A trail of busted doors

Note from Eli: Everyone be nice to the letter "a."


So last night I attended a candidate forum at the Uptown Jewish Community Center. Eastern New Orleans state representative Austin Badon Jr. was the featured candidate. The talk motivated me to contribute my first-ever post to this here blog, a longtime favorite of mine. I cross-posted this at http://www.theneworleansinstitute.com, the New Orleans Institute website where Karen Gadbois and I are regular contributors. FYI: My background is in traditional print reporting so forgive the non-blog-style blog post; I like stories with ledes and quotes sometimes too. Here goes:


We are officially living in a war zone.
Eastern New Orleans mayoral hopeful Rep. Austin Badon raised eyebrows last night with a call for a new Stazi-style approach to crime fighting, telling a roomful of District B voters that if he is elected mayor they will see “the NOPD kicking in at least four doors a day.”
The line appeared to stun many in the audience of uptown neighborhood leaders who had come to hear Badon, many of them for the first time. Upon reading furrowed brows, Badon quickly added that he would not lose track of “civil liberties and all that” and pointed out in a style reminiscent of police chief Warren Riley that most of the violence in the city was between “thugs and drug dealers killing each other off.”
The similarity to Riley was ironic as Badon emphasized throughout the talk the need to take him and other members of the current administration out to pasture.
“We are going to bring the best and brightest people,” he said. “Right now I am working to set up meetings in Miami to look at the best people, the best police chief to bring here.”
Badon appeared to have given more thought to crime than other issues, such as planning. While he did not know that the city’s master plan has not yet been written, he was prepared enough to note that the police chief he picks will be, unlike Riley, on the same page as the district attorney and the business community.
“The next police chief will be someone who has the support of the business community and the DA,” he said.
Badon, who considers himself a fiscal conservative, also noted that the City Council and the mayor “need help.”
“They are somewhere between Days of Our Lives and The Young and the Restless and I am not happy with what I see,” he said in response to a question about the behavior of the city council.
The married and childless Badon had no love either for Director of Public Works Robert Mendoza. He named public works as the department most in need of restructuring, as well as more funding. “I have been with the manager (of public works) and heard things I don’t agree with. They should not be treating you taxpayers the way they are.”
The nebulous statement was followed up with an explanation of why he hadn’t read any of the reports put out by the city or the Bureau of Governmental Research that describe possible restructuring. The reason?
“When there is a study, they don’t send it to us,” he said.
But if the 2010 mayoral race ends up turning on issues of personal style, New Orleanians better get used to sending their studies Badon’s way.
The little-known state representative showed up last night to the informal forum dressed to the nines with a sharply-tailored zoot suit jacket ( hello inverted back pleat!) and a four-pointed hankie in his breast pocket. The unstoppable outfit set the right tone for a campaign presentation long on big, sometimes extreme statements, and short on nuance.

Bush Regrets Decision to Invade?

Andrew Sullivan highlights a portion of the lame duck's chat with Charles Gibson of alphabet news. Mr. Sullivan highlights this quote:

I don't know -- the biggest regret of all the presidency has to have been the intelligence failure in Iraq. A lot of people put their reputations on the line and said the weapons of mass destruction is a reason to remove Saddam Hussein. It wasn't just people in my administration; a lot of members in Congress, prior to my arrival in Washington D.C., during the debate on Iraq, a lot of leaders of nations around the world were all looking at the same intelligence. And, you know, that's not a do-over, but I wish the intelligence had been different, I guess.

And then offers his analysis:

Observe the passive constructions. The description of others. "People in my administration." "Prior to my arrival." Everyone got it wrong but him, the one person ultimately responsible for getting it right.

But I look at the Bush quote and I see, in Bush-speak, an admission that the Iraq War was a mistake and that he regrets authorizing invasion. He wishes the intelligence had been different. He wishes it had all said that Iraq was not a threat, instead of just the parts he chose to ignore. So while he won't take ownership of his awful decision to invade, isn't he tacitly acknowledging that it was a bad decision with disastrous consequences?

If he didn't regret the Iraq war, he wouldn't have offered the intelligence failures as his biggest regret because they wouldn't, to him, make any difference as to whether or not the invasion of Iraq was justified or smart.

He might have instead chosen to blame "people in my administration" for the failure to respond to -- I don't know -- Hurricane Katrina.

It's not as if he didn't have an easy 'out' to that question. He chose to go the War route.

