Not a problem at all, so glad you asked for clarification.
That man, as I said, is hardly representational of the victims however it cannot be denied that he is a Katrina victim and former resident of NOLA. Would you rather I provide as many cites as are out there ( reliable cites, not lunatic fringe stuff ) discussing many different examples of this kind of situation?
Hundreds of thousands of folks lost everything, and it is almost inconcievable to me as I’ve never suffered such a loss. ( Nor have you , likely ). I am not saying that this man represents the majority. I AM saying that the hopes that donor money went to good honest folk struggling to return to the livest they lost is a good hope. But not always what happened.
There. I hope sincerely that this makes my intent in posting that link more clear.
But I still object to what seems like an unwarranted assumption being made over and over again, that simply because the guy is black then that means blacks voters flocked to him. In the 2002 election that clearly wasn’t the case. I just wish that in these type of discussions, the political behavior of blacks wasn’t so often presumed as being less nuanced than that of white folks. It’s damn right insulting, when you get down to it.
“How in the hell did Bush get elected a second time? What kind of idiots allowed that to happen?”
“Well, the country is predominately white. Need I say more?” (wink, wink, nudge, nudge.)
Of course, you rarely hear intimations like this. And that’s sorta my point.
Cartooniverse, maybe this will make you fell better. Here are some examples of people who received FEMA and Red Cross assistance after the storm.
J.N., a cow-orker whose home took on six feet of water, used hers to help relocate to Houston with her 90 year-old mother. **J.N. ** recently had lung surgery and is unable to work.
B.D., another cow-orker whose home took on eight feet of water, used his to help relocate his wife, son, and mother in law to Baton Rouge and get his son into parochial school there. It also helped him with his commute to our temporary offices.
This guy used his to relocate his 90 year old grandmother, his wife, their children, and their dogs to North Louisiana. He used some of it to rebuild his flooded studio. He also wrote this song.
J.B., a good friend, used some of his to buy toys for his four children who lost all their stuff in the flood. J.B. is a volunteer coach for youth football, youth basketball, youth baseball, softball, and cabbage ball, and directs a youth soccer leage. He is also a scout leader.
W.G., one of my wife’s friends, used hers to help get their urban mission restarted in Central City. You might have heard of this neighborhood in the news because of a horrendous spate of murders earlier this summer. Stay safe, W.G.
Ivorybill, yours truly, used much of mine to repair our old suburban (new radiator, new transmission, new brakes) that repeatedly broke down during our travels up and down the Delta. In addition to teaching one course a year at Tulane, I’m also a volunteer youth sports coach and am Cubmaster for our Cub Scout Pack.
Maybe these examples are not enough to balance out the bad apple in your link, but I like to think that we’ve used Dopers’ tax dollars and donations to make our lives, and the lives around us, a little better. Thanks, all.
As much as I wish it weren’t true, it’s not an assumption. In the 2002 race Mr. Nagin faced a black opponent in the runoff. He took 40% of the black vote and 84% of the white vote. In 2006 he faced almost 2 dozen opponents, many of whom were black, but all of the other black candidates were marginal. He took 70% of the black vote in the primary and in the runoff, but he was clearly not the most qualified of the candidates when you look at Mitch Landrieu and Ron Forman. New Orleans would be a better place for ALL New Orleanians had people voted on competence rather than pigmentation.
You might find it hard to believe up in Laurel, but for those of us who lived here during the campaign up to the primary and through the runoff, it was very clear-cut that this particular election was boiling down to race.
It is downright insulting when race is used to generalize about possible voting trends in elections and to predict voter behavior. We’re referring here to one election, and it’s been analyzed, discussed, worked, prodded, poked, and ultimately proven that race was the overriding factor in the outcome of this election. Sad? Certainly. Not right? Absolutely. Damn right insulting? Only if it weren’t true.
None of what you’re saying justifies the one-sided “he’s black, therefore the blacks will for vote him” attitude that I keep seeing repeated over and over again. You could just as easily cast this in terms of what white people did. They are the ones who voted his pseudo-Democratic ass into office in the first place. They “abandoned” him just as soon as he went against a white opponent. So should we be assuming that they are just race-blinded sheeple? Of course not. So why employ such logic with black voters?
It’s interesting that before the storm, most pundits predicted that Nagin would easily get re-elected. The people of NOLA seemed pretty satisfied with him. So why wouldn’t we expect that many of the people satisfied with his pre-Katrina performance would put him back into office, regardless of their race? People tend to cut politicians a lot of slack in times of disaster (let me talk about Bush some more). Even you have written some informative posts that come to his defense (as has Mama Tiger), so I’m really just scratching my head over what seems to be heavy-handed playing of the race card in the post-election analysis.
