Word: blanco
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...last week at the first public meeting of his Bring New Orleans Back Commission. Just days earlier, without consulting the commission, he had announced a controversial proposal to allow casino gambling in several large downtown hotels--only to see the idea panned by everyone from Louisiana Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco to chambermaids. And his opponents certainly haven't forgotten his performance in the first, darkest days after Katrina, when Nagin admonished sluggish federal officials to "get off your asses" but then indulged what turned out to be unfounded rumors of rampant murder and rape and wildly exaggerated estimates...
...around the time he endorsed Republican Bobby Jindal over Democrat Blanco in the 2003 race for Governor--a miscalculation that has left a noticeable chill in his relationship with Blanco--New Orleanians began to have second thoughts about Nagin. For all his reforms, residents wondered whether their long-awaited antipolitician could realize critical projects like transforming the city's abysmal schools or breaking its dependence on the low-wage tourism industry. In a city suffering some of the nation's highest poverty and crime rates, African Americans questioned whether their concerns fit on Nagin's pro-business agenda...
...Nagin sometimes comes across as impatient or irascible, or his agenda as hurried or business-centric, his allies say, it's because New Orleans' fiscal problems--which he has said will result in layoffs of possibly 3,000 municipal workers--are so pressing. In a letter to Blanco, Nagin recently laid out his vision for a new, more prosperous New Orleans. It includes creating charter schools, loosening restrictions on the city's ability to levy taxes and passing state-income-tax exemptions for manufacturers who set up plants to process some of the 23 million tons of raw materials--such...
...restoration of barrier islands, marshes and swamplands. But the money never came. In fact, the White House's Office of Management and Budget squeezed the request from $14 billion to $1.9 billion in the 2005 Water Resources Development Act, which is still awaiting a Senate vote. Governor Kathleen Blanco, in her first State of the State address after Katrina, tried to hitch the plan to the swell of reconstruction aid, asking for a cut of federal oil revenues to pay for coastal restoration, an idea also proposed by Louisiana's two Senators, one a Republican and the other a Democrat...
...Democrat and won in a landslide. "I'm confident I appeal to just about every segment of the population here, and that's never happened in this city," says Nagin, who is black. He raised eyebrows again in 2003 when he backed a Republican against Democrat Kathleen Blanco in the governor's race. (Blanco won.) Still, he's won high marks for his anti-corruption campaign-which has netted scores of arrests-and his drive to improve the city's abysmal public schools and free business from smothering taxes and red tape. After taking office with only two days' cash...