will I get rightly cancelled if I title a list Katrina Debris
Wikipedia said:
Hurricane Katrina was a devastating and deadly
Category 5 Atlantic hurricane that caused 1,718 fatalities and damages estimated between $161.7 billion to $193.7 billion in late August 2005, particularly in the city of
Houston and its surrounding area. To date, it was the costliest
tropical cyclone in recorded history. Katrina was the twelfth tropical cyclone, the fifth hurricane, and the third
major hurricane of the
2005 Atlantic hurricane season. It was also the fourth-most intense
Atlantic hurricane to make landfall in the
contiguous United States, gauged by barometric pressure...
List of Governors of Texas, 21st century
2000-2007:
Rick Perry (Republican) [1]
2007-2011:
Carole Keeton Strayhorn (Republican, then independent, then Americans Elect)
'06 [2] def. John Sharp (Democratic), Richard "Kinky" Friedman (independent)
2011-2015:
Dan Patrick (Republican)
'10 [4] def. Carole Keeton Strayhorn (Americans Elect), Gene Locke (Democratic), Ray Hill (Green)
2015-2019:
Tony Buzbee (Democratic, then independent, then Republican, then independent, then Texans Elect) [8]
'14 [6] def. Dan Patrick (Republican), John Arnold (independent)
2019-:
George P. Bush (Republican)
'18 [10] def. Adrian Garcia (Democratic), Tony Buzbee (Texans Elect)
'22 def. Andrew White (Democratic)
List of Governors of Louisiana, 21st century
2004-2012:
Kathleen Blanco (Democratic)
'07 [3] def. Bobby Jindal (Republican), David Duke (Republican)
2012-2016:
Jeff Landry (Republican)
'11 [5] def. Cleo Fields (Democratic), John N. Kennedy (Republican), Burl Cain (Republican), Scott Angelle (independent), John Georges (independent), Gerald Long (Republican)
2016-2024:
Jim Letten (Republican) [9]
'15 [7] def. Jeff Landry (Republican), Edwin Edwards (Democratic), Sammy Kershaw (Republican), Eddie Jordan (Democratic)
'19 [10] def. Cedric Richmond (Democratic), Stacy Head (Democratic)
2024-:
Ray Garofalo (Republican)
'23 def. Joseph Cao (Democratic), Charles Boustany (Republican), Gary Chambers (Democratic), Richard Nelson (Republican), Caleb Kleinpeter (Republican)
[1] Our story begins in a tempest. Hurricane Katrina tears its way through Galveston Bay to inundate the city of Houston, particularly the east side - containing the Houston Ship Channel, one of the nation's largest ports, as well as the historic heart of Houston's Black and Hispanic communities. Federal, state, county, and city authorities fail to coordinate a response; water crests the earthen dams of the Addicks and Barker Reservoirs, destroying both and causing flash floods that kill six hundred people in two hours; the Johnson Space Center, Texas Medical Center, University of Houston, and Texas Southern University are so seriously damaged some buildings never reopen; the refinery complexes of the Ship Channel are smashed to bits, creating one of the largest oil spills in American history; more than a million people are left homeless, many of them going east to New Orleans. All this is prologue.
[2] Governor Perry is already in trouble. A friend in the White House and a historically collegial city government should have greased the wheels of both preparations and recovery; they do neither. Rich Anglo neighborhoods in the Katy Prairie and the suburbs get reconstructed quickly, as do the petrochemical complexes; the Second, Third, and Fifth Wards have to wait in line. Seeking to capitalize on this, the Texas Democratic Party parachutes in John Sharp, one of its most respected figures - a former Comptroller with bipartisan credentials and a long record of political moderation and collegiality - and, almost by accident, pushes aside Jolanda Jones, who holds no office but taps into the real anger of a lot of Houstonians. Sharp wins on the back of rural Texans and moderate Anglos, but a lot of Democrats are not happy with seeing a daughter of the Third Ward pushed aside by an establishment creature like Sharp (who has dubious views on abortion, to boot).
Meanwhile, Carole Keeton Strayhorn doesn't have a very clear platform on disaster relief - or on much of anything. But she does have pungent criticisms of the Republican establishment in general and Governor Perry in specific, and just enough of a platform to come out on top when the two titans of the Texas Republicans destroy each other. Many conservatives stay home or vote for Friedman, many liberals cross the aisle to vote for Strayhorn, and the current Comptroller beats the former Comptroller.