To me, it looks like Nagin was reelected not because he was black and his voters were black, but because the people of NOLA largely were relatively satisfied with him and prefered him over Mitch “my family has been running this state since the days of Cain” Landrieu, who had the support of unpopular Blanco and who also shares blood ties with Sen. Landrieu, who came off poor in the whole dabocle by giving uncritical praise to Blanco and others in the early days of the crisis. Contrast this with Nagin, who admittedly made a fool of himself in his appeals for help, but who was at least giving a more honest protrayal of the inadequacy of the response efforts and stayed with the shipping while it was sinking. That struck a chord with a lot of the displaced. So to write his victory off to race is a bit ham-fisted, especially when the only race being discussed is black and not white.
Yeah, I know that I live in Laurel. That has crap all to do with what I’m saying. I know enough to know that the issue is too complex for race to be the only factor worth considering here. Your post seemed to portray it as if it is.
Are you referring to this particular election, or to other elections? If you’re referring to other elections, I’ll agree with you wholeheartedly.
In this particular instance, the black vote made the difference in Mr. Nagin’s reelection. During the lead up to the primary, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton and a few other figures dominated the news. Jesse Jackson said he’d protest the election result regardless of who got elected (you’ll have to scroll down). Jesse didn’t wind up protesting the result, by the way. You might also find this article illuminating.
You could cast it that way, but you’d be wrong. If you look at the results of the primary voting, the white vote was roughly equally split between a number of candidates, Mr. Nagin, Mitch Landrieu, Ron Forman, and Rob Couhig. If we take your argument that we could just as easily say that whites wanted a white mayor, then we should have seen the white folks line up behind the strongest white candidate and totally abandon Mr. Nagin. Instead, the white vote appears to have been cast based on political philosophy, not pigmentation, in the primary. Conservative whites voted for Mr. Nagin in the runoff rather than turn the city back to a liberal democratic mayor.
Surely the cites I’ve linked to above and upthread have made it abundantly clear that this election was about race from the very beginning for a whole lot of people, and it finished up to be about race in the end.
With all due respect, that’s not what it looks like down here. And between “Chocolate City” and some poorly-worded comments by white candidates, we’re still hurting on the race front.
But if you lived here and participated in the election and got out about your daily business and talked about the election with your friends and cow-orkers and neighbors and grocery clerks and others who make up our gumbo of a city, you would have quickly learned by being told first-hand by your African American colleages that they and their friends decided to vote for Nagin because they felt it important that New Orleans, 60% - 70% black, have a black mayor. A smaller percentage told me that they were voting for Nagin because they thought he had received a bum rap in the press and that Bush and Blanco were responible for our troubles. You cannot get that impression in Laurel, and I cannot provide cites for it because there are none. Also, please note that in my post upthread my prediction for the runoff going to Mr. Nagin made was after he brought in 70% of the African American vote in the primary.
Now, your being in Laurel has nothing to do with my agreeing with you that it’s disgraceful as a general rule to posit that a group of people behave a certain way based on the color of their skin. I like to think that you and I agree that racism is bad, voting based solely on race is bad, and that passing judgement ona group of people based on the color of their skin is bad.
So, I agree with much of what you say and the reasons for why you’re saying it, but I still insist that based on the campaign, the buzz around town, and the primary result, that if there was a high African American turnout, Mr. Nagin would win the election.
This type of punditry is hardly limited to just the NOLA election, but I’m specifically taking issue with your treatment of that particular race.
But you’re attributing the victory to race instead of considering other variables at play. I’m not disputing the fact that more blacks than whites voted for Nagin. So what? I take issue with the assumption that blacks voted for Nagin because he’s black and that whites used some other, more objective reasoning for making their decision.
This revealing nugget of information actually bolsters my point. White people clearly didn’t hate Nagin with the fire of 100,000 suns, otherwise why would the votes have distributed almost equally between him and the other dudes? At the same time, you can see that whites didn’t recognize Landrieu as being all that much better, since he received about the same percentage of the vote. Right?
When the race dwindled down to just the two of them, one would expect roughly half of the white voters who had previously voted for Forman and Couhig to vote for Landrieu and the other half to vote for Nagin. It doesn’t look like that happened. Almost all the voters who voted white before (regardless of candidate), voted that way in the runoff. Landrieu received a disproprotionate number of votes from people who had previously voted against him. That smells of racial bias, not objectivity.
