These People Look Familiar

After Saturday’s runoff elections the new city government for New Orleans is complete. I’m looking at the winners and I only see two names that represent new blood to me. The rest of the people that one are pretty familiar faces. Even our new mayor has been around forever. The question now for me is that how much progress I can expect from a group of people that were already involved when nothing progressive was going on. None of the election results surprise me. The progressive community in New Orleans is a small section of the population. They talk about a lot and get themselves involved in exposing a lot of things about city government but none of that trickled down to the minds of most of the people. Folks here stick with what they know and who they are comfortable with. If there is ever going to be any new political figures to really take control they will have to be so impressive that they get people to step out of their usual thought process. That may not ever happen so I’m just hoping that everyone was holding their great ideas until Mayor Nagin was out of office and now they are going to share them with Mayor Landrieu and get things going.

Since there’s so many people that won’t be learning on the job my timeline for wanting to hear and see a significant difference in what’s been going on is considerably shorter. I figure six months after everyone is sworn in should be long enough to at least hear some new agenda items. My new mind state will be Nagin’s gone so there are no excuses. There’s a little under two months left for everyone to hide behind him then we really get to see what’s going on.