Last Wednesday, November 30th, Ray Nagin, the Mayor of New
Orleans, was here in Memphis, meeting with former constituents semi-permanently
resident in our city, compliments of Hurricane Katrina. About 800 of them showed
up that evening at Mississippi Boulevard Christian Church in Midtown, to hear
what their mayor-in-absentia had to say about the Big Easy’s future, and what he
had to say about his and their place in that future.
Nagin’s Memphis “homecoming” was hardly a blip on the
national news scene, especially since all media eyes were focused that day upon
another speech, one that was given by another politician whose career also took
something of a Katrina detour. George W. Bush may have never mentioned the
hurricane in his rally-round-the-flag effort at the US Naval Academy in
Annapolis, Maryland, but watching the two men speak that day gave me real
insight into what works and what doesn’t in the world of oratory. Whatever his
faults (and I’m told he has many), Ray Nagin’s speech indicates that he “gets
it” when it comes to leadership. George W. Bush hasn’t a clue. Not a clue.
The refugee crowd that greeted the New Orleans Mayor in
Memphis was similar to those at “reunions” he’s sponsored throughout the South:
mostly black, but clearly a cross-section of displacement – old and young, rich
and poor, people from all walks of life. Indeed, the audience at Mississippi
Boulevard Christian Church was just about as carefully screened as a one
randomly gathered on a Manhattan subway platform.
Contrast that with the entirely different “crowd” that
listened attentively to the President earlier that day at Annapolis. The Naval
Academy’s corps of midshipmen formed, literally and figuratively, a captive
audience, one with a vested interest in applauding every word spoken by their
Commander in Chief. (The official transcript of Bush’s speech contains 24
applause breaks.) In such circumstances, Bush could have asserted that the moon
was made of green cheese, and the midshipmen would have given him a vocal
high-five.
Actually, the President said things almost equally
far-fetched. “We will never back down, we will never give in, and we will never
accept anything less than complete victory,” he told the middies, delivering his
now-customary empty rhetoric about freedom and democracy, even though the entire
universe by now is well aware of how his Operation Iraqi Freedom has backfired
big-time. By Thursday morning, in fact, all the major newspapers were pointing
out factual errors in W’s speech, one which was judged by all but his most loyal
partisans as something of a rant, a speech as much detached from reality as,
well, he is.
This should have come as no surprise. Since his
re-election, the President has remained steadfastly within his own private
bubble, as if he were doing a reality-TV version of “The Truman Show.” Bush
doesn’t seem to notice or even care that there’s a real America out there beyond
the military bases he always visits, the whirlwind photo-op road trips to garden
spots like Latvia and Mongolia, the well-screened crowds at Republican party
gatherings, and, of course, the friends who gather for his many holidays at his
beloved ranch in Crawford. Tellingly, the President hasn’t had a full-fledged
press conference since July; in fact, he hasn’t had any meaningful face-to-face
encounters with what might be called “ordinary people” since the Presidential
debates last fall.
By contrast, Ray Nagin had more face-time with randomly
selected Americans in his brief hours in Memphis last week than George W. Bush
probably has had in the past year. Standing at the church podium, behind a bank
of a thousand bright-red holiday poinsettias, and dressed nattily in a dark blue
suit — in person, Nagin has a self-assured presence that doesn’t always come
across on television — the Mayor of New Orleans got down to business almost
immediately:
“I wanna speak to you tonight in the spirit of truth. I’m
gonna tell you what I know (about the situation in New Orleans), and tell you
what I don’t know. And then I’m gonna try to answer all your questions as best I
can. And if I can’t, I’ll try to get back to you with real answers.”
Just try to imagine George W. Bush starting his Academy
speech – or for that matter, any speech – with those lines. Imagine the stunned
stage-propped midshipmen not knowing what hit them. He wants us to ask
questions, without anybody vetting them first? Then imagine Bush trying to
answer those questions with something besides formless jargon. Then take a deep
breath. Imagine hell freezing over.
Back in Memphis, Nagin wasn’t kidding about the Q&A
part. He spoke for about half an hour, and then spent the next two and a half
hours mostly listening, as his reluctantly-transplanted constituents trooped up
to the microphones in the aisles, sharing with the Mayor their criticisms, their
opinions, their hopes, and their fears.
Their comments were sometimes petty – one woman simply
couldn’t understand why the Mayor didn’t know why her company had moved to
Memphis — and most ended up being statements rather than questions. One
passionate Catholic priest spoke at length between his tears about his affection
for his damaged city’s history and culture. And some folk were downright
confrontational, like the woman who wondered why the Mayor had snuck off for a
Jamaica vacation two weeks after Katrina hit.
But Ray Nagin took a licking and kept on ticking. Nothing
fazed him. He stood at the podium politely listening to each and every question
— over forty people eventually spoke out, before they had to shut down the
microphones – along with the lights – at eleven pm.
All the while the Mayor seemed more psychiatrist than
politician. He told the woman who complained about his Jamaica trip that he
understood her point, but hoped she could understand how he felt like he needed
some quality time with his family, the family he hardly ever sees. (The crowd
did, as the applause that followed indicated.) He made suggestions to those who
wanted tangible advise, commiserated with those who simply wanted to share their
sorrow, and in the process “uplifted” nearly everyone in the room. As another
more famous Southern politician might have put it, he felt their pain.
One thing was perfectly clear: for better or worse, Ray
Nagin is comfortable in his own skin, something that George Bush just as clearly
is not. With all kinds of domestic storm clouds circling over his White House
and the Iraq war he sought out so deliberately, the President spends most of his
time now circling the wagons. Ray Nagin takes a different approach, being
unafraid to “shoot straight and let the chips fall where they may,” as one
frustrated Memphis refugee grudgingly admitted at the microphone.
Over the past year, George W. Bush has been asked time and
time again if he thought he’d made any mistakes in Iraq. Every time, he answers
the questions with a shrug and a smirk, and words to the effect of “Mistakes?
How would that be possible?” Nothing gets in the way of the President’s vision
of a rosy future for the Middle East, one that he himself has done so much to
carve out and create. Not even two thousand dead Americans, and untold more
innocent Iraqis. Not an America made less safe against terrorism. Not even a
hurricane called Katrina.
Here’s how Ray Nagin answered the same $64,000 question
about his handling of Katrina. In fact, he not only answered it; he asked it
rhetorically, as if to save his audience the trouble of asking:
“If I had had the chance, would I do anything differently
than I did that last weekend of August?”
He paused and smiled at the church crowd. “You’ve gotta be
kidding. Of course, I would! Here are three things I wish I’d done
differently…”
Nagin ticked them each off, one finger at a time. “I blame
myself for not ordering a mandatory evacuation earlier. That’s 50,000 people we
didn’t get out, that we could have and should have.”
Then he spoke directly about the infamous placement of
transit-system buses that coulda/shoulda been staged on higher ground. “We
staged them above the hundred-year flood plain, but that just didn’t cut it. It
was a mistake. My bad.”
Then came the Big One, number three: “My biggest mistake?
That was assuming that, after three days of waiting, the cavalry would come. I
thought everybody knew that this was too big a job for our city government, for
any city government.
“I kept waiting, thinking help was on the way. It wasn’t.
And it still isn’t…”
The church got as quiet as if a funeral was in progress, as Nagin completed his thought. “Doing it again, I would not wait for the cavalry. I would try to think of something else to do.”
Who could blame him? As yet another famous politician from the South once said, inexplicably referencing our own state, of course, but, hey, it’s the thought (?) that counts:
“There’s an old saying in Tennessee — I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.” p>