Not really. If Landrieu was clearly the better man, he should have received a lot more votes in the primary. It seems that whites were voting fairly indiscriminately in the early part of the election, when there were more candidates, but then suddenly showed a huge preference to Landrieu come end game. If their voting at the primary was any indication, there was no “strongest candidate”. It was only when the race became black man versus white man, that the whites suddenly ran over to Landrieu’s team. So I contend that the math behind your “whites were not basing their vote on pigmentation” conclusion is quite faulty here.
Douglas Brinkley is not a political scientist or even a journalist, no matter how much he fashions himself as one. He’s a historian. He wasn’t even in the city during the storm, he had evacuated with his family and didn’t return until mid- to late-September.
Jed Horne’s book, Breach of Faith, is much better. Horne is the Metro Editor of the New Orleans Times-Picayune, and one would imagine, a bit more intimately aware of the talents and foibles of C. Ray Nagin than a history professor.
I disagree. Nagin led the primary with 38% of the vote. So 62% of the voters wanted someone other than Nagin. That he picked up white support in the runoff shoots your argument in the foot.
But, if all these posts and cites cannot convince you otherwise, in this particular case, then we’re just going to have to disagree. I realize that my small sample of friends, co-workers, acquaintances, and sundry other folks I live and interact with may not exactly meet a statistically rigorous test, but having lived through the election and had very frank conversations with people of all stripes, the conclusion is that this was a racially motivated election and that people were predicting that Nagin would win based on the 70% support of black voters in a majority black city during the runoff.
I don’t think that stating the truth is a racist thing to say. And I’ve agreed with you in principle about racism and predicting votes in most other instances. So I guess we’re at an impasse.
The article that you cited contradicts this characterization.
From the BayooBuzz cite:
(bolding mine)
So it looks like whites once again gave Nagin his seat. Landrieu came close to scoring 25% of the black vote but he was unable to woo over the 90% of the white vote required to win the race. According to the article you cited, the shortfall had more to do with the stuff I mentioned, like the unpopular reputation of the Landrieu name.
I’m not saying its necessarily racist. What I am saying is that attributing the whole affair to Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton is intellectually lazy. Especially when one side seems to be receiving the bulk of certain assumptions while the other is not.
The article you cited talks about other factors behind Nagin’s victory, like the name-recogizability of Nagin compared to his opponent (which always helps incumbents) and the fact that the displaced had limited access to campaign advertisments that may have given Landrieu more exposure. It also talks more about Nagin’s relationship with the business sector and the African-American community. When people ask “How did Nagin get elected?” it makes more sense to talk about these type of these things, rather than playing the “Jesse Jackson made them do it!” card.
Okay, you with the face has totally lost me. Are you pissed at the argument that blacks won’t cross the color line to vote, or that whites won’t? Because I’ll tell you, respected political scientists were saying that Nagin was going to win weeks before this election *specifically * because blacks in the South historically have not voted for a white candidate against a black one in *any *political race.
Both groups crossed the color line, as is evident in the article I referenced in my last post.
I’m not pissed at all about the voters. All I’m objecting to is Ivory Bill’s curt analysis of Nagin’s election, especially his broad brush assumptions about black voting behavior. You can’t chalk the whole thing up to the Jesse Jackson. It would be wrong for me to say that whites didn’t vote for Nagin because he’s black, so I’m wondering why so many people feel so comfortable saying this about black voters?
Psst… guys… it’s Ivorybill. One word. One cap. Thanks.
you with the face, it’s disengenuous of you to reduce my arguments to “Jesse Jackson made them do it.” I have not engaged in cheap debate tactics here, even though it is the Pit.
As for intellectual laziness, need I point out that your sole source contribution to this thread has been The Timeshare Beat, “A Timeshare and Travel Magazine”, and then you don’t even draw a correct conclusion from the article you cited? And you’re trying to call me on intellectual honesty?
In case it was lost in the shuffle, I’m basing a fair amount of my claims about the actions of white voters based on my discussions with friends, colleagues, and people I spoke with during and after the election. I cannot support those claims with citations. I’m not aware of there being a lot of crisp analysis of white voter behavior in this election.
I have addressed your comments at face value, have stated my case, and have pointed to links that show that there were plenty of factors at play in the election, particularly leading up to the primary.
Given the results of the primary, I believe that it was evident that the vast majority of the African American population of New Orleans decided to rally to Mr. Nagin. I have evidence - - personal contact with people in my city and analysis by political experts - - that this was the case and that the support of the African American community carried Mr. Nagin into the runoff. Many New Orleanians thought he’d never make it out of the primary. Many pundits found few other compelling reasons for why Mr. Nagin would get 40% of the African American vote in 2002, but 70% in 2006.
