I don't think so.
I don't think so.
A better way to phrase that might be "Did you hear who the incident commander was?".
Where I work the incident commander is the on duty shift supervisor, even if he calls in federal help the overall incident command remains with him. Of course the scale of the disaster in NO is huge but it looks like whatever incident command there was rolled over. The mayor's statement that "they" give authority to "the John Wayne dude" "if" "they" don't give it to "me" shows he didn't understand disaster management or that they had given up on managing it themselves.