New Orleans in the Spin Cycle

Stephen Griffin

The last few days of the media cycle have not been kind to New Orleans. Locals spent today complaining about the “60 Minutes” report last night that had the city turning into an island surrounded by the Gulf of Mexico in perhaps 80 years. The report did indeed have some problems. It tended to equate the coastal erosion problem with the breach of the levees, two different events. It passed over experts and a National Academy of Sciences report suggesting that the eroding coast could be restored to an extent. But it did highlight a point of view that citizens here thought would never turn up in a reasonable public debate – that the city ought not to be rebuilt, at least not on anything like the same scale.

Despite today’s criticism, the CBS reporter, Scott Pelley, did not back off. Somewhat ominously, he commented: “People in Louisiana are desperately hoping that the federal government is going to come up with billions of dollars to restore the city and protect for city," Pelley adds. "It's not at all clear at this point that that is going to happen.”

This illustrates a large gap in perceptions that seems to have opened up between New Orleans and Washington. Consider the contrast between the “60 Minutes” report and a front-page Sunday editorial by the local newspaper, the Times-Picayune. The paper laid down the law:

But we need the federal government -- we need our Congress -- to fulfill the promises made to us in the past. We need to be safe. We need to be able to go about our business feeding and fueling the rest of the nation. We need better protection next hurricane season than we had this year. Going forward, we need protection from the fiercest storms, the Category 5 storms that are out there waiting to strike.
Some voices in Washington are arguing against us. We were foolish, they say. We settled in a place that is lower than the sea. We should have expected to drown.
As if choosing to live in one of the nation's great cities amounted to a death wish. As if living in San Francisco or Miami or Boston is any more logical.
Great cities are made by their place and their people, their beauty and their risk. Water flows around and through most of them. And one of the greatest bodies of water in the land flows through this one: the Mississippi.
The federal government decided long ago to try to tame the river and the swampy land spreading out from it. The country needed this waterlogged land of ours to prosper, so that the nation could prosper even more.

This editorial illustrates the primary sort of public justification for aid that has been used by the city since Katrina struck. We are economically useful, indeed essential, so helping us is in your interest. The problem is that this argument is not working. The port of New Orleans was hurt, but commerce seems to be flowing in a way that has not led to a crisis in Midwest agricultural exports. Oil and gas flow out of the Gulf, but it seems we do not need an entire city to maintain them. Local business people are making reasonable economic arguments when they visit Washington, but they are getting the brush-off. (Tuesday’s New York Times contains a similar story).

A story in today’s Washington Post reveals one source of the problem. There has been $18 billion spent so far, and it is becoming clearer that this is just a fraction of what will be required to truly rebuild the city. The story says: “It is yet to be determined, for instance, just how much of a role the federal government will play in picking up the tab. ‘It depends on a threshold question: What are you going to rebuild? What is the federal responsibility for rebuilding a city, a metropolitan area or a region? This is where it gets really confused,’ said Bruce Katz, director of the metropolitan policy program at the Brookings Institution. ‘Federalism is a messy business.’”

Bruce is right on the money. Federalism means never having to say you’re sorry, because it is never clear where political responsibility lies. The “60 Minutes” report did make it clear that New Orleanians find it incomprehensible that the federal government will not step up to the plate. But the city has not yet found an argument that works.

So far, the only way the city has found traction with Washington is in a crisis. If local estimates are right, we may have one by the end of the year, as tens of thousands of small businesses go into bankruptcy, along with mortgage holders and local governments. And we will have reports and recommendations from the New Orleans city and state recovery commissions, reports that will give Louisiana congressional representatives something to work with.

Somewhat counterintuitively, I continue to think that the best argument New Orleanians can make is: “you would want the same done for you.” That is, we should make arguments based on our status as citizens, not stevedores or oil workers. And we should stress culture, not economics. However, I now have a better understanding of what is wrong with the argument Jim Stoner made in the National Review (referred to in my second post). Stoner discussed the feasibility of flood control by comparing Louisiana to the Netherlands. But the Netherlands does not appear to be a federal state, and in any case flood control there is a matter of national preservation. The Netherlands will not write itself off to the sea, but it appears that many in Washington are willing to do just that to New Orleans.

UPDATE: Everyone should read this editorial in Wednesday's NYT:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/23/opinion/23biguenet.html
Posted 11:00 PM by Stephen Griffin [link]