Word: nagin
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Nagin's own path to power was a New Orleans anomaly. Raised in a poor section of the city, he went to college on a baseball scholarship, got an MBA and rose to be a $400,000-a-year vice president at the cable giant Cox Communications. In 2002, Nagin, who had never run for public office, ran as a 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...
...Katrina demanded far more than business acumen-more than any mayor could be expected to rise to, say Nagin's defenders. He is credited with ordering a mandatory evacuation of New Orleans before the storm hit, but has made several missteps as well, including a failure to get enough buses to people stranded in flooded neighborhoods, his baffling four-day disappearance during the second week of the crisis when he went to Dallas to rent a house for his family and his overwrought estimate that the city's death toll could be 10,000 instead of the likely finally tally...
...worse gaffe, critics say, is his call last weekend for residents to return to the city without making it clear that, in most cases, they wouldn't be able to stay due to factors like toxic house mold. "Nagin just put us in a very bad situation," says Brenda Davis, 44, a resident of the Algiers district across the river from the French Quarter. She, her daughter and four grandchildren paid a stranger $220 to drive them from their evacuee housing back to New Orlean-only to find their home unlivable and with no transportation to get back...
...Nagin insists he explained to residents that he meant only for them "to come back in to at least get a peak at their homes, to get some closure"-something many Orleanians had indeed been clamoring for-and that he'd warned them to "come prepared, with your eyes wide open." Others attribute Nagin's haste to a fear that too many residents have decided not to return to live in New Orleans-which could leave the city bereft of enough homeowners and workers to make its resurrection possible. Nagin conceded this week that New Orleans' post-Katrina population could...
...Nagin dismisses suggestions that he's in a hurry to bring New Orleans back to life by the time he runs for a second term early next year. "I've been at this for three years now and people know we've moved them away from the politics of New Orleans' past," he says. But as much as Nagin would like to think that his Katrina performance will be only a part of the record voters consider, it will surely be a deciding factor. It's something he'll have to come prepared for, with his eyes wide open...