« BACK  |  PRINT

RS

FRONT PAGE CONTRIBUTOR

Mitch Landrieu claims New Orleans mayor’s office in a landslide

By: Steve Maley (Diary)  |  February 7th, 2010 at 10:49 AM  | 

RESIZE: AAA

For those who may have missed the comments to yesterday’s post on New Orleans’ mayorial election, current Lt. Governor Mitch Landrieu defeated a large field of challengers to take the election without a runoff.

Mitch Landrieu claims New Orleans mayor’s office in a landslide – NOLA.com.

Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu, son of a former mayor and brother of a U.S. senator, routed five major challengers in Saturday’s mayoral primary, riding a sense of regret among voters who rejected him four years ago and extraordinary biracial support to claim an unprecedented first-round landslide victory.

When he takes office May 6, Landrieu will become the city’s first white chief executive since his father, Moon Landrieu, left the job in 1978. Early analysis shows that Mitch Landrieu’s victory owed to widespread crossover voting by African-Americans, who make up two-thirds of the city’s residents.


Tags: ,

COMMENTS

POSTING RULES  |  LOGIN TO COMMENT  |  REGISTER TODAY
  • http://moelane.com/ Moe Lane

    …but is he sane and sensible? New Orleans could use both right now.

    • http://impudent.blognation.us/blog kyle8

      He is the worst sort of party machine hack, The heir of a rotten legacy. His Pa was a crook, his sis is a crook, and he is a crook.

      He will be a disaster, possibly worse than Nagin.

    • redtillimdead

      He is much smarter than Nagin. I think he will help NOLA rise again. I hope so. He is probably the best out of the people who had a chance at winning. I’m just glad that whites and blacks in NO came together and unified on this one. Plus, we get a new LG now!!

  • haystack

    is this passage from Reuters:
    <blockquote
    Ray Nagin, the current mayor who can’t seek re-election due to term limits, was the public face of the city’s botched response to Katrina, which flooded 80 percent of New Orleans and killed 1,500 people.

    Some of its neighborhoods are still unfit for habitation due to flood damage, and its system of levees and flood walls — protecting a city with large areas situated below sea level — is vulnerable to a repeat of Katrina’s catastrophic flooding.

    I thought Nagin was the savior and GWB the sole reason Katrina even hit NOLA in the first place, let alone being the reason it hadn’t still been rebuilt. Nice that Nagin finally gets his due when it’s too late to hold him accountable at the ballot box.

    • nessa

      …how have they already been able to rebuild and get on with their lives while poor, poor NOLA, 4 1/2 years later still cries, whines and gnashes its teeth for the “lack” of help rebuilding? What was the name of the hurricane that hit Detroit, they’re both in the same condition? Yea, democrat politicians and policies. That hurricane.

      • Achance

        provided for themselves in generations.

        • nessa

          Not with Landrieu in the Mayor’s seat. He may not be the absolute and utter idiot Nagin was but he’s still going to cement his base by providing for them, how much longer can they continue to blame their ills on Bush? I would suggest, “They made their bed, let them lie in it.” but even that hasn’t taught them anything.

      • Vladimir

        Nearly all of New Orleans was completely under water, salty water no less, for three months. It devastated all the infrastructure (hotels, hospitals, grocery stores, utilities, etc.). It’s a mistake to compare a river out of its banks in a city like Des Moines or Fargo; not to downplay the magnitude of the devastation in those places, but as soon as the floodwaters receded, the rebuilding could begin. In N.O., by the time many residents could return to their homes, the process of mold & decay was already well-advanced.

        We can agree that the original decision to site a city in a swamp & below sea level wasn’t far-sighted, but that was in about 1700 and can’t be pinned on either the Ds or the Rs, so there’s not much point in debating that.

        Yes, there was a large, very visible underclass whose poor decisions made them vulnerable in N.O. There were also plenty of people whose lives were devastated through no fault of their own. Some of them are friends and family.

        And while we’d all like to absolve G. W. Bush of blame & heap it all on Gov. Blank-stare and Ray Nagin, Bush had a chance to make the city’s situation better and he passed on it. It was when then-Rep. Richard Baker, an R from Baton Rouge and chairman of the House Finance Committee (IIRC) proposed a recovery plan that would have greatly accelerated the recovery process.

  • http://wwwthunderright-texasgalt.blogspot.com/?spref=fb texasgalt

    Fitting circumstances for Nagin. I got dragged to a business meeting in New Orleans recently. To be fair, the best I can say is, the food is still great.

    It would seem that Landrieu may need all 10,000 of the political contacts in his electronic rolodex. Strange thing for him to brag about (especially these days) but hey, it is New Orleans, or at least the shell of New Orleans.

    Good luck to the new mayor and good luck to the Saints. They both will need it.

  • Third Street

    which doesn’t have any substantial effect right now, since the Louisiana Lt. Governor doesn’t do anything, but at least now we don’t have the worry of him moving up to the top spot if Jindal runs off to be Vice President or Senator or what have you.

    Still, this is not good. Mitch Landrieu is bottom-dwelling slime. What a lot of people don’t know is that Ray Nagin was actually the reform candidate, and that the reason he won a second term even after Katrina was that this was his opponent. In ’06 I was working for some people from New Orleans who’d set up a satellite office in Lafayette after Katrina had temporarily flushed them out, and they all wearily cast their votes for Nagin. Nobody wanted to see the Landrieu family regain its grip on N.O.

    My favorite Mitch Landrieu story is from a visit he made to Katrina refugees in the Cajundome, about a week or two after the storm. The place was overwhelmed, as just about every relief center was; the people were crammed in there and were being attended to as best the volunteers could — and here came Baby Brother Mitch with his retinue of flacks and photographers, who shoved workers aside so that Landrieu could get some PR photos with these people who had just lost everything they had in the world; someone (a friend of an acquaintance) tried to stop him, told him they didn’t have time for this right now and to please leave these poor people alone — whereupon Mitch treated her with an indignant “do you KNOW who I AM?” and had one of the flacks remove her from the path to the next photo-op.

    The man’s pond scum. And now he’s the mayor of New Orleans. The two go hand-in-hand, I suppose.