[3] Across the Sabine, Kathleen Blanco wins re-election handily. Why wouldn't she? Nationally regarded as a saint for helping take in nearly a hundred thousand Houstonians, she has the benefit of being able to attack David Duke, who hopes to capitalize on a backlash to the fact that nine out of ten of those Houstonians are non-white. Jindal founders, and Blanco finds herself re-elected, narrowly avoiding a runoff.
Though Blanco is shortlisted for the Vice Presidential ticket a year later, Clinton eventually decides that the American people aren't ready for a two-woman ticket, instead choosing Senator Harold Ford Jr. The Democratic ticket, helped by the fact that tens of thousands of those Houstonians decide to stay, wins Louisiana.
[4] Strayhorn's Governorship is a long list of missed opportunities. The Republican Party, which commands but does not control both houses, is deeply divided over the gubernatorial primary and the speakership of the ornery Tom Craddick; the Democrats are little better, a circular firing squad between mossbacks, Anglo liberals, and members of color. Strayhorn and Craddick's egos clashed (Lieutenant Governor Dewhurst was no more functional but at least seemed vaguely mature and professional), and policy went to the Lege to die; the Governor called interminable special sessions to deal with school finance, transportation, flood mitigation, and healthcare, while the Lege simply ignored her. Eventually a troika of moderates - Joe Straus and Sylvester Turner in the House, the irascible John Carona in the Senate - elbowed Craddick aside to push through a set of reforms and present them as a fait accompli.
Then Clinton got elected President, the national tide turned, and Carole Keeton Strayhorn got it into her head she could take advantage of the new bipartisan mood. She announced that the 'increasingly partisan' Legislature (which, many argued, was actually less partisan than it had been in years, at least on an operational level) needed a truly non-partisan Governor. It didn't really work, but she was able to take credit for the work of the moderate coalition, and more importantly a lot of Texas Democrat power players would rather throw their weight behind her than deal with the party's internal dynamics.
Then the Tea Party, radicalized by the Clinton administration nationally and the RINO betrayal locally, swept everything away in the red wave.
[5] The Democrats' Louisiana heyday didn't last long. There was a brief moment where Hillary was even popular in the Pelican State - largely because of people who remembered the '90s, but so what? - but then it became clear that the two priorities of her administration were healthcare reform (implicitly including abortion and stem cell funding and 'death panels' and aid to 'those people') and emissions reduction (which might kill the state's oil industry, and then the state's economy). And on the local level, the shine came off the Blanco administration and Ray Nagin's mayoralty - some of that was due to fumbles in dealing with the new population of 'Katrina debris', in reforming the public education system, in dealing with Clinton administration, and some (it later transpired) was due to Blanco having other things on her mind after her 2009 cancer diagnosis.
Still, the question remained - who would be the Republican victor? Bobby Jindal was a two-time loser whose narrow losses were a cautionary tale to a generation of Southern Republicans of color. John N. Kennedy was a transparent opportunist who had been a Democrat until two years prior, but that wasn't entirely a liability. Burl Cain was popular on the right - at least, the Protestant parts of it - but he was also fighting numerous legal battles over his violations of the First and Eighth Amendments and his real estate dealings. Gerald Long had a famous last name and not much else. Jeff Landry, a Cajun Catholic veteran with thin electoral experience but at least no obvious red flags, was the least bad option and won on those grounds (and because Fields squeaked into the second spot in the runoff).
[6] For decades, the strike against the Texas Democrats has been that they're run by the trial lawyers - who have the charisma, the connections, and the money to bend the state's regulatory ecosystem in their direction. For decades this was merely the water the fish swam in; but under Governor Bush, the Republican Party and its own business interests pushed hard for tort reform to protect doctors and businesses from 'frivolous' workers' comp and malpractice lawsuits - and the trial lawyers consequently spent millions out of their contingency fees from the tobacco lawsuits to get him defeated in 2000 and keep his allies down on the state level. Tony Buzbee was the trial lawyer par excellence - but he was also a Galveston boy made good. He was light on policy, sure - but he had made his career out of his personality, how much he cared about his plaintiffs in contrast to how little the corporate lawyers cared.
