Karl Rove Taught Us Nothing

Imagine my shock and surprise when the election results began being tallied and announced. Out of the 23 candidates for Mayor of New Orleans it was clearly down to a choice between Ron Forman and Mitch Landrieu. I wanted to vote for Forman but several things changed my mind. Mattie clued me into some things I didn't really know about him, things like his salary as the head of the non profit Audubon society. He was also deeply involved with the attempt to by pass laws preventing former Mayor Morial from running for a third term. Morial subsequently (allegedly) raided the city's treasury in the last days of his administration. I guess once your father (allegedly) passed himself off as white while serving in the navy and later dies (allegedly) in the arms of a white hooker while shooting heroin, raiding a treasury isn't that big of a deal. Anyway...

There have been elections where I have voted my consience. There have been elections where I have voted the lesser of two evils. In Indiana I registered as a republican so I could vote in primary elections against evil candidates. In this election my desire to vote for Ron Forman was mostly overweighed by the fact that I didn't feel he could get the necessary votes to avoid the always amusing run off election. If you are unfamiliar with Louisiana politics, unless a candidate receives more than 50% of the vote we have a second election with the top two candidates. I wasn't shocked to see that we would be having a run off, but I was certainly surprised by the numbers. Uncle Tom Nagin managed to snare 38% of the vote while Mitch Landrieu only garnered 29%. There are a lot of reasons I can think of that made that possible but it's still shocking.

Busloads of people were brought from Atlanta and Houston, most of them black, most of them voting for Nagin. Nagin was the only "real" black candidate, but he received less than 50% of the black vote during his first election while receiving 90% of the white vote. This election the white column for Nagin was 6%. Most of the people who were bussed in to vote are living in other cities with no intention of returning to New Orleans. National black advocacy groups and black business leaders are all pushing for Nagins re-election to maintain control of the city. These are the same people who screamed racism in the days after the hurricane. Time has passed and we see it was the poorest people who suffered the most, and the race division was not the issue. There were 20,000 votes cast before the election, absentee ballots, early voting, even faxes were sent. The candidate to receive the majority of these votes was Nagin. My negative side says that there was a lot of cemetery voting. Wasn't it Chicago Mayor Daly who said "vote early and vote often"? Jesse Jackson had to butt his nose into the election and claim that blacks were being disenfranchised by the refusal of the state to bear the cost of setting up polling places in Houston and Atlanta. This is very simple. The state sent out to EVERY registered voter an application for an absentee ballot. If these poor poor people are totally unreachable, I guess there isn't anyplace for them to receive their FEMA check. Since we know the 26 months of rental assistance is flowing like water, we can assume that people also received their application. Another thing, voting is a right, and if you want to exercise your rights, you have to EXERCISE YOUR RIGHTS. In this case that means finding a stamp and a pen. I didn't see the good Reverand Jackson bitching about the number of white folks from Lakeview or the extremely large east New Orleans Asian populations lack of proper voting booths.

Since I am already out here on the racist swine limb, I have to applaud U.S. Housing Secretary Alphonso Jackson for his recent comments about the return of public housing residents.

I understand people not wanting to vote for another Landrieu, supporting the continuance of another family political dynasty. All I wanted out of this election was to see an end to the lunacy of the Nagin administration. Hopefully the numbers were frighting enough to the rest of the city's voting block to get them out on the 20th to vote. Ron Forman has officially endorsed Landrieu now and the majority of New Orleans business community seems to be leaning towards Mitch.

The election does sadly bring to an end the campaigns of Virginia Boulet and Peggy Wilson. Both women were amusing but for different reasons. Peggy was at one time a normal woman from all accounts. Her campaign platform centered on the idea that she was going to convince the federal government to make our city a tax free zone. I'm no exactly sure how this was going to happen or how this was going to work. Virginia had some decent platform plans but lost me when she announced her intentions to literally tear down city hall and move University of New Orleans to the site. Then she was going to spread this educational district through a wide swath of the edge of downtown and a public housing unit or two. Throw in Sondra "lady" DeDais and gay candidate Leo Watermeir and we had a whole nuthouse.

I have more to write about but for now I need some rest...