Can New Orleans Do Better?

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Ironically, a large part of the former communications executive's current problems may well be how he communicates--or doesn't. The CEO mayor relies almost exclusively on an ultratight circle of confidants brought in from the halls of business, especially McDonald's franchise baron and fellow millionaire friend David White. State and federal officials say privately that Nagin's insular and politically inexperienced staff has hurt him when it comes to the kind of public relations and coalition building he'll need from here on out. "This administration tends to dismiss too many people, especially career political people," says New Orleans City Council president Oliver Thomas, a possible mayoral candidate next year.

Certainly in the weeks since Katrina, Nagin could have used some p.r. help, as he has often come across as irritated and defensive. He complained to state legislators that he was "getting more criticism than God knows who," as if "you all think I'm crazy." After encouraging residents to return to New Orleans despite federal warnings that conditions weren't yet safe, Nagin groused that the Katrina recovery director, Coast Guard Vice Admiral Thad Allen, was acting like the "federal mayor of New Orleans." It won't be so easy for the mayor to win back the Big Easy's confidence. When he encouraged evacuees last week at a number of shelters across Louisiana to "come back and work" in New Orleans, many angry former residents retorted that they were tired of hearing empty promises. "Before Katrina, the man used to give us straight yes and no answers, and we liked that," says John Washington, 40, an owner of a small print shop who lives in the city's Ninth Ward, perhaps the hardest hit by the hurricane. "But I guess you never really know the measure of a man until disaster strikes."

Nagin has to hope those initial measurements can be altered, and he does seem to have regained a bit of the reassuring and charismatic swagger that got him elected. Sporting silky black knit shirts, he often uses streetwise vernacular in his chats with the city's beleaguered residents. Visiting with a group of small-business owners last week, he urged them not to let large outside firms steal all the recovery business up for grabs. "Don't let 'em pull a razoo on you," he said, using the local slang for cheating at marbles. A day after dining on hickory-grilled rib-eye steak and praline bread pudding with Allen and President George W. Bush in the French Quarter, Nagin managed to salvage a potentially deflating photo op last week. The Rev. Jesse Jackson had arrived with a bus convoy of what was supposed to be 200 New Orleans evacuees returning home but turned out to be mostly down-and-out residents of other cities like Mobile, Ala., and Memphis, Tenn., looking for reconstruction jobs. The event could have been an embarrassing rebuke of Nagin's come-home rallying efforts, but the mayor turned it around by welcoming the new arrivals as a "test case" for the city's job opportunities.