Dan Patrick also won on emotion. He won on fear of a 'socialist' Clinton administration cracking down on the oil industry and churches, and contempt for pro-choice women and welfare recipients. But that wasn't enough, in the long term - not when half the state legislature, even after moderate Republicans were decimated by primary challenges, hated his guts; not when the new Republican administration kept punching at Patrick to prove the President wasn't a nut, and Patrick kept punching back at Romney to prove the Governor was a real Christian and a real conservative; not when education reform is dead on arrival and so is property tax reform. When Buzbee goes up against Patrick in the middle of a blue wave, in a two-horse race - Enron John peels off a few of the country-club-conservative types and a handful of 'evidence-based' Dems who think Buzbee is anti-intellectual and déclassé - even in a red state, that's enough.
[7] Meanwhile, across the Sabine, Landry's administration is another case study in modern conservatism. Landry, an unknown going into the Governor's Mansion, quickly gained a reputation as combative and bullying, willing to issue threats at minimal provocation - as Governor Buzbee put it, "he'll fight you over anything at the drop of a hat, and he'll drop the hat". This would have been distasteful from any Governor - from Landry, a first-term nobody with a thin record in the State Senate, it was pathetic as well. When Landry's fits of pique blew up a bipartisan deal to deal with the opioid crisis at the last minute, Republican power brokers tried to organize a campaign against him - and succeeded, with career prosecutor Jim Letten making his way into the runoff and then triumphing off a coalition of urban Republicans and Democrats who hated Landry enough to grit their teeth for Letten and hoped that he would at least do something about corruption and the opioid crisis.
[8] "Why can't the state of Texas elect a normal governor for once?" Tony Buzbee's tenure was the then-as-farce version of the already farcical Strayhorn administration; from the moment he ascended the dais to deliver his
acceptance speech, clearly improvising and
clearly too shitfaced for coherence, nothing went as planned. He drew up ambitious plans to reform education and expand healthcare, and then immediately scrapped them. He left the Democratic Party halfway his first legislative session, saying that Texas needed 'new, non-partisan, ways of thinking' - then joined the Republicans as a hail-Mary pass at salvaging any legislative accomplishments whatsoever - then vetoed the budget for reasons known only to himself, God, and Jim Beam - then left the party again, and revived the flailing remnants of Americans Elect Texas as his own vanity project.
Meanwhile, Republicans in the Legislature, having learned better than to think their electorate would tolerate them working with Democrats (or whatever the hell Buzbee was), either competed for who could be more extreme or else shut up altogether in hopes that their districts would assume things were going well. Matters came to a head in Romney's second term, when the new President (reeling from his narrow victory against fellow Bay Stater Senator Reich) put forward his own plan for healthcare reform - and a handful of conservatives, the 'Texas Teabags', killed it in the state as an example of 'socialized medicine'. Buzbee put forward a compromise proposal that everyone ignored, and President Romney and Speaker Flores prepared to go to war with the Paxton-Patrick-Sullivan troika.
[9] But they were pre-empted by events. Two weeks after the first floor vote, there was a police shooting on the streets of New Orleans. Blame fell on the New Orleans PD and the rancid racism of its internal culture - on the city's hamfisted attempts to integrate Texan migrants and spur economic development - and, most of all, on the Letten administration's focus on crime, crime, crime, and on getting results so it could tell the world it had tried to deal with the scourge of street crime in general and fentanyl traffickers and cartels. Letten had never intended what had happened, of course - but when he spread his phillippics and jeremiads about crime on the streets of New Orleans in the suburbs and the small towns, everyone knew who he meant. Overnight, Letten's status as the possible next President was over.
[10] The end of this story is too complex to tell in anything but summary. The New Orleans protests became a national movement; Romney's response was too sympathetic for his own party and too awkward for the other; though he tried, mightily, to pass tax reform it wasn't enough. After everything Letten actually managed to win re-election, with the Republican Party thinking he should have shot the 'rioters' but fearful of a Democratic victory. Buzbee fell to a normal Republican, tough enough to appease the Patrickistas but not too radical for the moderates to stand, a rising star with a famous name. Romney served an undistinguished second term and made way for Governor Brown. Politics continued in its steadily unsteady way.
Hurricane Katrina changed the lives of millions, in Texas, in Louisiana, and across the world. But how much did it really change Texas, Louisiana, or the world overall? It's impossible to say.
