New Orleans Diarist

In my admittedly limited experience, Carnival season has a sort of deflationary effect on the news cycle in New Orleans. In the weeks before and the days after Mardi Gras, the stories covered by the newspapers and the evening news are full of familiar features. We hear about hotel occupancy rates, arrest statistics, and announcements about celebrities participating in this or that parade. There are profiles of this season's king and queen of major krewes, Rex and Zulu , and assorted recaps of local traditions. And once it's over and the cleanup begins, there is a tally of how much trash was collected — the depressing barometer the city uses to gauge the relative success of its biggest tourist attraction.

I had a feeling this year would be different, though, when I received an anonymous recorded phone call a few weeks ago attacking one of the candidates in the city's upcoming mayoral election. "Don't be fooled" by Ray Nagin — a Cox Communications cable executive whose mayoral candidacy had just begun to surge — the automated female voice warned me. Despite his outsider talk, the voice continued, Nagin is a tool of outgoing Mayor Marc Morial's "machine"; voters who want a break with the past would be well advised not to support him. The recording didn't suggest who a better candidate might be or give any indication as to who funded this sneak attack. It just ended. I hit *-69 and got a recording saying the call had come from (000) 000-0000.

The Times-Picayune subsequently reported that the mystery calls were carefully targeted to white voters (Nagin, like most of his mayoral competitors, is black). But the paper never determined who was behind them. It was equally hard to figure out which candidates were behind many of the carefully targeted campaign mailings — frequently containing wild allegations of wrongdoing — that marked this year's election. In a city notorious for its inefficiency, political opponents are nonetheless smeared with dazzling precision.

Days after I received my prerecorded call, Nagin was the surprise top finisher in the first round of voting; last weekend he won the runoff by a solid 59 to 41 margin. It was a fascinating campaign for a relative New Orleans newcomer like me. But even old-timers seemed surprised by the race, which culminated in the town — where the good times roll and political practices are politely described as "colorful" — settling on a bona fide businessman as its new leader. (The fact that Nagin comes from the not-exactly-populist world of cable is just icing on the King Cake.)

The consensus among observers here is that the city is ready for a change, and one can certainly see why that might be. New Orleans has been losing jobs and population for decades; what was once a financial center for the South is today an economic backwater, a punch-line city that's been described as having a business and political culture more Caribbean than American. While cities from Austin to Atlanta have developed whole new economic sectors, here it's all about tourism, oil, and the port, as it has been for years. So you can see why New Orleanians might be ready for a change. Don't get me wrong: I love living in New Orleans. But if my livelihood depended on the local economy, I'd have to move.

Perhaps the most startling thing about the Nagin candidacy is that his entire campaign lasted just about three months. As recently as mid-January, he was registering about 5 percent in the polls, just another face in a field of 15 candidates. Most of the top challengers were political veterans, and the "outsider" vote seemed to be coalescing around Richard Pennington, the police chief. Though Pennington was the early front-runner, he suffered from the perception that he was secretly controlled by Morial — exactly the same charge later leveled against Nagin in that blind phone call I received. It was an odd complaint given that Morial is a popular two-term mayor who even now enjoys sky-high approval ratings. Despite this, his attempt to amend the city charter to run for a third term was stomped by voters, whose general feeling about him seems to be, "Marc did a great job, and we want all traces of him removed from public life." The strange upshot was that being endorsed by the well-liked mayor was political anathema, and Morial was duly invisible through the campaign.

Pennington eventually this twisted logic to a new level. As Nagin gained momentum, the police chief started criticizing him for gaining too much support from influentials who had previously been in Pennington's camp. "I'm glad they're all with you now, because you're stuck with them," he told Nagin in one of their debates. This attempted jujitsu was of a piece with Pennington's entire campaign. First came a radio ad, aimed at black voters, suggesting that Nagin is a closet Republican who supported George W. Bush and ought to be called "Ray Reagan." (Pennington, like Nagin and 67 percent of the New Orleans population, is black.) Weeks later Pennington was running ads prominently featuring praise for his police work from the previously demonized Bush.

Then there were the smears, many of them — like the phone call I received — mysterious in origin. On Lundi Gras, Pennington held a news conference to announce that he had obtained information "that sickens me to my core" concerning Nagin's business practices, which he pronounced "abusive, if not corrupt." It took two more days before he made the more specific (if something short of core-sickening) charge that millionaire Nagin had tried to launch a car-rental business under a program for "disadvantaged" minorities. The mudslinging peaked days later when Pennington accused Nagin of circulating an anonymous letter alleging that the police chief was a wife beater. This sordid turn drowned out the familiar post-Carnival news, which found that though trash tonnage was up, hotel business was "not as robust" as in the past. And, as The Times-Picayune's social columnist enthused, the Mistick Krewe of Comus ball — a surreally anachronistic masked affair that ends the season — once again "served as an apogee of Carnival tradition and excitement."

Watching all this — both the mayoral campaign and the Carnival backdrop — it was hard not to dwell on the cliché of New Orleans as a city of masks. The election made it easy to cook up conspiracy theories. Pennington's forked relationship to Bush was just one example of a candidacy that seemed like a study in masking — an impression driven home when he commented just over a week before Election Day that, if he could start over, "I probably would have a little bit more control of my campaign." So who was controlling it? And what about Nagin? Nothing "sickening" about his business past emerged, but he did fudge facts about whether he was a certified public accountant and whether Morial had helped him to found a local minor-league hockey team. Sure Nagin is charming and seems successful, but what's behind the campaign mask? Was he really in Morial's pocket after all? And who was behind that allegation anyway?

But the most interesting questions are about New Orleans itself. True, the election seemed driven by a hunger for change. And yet the general culture here seems proud and determined to resist change. Mardi Gras is merely the most conspicuous example both of an obsession with "tradition" and of the city marketing itself as, above all else, a unique party environment. The relentless focus on tourism has amounted to New Orleans betting its future on its skill in preserving its past. Can Nagin alter that mindset? Does anybody really want him to?

A similar version of this essay appeared in the March 18, 2002 edition of The New Republic.