Posted by
Defend America on Wednesday, February 10, 2010 7:03:49 PM
An 'Earth-Shaking' Election in New Orleans [Abigail Thernstrom]
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.
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