison. One of our two Senators is a very conservative Republican. And, most ominously, the state's most solid progressive voting base.. the city of New Orleans.. has been badly weakened as a result of the Katrina diaspora effect. While the progressive impulse has been somewhat muted, this does not mean that the peculiar brand of personality-driven politics does not survive. In fact it thrives (as does the corruption).. in ever evolving forms of strangeness.
One institution which bolsters Louisiana's variation on the Southern one-party system is the state's peculiar election system. The system allows multiple candidates of any party to participate in an "open primary". If no candidate in the primary garners fifty plus one percent of the vote, the top two candidates are then thrust into a runoff. The open primary feeds the taste for personality-driven politics as it forces interest groups to build coalitions around a particular candidate rather than a party. As a result, such coalitions are extremely fluid varying greatly from one election to the next. The system also results in some fascinating posturing and horse trading as the candidates in a runoff scramble for the support of the eliminated candidates.
The current race in the Second Congressional District is the scene of even more scrambling than usual. This is thanks, in part, to the diaspora effect and also to "Dollar" Bill Jefferson's well publicized current legal and ethical cloud. The combination of these circumstances with the context of New Orleans's politics of mutable personal alliances has placed Jefferson in a precarious position. He qualified for the runoff with a mere 30% of the vote. This same combination of factors may very well be his his salvation.... until the indictments come down at least.
One of the problems of post-Katrina electoral politics in New Orleans has involved figuring out which of the city's numerous political organizations.. which we tend to call machines and Tim Tagaris has termed "clans"... has retained its strength. The most recent thirty years of local politics has seen the rise (and perhaps fall?) of several rival organizations which loosely bind "families" of pols together in mutually beneficial patronage and GOTV relationships. These organizations, which grew up with the ascendance of African-American political leadership in the city are best known for their identifying acronyms. Among these are BOLD, SOUL, and COUP. The ever glib Mayor Ray Nagin who was elected in 2002 as a kind of anti-machine "reformer" has famously referred to these organizations as the "alphabet soup". Bill Jefferson, during his run in the US Congress has built his own political organization which calls itself the "Progressive Democrats". It's a meaningless name for what is basically Bill Jefferson and family.. and associates. Members of Jefferson's organization have not fared well in the most recent post-flood elections and this race is basically a life and death fight for the Dollar Billites. BOLD, on the other hand seems to be emerging in decent shape. Karen Carter, a second generation BOLD princess (with appended ethical questions of her own), is seeking to push that emergence further along. This turf battle between competing local machines grasping to remain in power amongst a rebuilding, scattered, and unpredictable electorate is the heart of what this race is about. Everything else is a superficial externality.
The post-Katrina atmosphere is working to Jefferson's advantage. On an almost sub-conscious level, national reaction to the storm has brought about a bunker mentality among an already hyper-provincial populace. As a city, we have witnessed our neighborhoods, our way of life, our very existence, in fact, be threatened by ignorant, insensitive, and openly hostile commentors, politicians, insurers, and government bureaucrats from the outside world. It has inspired in us a sense of what Ashley Morris has aptly termed Sinn Fein. New Orleanians, particularly in the black community, have (with good reason) come to view much of what has developed post-Katrina as part of a conspiracy to radically alter the demographics, and character of the city disenfranchising and dispossesing the poorest among us in order to create a smaller, quieter, whiter New Orleans. This was the central issue in the recent Mayoral election which saw a Machiavellian coalition combining the conspiring developers with a pandering lighting rod of a candidate to take advantage of people's fears in order to effectively actualize those fears. Yeah that's a mouthful.. the whole election was. Jefferson benefits from the post-Katrina bunker mentality because it allows him to illogicaly hint that his legal troubles are yet another aspect of the vast conspiracy against New Orleans. This argument doesn't have traction with the entire electorate but it does provide him with a bit of insulation in the form of a determined anti-conspiracy vote.
Jefferson is also close to pulling off a clever trick similar to Nagin's. On the one hand, by playing the federal investigations of his activities as a federal witch hunt tied to the anti-New Orleans conspiracy, he establishes himself as the "black" candidate. (Both candidates are, in fact African-American.. thus the quotes.) Jefferson has made other inroads in this direction by pandering to local ministers through some uncharacteristic complaints about his opponent's pro-abortion and gay rights stances. Social issues like these have never been part of Jefferson's platform and don't usually figure at all in New Orleans politics.. but it will help get Dollar Bill access to a solid GOTV mechanism in the ministers. The trick comes in where Dollar Bill has also positioned himself as the "white" candidate on the West Bank of Jefferson parish. Folks on that side of the river are still defensive over criticism of the Gretna police who famously forced a crowd of mostly black storm refugees back across the Mississippi River bridge. Carter appeared in Spike Lee's "When the Levees Broke" denouncing the actions of the Gretna police. For these comments she has been taking heat from the powerful Jeff Parish Sheriff and other law enforcement officials who are now supporting Jefferson. Dollar Bill has out-pandered Carter in key portions of both the white and black communities with carefully targeted, implicitly racial appeals. If it works (and such a strategy worked for Nagin) it's both a beautiful and terrible thing to witness.