The follow up exchange between Gibson and the duck is also illuminating:

GIBSON: If the intelligence had been right, would there have been an Iraq war?

BUSH: Yes, because Saddam Hussein was unwilling to let the inspectors go in to determine whether or not the U.N. resolutions were being upheld. In other words, if he had had weapons of mass destruction, would there have been a war? Absolutely.

GIBSON: No, if you had known he didn't.

BUSH: Oh, I see what you're saying. You know, that's an interesting question. That is a do-over that I can't do. It's hard for me to speculate.

In the past, Bush would have dutifully defended the decision with his other made-up justifications about democratization and fighting them there so we wouldn't have to fight them here. Or he would have gone on and on about how the surge is working and we're succeeding in Iraq. In this case, Bush doesn't evade the question with talking points. Instead, he barely musters the strength to punt it entirely.

It might be the closest thing to an admission of wrong-doing or confession as we'll ever get. If Gibson pressed here, even a little bit, Bush might have gone even further. He didn't. He immediately went to the next question:

"Greatest accomplishment? The one thing you're proudest of?"

I was hoping he'd say "not rigging the 2008 election." He didn't.

Back in the USSR: The Intersection of McCain's Confusion and McCain's Hotheadedness

Last night I had a spirited debate with a friend of mine about the US electoral implications of the conflict between Russia and Georgia. We had a few agreed-upon points.

-The McCain camp had effectively controlled the news cycle as it related to Georgia.

-McCain controlled the cycle by ratcheting up provocative rhetoric.

-The long-time close ties of McCain's advisers to the the Georgian government, McCain's proud disclosure that he speaks to the Georgian president every day, and his decision to immediately send Senate allies to Georgia underscore McCain's tendency to the staunchest neoconservatives of the Bush administration.

-Close ties between people in the McCain camp and people in the Bush camp have colored the official US response to the conflict. That essentially insinuates that the less neoconservative Bush advisers have been quieted by stauncher colleagues in an effort to assist John McCain's efforts to boil down this conflict to good v. evil and make Barack Obama seem not sufficiently on the side of good.

-All of this is bad for America.

So we agreed on all of those things but disagreed as to how McCain's decision to play the Soviet Union card will effect voters.

My friend argued that McCain's gambit would fall entirely flat. First, he argued McCain looks old and confused for dusting off Cold War rhetoric. More forcefully, he speculated that the close ties between McCain's people and the Georgian government and his campaign's unprecedented political interference on the handling of a national security crisis will ultimately be painted as dangerous and inappropriate.

I argued that McCain's furious reaction to Russian aggression in Georgia had already effectively pressured Barack Obama to depart his initial and appropriately moderate reaction to the conflict in order to sound more overtly pro-Georgia. I argued that McCain's Russia-bashing earned cheap points with a lot of moderate swing voters or amongst whichever electoral cleavages that intersect with the stereotypical 'nuke the bastards' attitude or whatever bastardization of values occurs when pride in America intersects with testosterone and cross-cultural ignorance. I also said that what it does more than anything else is give right wing pundits and McCain surrogates something that, at the very least, they'll be comfortable taking to the airwaves. They'll be able to pontificate about how this solidifies McCain's 3am phone call credentials or how Americans want the experienced hand when situations like this arise without getting totally laughed out of newsrooms or kicked off their side of the split-screen.

I also pointed out that Senator Obama has already decided to lay off the attack on the Georgia issue. While I see Obama on the attack on domestic issues with targeted swing state ads, he has largely decided to hold off on the national level. For the most part, I agree with the strategy. Americans are watching the Olympics and the convention is approaching. Obama can wait and let McCain's constant running of the sleazy 'celebrity' ads ultimately tick off everyone just wanting to watch Michael Phelps kick everyone's ass. Yet, had Obama already been on the offensive against McCain by tying him to Bush and hitting the behind-the-times/confused/hothead memes, he might have been better positioned to hit Bush-McCain for their overall handling of Russia, allowing the arguments of my friend to factor more prominently in the mainstream media "discussion."

Either way, the pleasant Olympic distraction will ensure that neither candidate's response to the conflict in Georgia will have too much electoral bearing. And in that way, my friend was at least partially correct. McCain's aggressive interference, however, may have already damaged our credibility to lead any productive diplomatic efforts there. McCain's war-mongering against Russia makes us look weak.

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Just some thoughts, hopefully not too incoherent. I'd love to know where y'all weigh in.