Also, let’s please stop with the broad brush argument, too. I’ve very explicitly said that in this particular election the race angle was the major factor in the outcome. Emphasis on this particular election. I have agreed with you that broad brushing with race is a horrible practice.
But I’ll add one more thing: two presumably white guys (I’m a white guy) arguing on the internet about the behavior and motivation of individuals based on the color of their skin is kind of dumb.
I particpated in this thread mostly because I saw it as a chance to fight a bit of ignorance about New Orleans and to give dopers some perspective from someone who lives here. I hope I’ve done that. Have a good evening.
I agree with you with the face that there is no evidence that black voters voted for Nagin just because he’s a black guy, which is the main point she’s been trying to articulate with her rebuttal to your posts. I can’t tell if you believe that race was the only thing guiding black voters, but it seems to me that implication has been made in this thread.
Without attacking you or calling you names or miscontruing any of your points, I explained why this is an gross oversimplication of the events in question. The outcome had less to do with Jesse and more to do with the failings of Landrieu, as evident in the number of whites who crossed the color line to vote for Nagin. After taking in account the racial biases of both groups, it’s clear that more whites prefered Nagin than Landrieu. For reasons that your cite went into.
And I appreciate it. Just understand that I’m black and I’m fighting ignorance from the perspective of a black person who is a wee bit tired of her demographic group always being cast as members of the Jesse Jackson Borg.
Indeed I did. By the time the primary was over we were not offered much of a choice.
Suggesting that someone has engaged in intellectual lethargy and boiling down several posts and cites to “Jesse said so” is moving a bit close to the line, IMHO, if not crossing it.
Again, please don’t boil my arguments down to Jesse. It’s more than that, and I’ve said so and provided links to the same. If you like, call it votes against Mitch rather than votes for Ray. Many of my white friends voted against Mitch, but were not happy voting for Ray.
But please understand that I don’t think that all blacks are part of the JBorg, or that even all black residents of New Orleans’ are part of the JBorg. My personal experience is that in this particular election there was a large African American voting block that acted on race. I heard murmurs in the grocery store. Murmurs in the post office. Murmurs all over town. I agree that there were other blacks who did not, and who “crossed lines” to vote for Mitch (or against Ray).
And, after that, please let me thank you for your stand and for your expression of gratitude. I got a few bourbons in me and came back all ready to throw down and you go all nice on me. Seriously: THANKS. New Orleanians of all hues are under a bit of stress here. Your comments are appreciated.
That said, I can understand your frustration. Remember, I’m a minority here and deal daily with being the white guy. The man. The one holding everyone down. I’d like to be able to sit down and chat with you about this thing called New Orleans since I’m never quite able to get the nuance of the situation with message board posts and emails, even among friends who have known me for years.
And to Monstro: My apologies that I don’t have time now to address your post directly. I lurk a great deal, obviously, but I’ve enjoyed reading your threads and posts over the years and appreciate your coming in here with your perspective.
By all accounts, Nagin got 80% of the black vote, and Landrieu got 80% of the white vote. It was polarized on both sides. Political races are generally predictably racially polarized in this area if there are fairly equally matched white and black candidates. No, it’s not an absolute that people will vote their color, and god willing, people are becoming more enlightened and the South as a whole might someday become less provincial… but it’s enough of a given – a hefty majority – that analysts can predict the outcome of elections based on it.
Thanks for the considerate tone and your informative posts. It’s always good when we talk about these issues without having a brawl.
If you must know what prompted me to take you to task, it was surprise. I thought you explained very thoroughly and objectively why Nagin, faults and all, was not deserving of the criticism coming from a lot of outsiders. So when magellan wrote this:
I expected you to come to the defense of your fellow citizens being ridiculed for their voting decision and explain why it wasn’t all that baffling–not because of the race card–but because of other issues going on. Instead, it seemed that you were pushing the responsibility of this “baffling” outcome on to race-blinded black folks, as if to say no further explanation was needed and that whites had little to do with his re-election. Because this came after you spent of lot time explaining to the SDMB why Nagin was actually not the spawn of Satan and did manage to fix some of the problems ailing the city pre-Katrina, it made me wonder why you seemed so quick to attribute his victory to race. All your previous posts made it crystal clear that the NOLA situation is far too complex to be throwing around superficial judgements. That’s why my claws dug into you a bit.