The presumed "king-maker" in this race is third place primary finisher, Derrick Shepherd. Shepherd has been working to develop a machine of his own and has successfully carved out a small principality for himself on the critical to this race West Bank. Shepherd, himself an accomplished panderer, is the author of a well known attempt by the Louisiana Legislature to ban butt crack revealing, low riding pants. Ever the calculating pol, "Ass Crack" Shepherd has recently thrown his considerable strength behind Jefferson. Shepherd is hoping to run for an open seat in the event that the feds eventually get Dollar Bill out of the way. Shepherd's nominal excuse for endorsing Jefferson? He cannot abide Ms Carter's pro-abortion position. Uh huh.
Which brings us back to the bit I started with about the "eyes of the nation". The District 2 runoff is.. due again to the quirky Louisiana election law.. the final unsettled matter in the 2006 mid-term congressional election. The dramatic seizure of power by the national Democratic party is the political story of the year. The national narrative comes with its own set of issues (Iraq, Republican corruption, Bush's approval rating) none of which has any relevance to our dismal turf war between one established criminal and another aspiring one. In other words, it's yet another opportunity for the national media to misunderstand and gawk at Louisiana politics. Recently, MyDD.com has sent Tim Tagaris to New Orleans to serve as a blogging correspondent on the District 2 race. Perhaps it's a bit of my own Sinn Fein-ism that caused me to pronounce myself "incredulous" the other day at some of the conclusions Tagaris has drawn so far. In fact, from what I can tell, Tagaris is doing a good job of immersing himself in the race and its context. I think he gets it. But there are two things about the nature of his job that make it inherently difficult for him to present an accurate picture. 1) He's writing for a national audience who has just watched a "nationalized" congressional election cycle and is expecting to see national issues discussed in this race. National issues have no bearing on this race whatsover. 2) MyDD has "endorsed" Karen Carter in this race. The national Dems have an interest in seeing Dollar Bill go down so that they look less guilty by association of his reported ethical transgressions. Tagaris and MyDD are not only reporters but also advocates. I believe these factors are evident in Tagaris's post entitled Why this Race Matters. It is intended as a sort of primer for outside observers. For the most part, the facts and the mechanics of the race are reported accurately.. but interpreted through a prism of Carter boosterism that does indeed stretch credulity. One example:
Personally, I've been impressed with Carter's willingness to tell it like it is even in the face of political fall-out. Some of you might remember the policemen with shotguns and dogs dispatched to stop New Orleanians from crossing the bridge into the "West Bank." In Spike Lee's documentary, "When the levees broke," Carter called the action un-American. It made her a hero to many in the district, but a villian to some in power on the other side of the bridge (also in her district). Her willingness to stand up found her on the butt-end of a nasty 25,000 person mailing, literally paid for by the people who called in the dogs.Well, no as I noted above it's much more complicated than that. In fact Carter has, in a losing battle to capture some of the white West Bank vote, backtracked a bit on the very comments Tagaris praises her for.
And then there's this:
Karen Carter has also taken some courageous stances on "social issues." She is pro-gay marriage, choice and stem-cell research. These are not easy positions to take in the deep South. Indeed, her opponents (primary, run-off, and future) are hammering her, primarily through a network of churches, for those positions.Conflating New Orleans politics with the bible-thumping cariacature of the "Deep South" is so off the mark that I have to assume it is a clever and intentionally misleading construction designed to make a point to a national audience with no understanding of the city and its culture. The mostly quiet "social issue" pandering done by Shepherd and Jefferson is targeted toward black ministers who hold considerable political sway with a key niche vote. Tagaris, would have his audience believe, however, that Carter has taken a "courageous" stand amid a climate of rabid fundie mouth-breathing. If I'm right in suspecting that this is intentional, every New Orleanian should be insulted. If I'm wrong, well, it wouldn't be the first time. Tagaris goes on to report that Carter.. in "her words".. would not support Social Security privatization. In the early debates, however, she was less clear on this. It is possible that the Democratic victories early this month have imbued her with more "courage" on this issue. Let's hope she can maintain it.
As the gawking eyes of the nation turn once again to Louisiana for this latest [EVENT], we are presented with yet another opportunity to make plain to a national audience the still critical plight of our region. In turn, that audience is presented with yet another opportunity to draw ugly, inaccurate, and self-serving conclusions. It remains to be seen which story gets told this time.
Update: For a more detailed (though apparently hastily written) explanation of the New Orleans political dynamic, see this Kos post.
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