New Orleans Election Hinges on Race and Not Rebuilding

[rodeodance]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/04/us/nationalspecial/04orleans.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin

April 4, 2006
New Orleans Election Hinges on Race and Not Rebuilding
By ADAM NOSSITER

NEW ORLEANS, April 3 — As the first vote since Hurricane Katrina, the April 22 mayoral primary was supposed to be about the critical choices facing this battered city — an issues-filled debate about whose reconstruction plan was best.

Instead, with the city's majority-black status in doubt for the first time in decades, one dominant motif has emerged in the campaign: race, which for nearly 30 years has been merely a muted subtheme in politics here. Since 1978, New Orleans has elected black mayors, and there has been little doubt about the racial identity of the eventual winner.

This year, the three major candidates or their supporters have aligned themselves along racial lines, with each camp hoping it has singled out the correct, and as yet unknown, demographic. In part, this is a measure of how far the office of mayor has been reduced in the seven months after the storm.

Though the candidates' promises and speeches have filled the airwaves in advance of the primary election, there is little doubt that the real force in rebuilding will be the billions in pending federal aid. That money will be doled out largely by the State of Louisiana; the role of any future New Orleans mayor will be strictly secondary. ......