For once, Nagin says nothing

At the risk of stating the obvious, Mayor Ray Nagin doesn't have much of a sense of when to keep his mouth shut.

He also doesn't have a particularly good sense of when he really ought to have something to say.

Now is one of those times.

Ed Blakely, who Nagin hired to oversee the hurricane recovery and who shares the mayor's innate lack of discretion, really stepped in it during a recent videotaped interview with the University of California-Berkeley's television station.

He claimed New Orleanians didn't want to work for their own and their city's recovery, that they "expected someone else to do it all along ... They never expected to do it themselves."

He admitted to a remarkable detachment from, and lack of interest in, his mission. He said he should have left town sooner than this summer, both for health reasons and because "I had other things I wanted to do, and administering a recovery is not one of them."

He labeled racism "deeper, more viral, more visible and more entrenched in New Orleans than any place I've ever seen." He predicted "race riots" unless the next mayor is "very clever." He said the "white community" -- all of it, apparently -- smelled "blood in the water" and thought it could "recapture the political apparatus and kind of put their foot back on black people's throats."

But maybe it doesn't much matter, in Blakely's view, because he thinks the city is unlikely to survive nature's ravages another 100 years.

In many ways, the interview was vintage Blakely. It was imprecise, to put it charitably, and ill-mannered. This is the man, after all, who called some New Orleanians buffoons and likened our hometown to a Third World Country even while he was still on the city payroll collecting a six-figure salary.

But it was worse than in the past. More insulting. More divisive. More harmful. More demoralizing to hear, particularly since it was aimed at an outside audience.

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