The Coalition of the Swilling

Take that statement with a grain of salt, ths. The animosity between New Orleans and the rest of Louisiana goes way, way back. He could have done those polls 50 years ago and gotten the same result. The statement is basically meaningless.

Oh, rats. I thought it was such a good line, too. The problem is the rest of the country looks at NOLA the exact same way and the ruling party isn't doing much to help that impression at the moment. There's been years of "COPS in New Orleans", movies like "The Big Easy" (mostly remembered for Ellen Barkin's horrible dirty white bikini underwear, rather than for Dennis Quaid's Big Easy sleezy cop-family) and Primetime investigations, on top of what the Feds go after that makes the paper. Ice that pile with all the negative stuff seeing the light of day via Katrina ~ levee boards, Mardi Gras fountains, oily palmed cronyism I've blogged about...man, I honestly think everybody has bascially the same jaundiced impression. There's going to have to be a sincere 'walk-on-water' reversal to get that to change, I'm afraid.

True and the image is not altogether undeserved. It is extremely hard to shake. How long did it take for New York City to shake the impression people had of their cops after Serpico (Much better movie, by the way)?

Big city machine politics is not unique to New Orleans. Believe it or not, Nagin IS a reformer. His predecessors were some of the most corrupt people on the planet. This goes for Blanco, too. If they're stumbling, I give both a little more grace than most. The destruction and disruption is massive and unprecedented.

Big City machine-politics runs San Francisco too, only it's a bunch of Socialists, controlled by the CA State Democrat Central Committee, which is chaired by the gatekeepers Feinstein and Boxer.