That's a good thing.
Posted on 02/11/2010 9:37:41 AM PST by neverdem
Louisiana Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu is the next mayor of New Orleans. The city is two-thirds black, and he will be the first white elected to the office since 1970, when his father, Moon Landrieu, won the seat.
The election was a true post-racial moment. Four and a half years after Katrina, black voters decided competence trumped race. The prospect of a white mayor would be “an earth-shaking event,” a politically active black lawyer told a New York Times reporter before the election.
In January 2006, when the first post-Katrina election was held, Mayor C. Ray Nagin took the occasion of Martin Luther King Day to declare that the city should stay "chocolate." God wants the city to be a majority black, he went on. "You can't have New Orleans no other way. It wouldn't be New Orleans."
Is New Orleans still New Orleans? Landrieu, who had run unsuccessfully for mayor before, got 70 percent of the white vote, and an amazing 63 percent of the black vote, winning all but one of the city’s 366 precincts. His total was roughly twice the total of the ten other candidates combined. He needed more than 50 percent to avoid a runoff; the second-place finisher came in at 14 percent.
Not only is the mayor-elect white; the city council will have a 5–2 white majority. Name recognition and political connections helped Landrieu. His father had desegregated city agencies and is still a legendary figure. His sister, Mary, is a U.S. senator. But Nagin’s incompetence persuaded black voters that racial solidarity wouldn’t repair the still-broken city.
About a third of the city’s homes are still empty; the murder rate is among the highest in the nation; and the police department is scandal-plagued.
The city has long been culturally and socially integrated, but politics had remained racially divided. Elections are “always about race,” Lambert C. Boissiere Jr., a former state senator and currently the city constable, recently remarked.
No longer. Blacks voted with their heads, not their hearts. It’s morning in New Orleans.
— Abigail Thernstrom is the author, most recently, of Voting Rights — and Wrongs: The Elusive Quest for Racially Fair Elections. She is an adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and vice chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
Don't get your hopes up too high.
Too much regret that they couldn’t complain about Ray Nagain and William Jefferson’s corruption. Now if anything happens, “the Man” is keeping the community down.
The real solution is to stop electing Democrat insiders.
When all is said and done, he is still a Landrieu.
Moon Landrieu?
Couldn’t have had anything to with Mr. & Mrs. Carvile working on Landrieu’s campaign, now could it????????
Daley has done the same thing in Chicago, the city is at least livable in spots. Of coruse there are a few hotheaded blacks but they are marginalized and left on the outside. Even the congregation at that anti-white bund known as Jeremiah Wright’s church probably voted Daley.
That's a good thing.
Now?
Ok - Hey Moon!
Was Moon Landrieu named by Frank Zappa?
What a silly piece. I expect better from National Review. The fact that the guy is white is meaningless. Race isn’t the problem in New Orleans. Politics is. They replaced a Democrat with.... a Democrat. Nothing is going to change there. Nothing.
It really was that corruption has trumped incompetence.
So they couldn’t find a SINGLE competent AND non-corrupt AND black democrat in a city of nearly 500,000 ????
And thus, “the citizens voted with their minds rather than their hearts (er, skins)?” electing a person who’s “name” is recognized?
(Sound like their using neither their minds nor their hearts down there.)
“Not of the Body”.
Chicago is 34.6% black.
From Wiki;
“Moon Landrieu was born in Uptown New Orleans, the son of Joseph G. Landrieu (owner of a small corner grocery) and the former Loretta Bechtel. While his birth name was Maurice, he acquired the nickname “Moon” in his early childhood, and later had his name legally changed. He went to Jesuit High School. A promising athlete, Landrieu won a baseball scholarship at Loyola University New Orleans, where he received a bachelor of arts in business administration in 1952 and a law degree in 1954. As an undergraduate, he was elected student body president at Loyola. After a three year stint in the United States Army, Landrieu opened a law practice and taught accounting at Loyola. In 1954, Landrieu married Verna Satterlee, with whom he had nine children.”
Bwaaa! That was a great episode!
He had his name legally changed? Whatever for?
Is this a racist post?
Id bet most libs would say yes
It’s a changing of the corrupt guard.
Landrieu’s father was part of the body of insiders that ran New Orleans for decades. It was a corrupt and racist spoils system. By the 1970s Black Dims had enough of being left out of the spoils, and through elections they gained office.
Did they reform the corrupt spoils system of New Orleans?
No, they just took it over, for themselves.
I expect this Landrieu will be no more a reformer than his father.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.