History > 2008 > USA > New Orleans, Louisiana (III)

History and Amazement

in House Race Outcome

December 8, 2008
The New York Times
By ADAM NOSSITER

NEW ORLEANS — Soft-spoken, retiring and diminutive, Anh Cao does not appear to fit the role of dragon-slayer.

Yet a day after he defeated Representative William J. Jefferson, the once-untouchable incumbent here, Mr. Cao was being approached by voters on the street Sunday with the bewildered awe reserved for one who has returned from the wars. They asked for his autograph, beamed at him and yelled words of encouragement.

The astonishment was palpable, and it had two sources: first, that the nine-term Mr. Jefferson had been beaten at all, and second, that Mr. Cao, 41, had been the man to do it, winning with 50 percent of the vote on Saturday to 47 percent for Mr. Jefferson. (The election had been delayed because of Hurricane Gustav.)

Mr. Cao was a refugee from Vietnam at age 8, a former Jesuit seminarian, a philosophy student with a penchant for Camus and Dostoyevsky, an unknown activist lawyer for one of the least visible immigrant communities here and a Republican in a heavily Democratic district.

Few in New Orleans were betting on him in the days before the election. Now, Joseph Cao, as he is known here (his last name is pronounced “gow”), has become the first Vietnamese-American elected to Congress.

Mr. Jefferson has been a fortress in this city’s politics for more than two decades and appeared to gain strength at home as his legal troubles mounted outside of it.

He was returned to Congress year after year by loyal voters even as whispers of impropriety turned into full-blown scandal, culminating in 2007 in a 16-count federal corruption indictment. He was charged with money laundering and bribery after the Federal Bureau of Investigation found $90,000 in his freezer. No date has been set for his trial.

“They don’t generally turn out candidates with ethics problems,” said Charles E. Cook, a Louisiana native who is the publisher of The Cook Political Report, speaking of New Orleans voters.

Nothing was big enough to undo Bill Jefferson, so went the conventional wisdom here.

Mr. Cao is not large, standing only 5 feet 2 inches by his own sheepishly given reckoning. But he is persistent and has the sort of difficult life story that would have made taking on Mr. Jefferson seem like a lesser hurdle.

He is only a recent convert to the Republican Party, having been a registered independent for most of his adult life, and has no position — at least not one he cares to share yet — on President-elect Barack Obama’s agenda. His politics seem less a matter of ideology than of low-key temperament and a Jesuit-inspired desire to “help and serve people,” as he put it.

His mother bundled him onto a military transport plane with some siblings as Saigon fell in 1975 — “She shoved me along with a bunch of relatives,” he said — and he was separated from his father, a South Vietnamese army officer sent to a prison camp, for 16 years. He recalls a letter he received from his father at age 9, sent from the prison: Study hard, and give back to the community.

Bounced from Arkansas to Mississippi to Indiana and separated from his parents, Mr. Cao grew up in Houston, raised by an uncle, and eventually gathered degrees in physics at Baylor, philosophy at Fordham and law at Loyola in New Orleans.

Mr. Cao said that while he was studying to be a priest in the 1990s, he had “the great opportunity to work with the poor in conditions of extreme poverty” in Mexico and in Vietnamese refugee camps in Hong Kong — children playing in the slums, children behind bars. He wanted to be a missionary.

“From there, the desire to bring social reforms, or to promote certain social change,” Mr. Cao said in an interview Sunday at an outdoor cafe in the Uptown neighborhood here. But, he added, “Politics and religious life don’t mix.”

Mr. Cao left the Jesuits, set up as a lawyer and began advocating for the small Vietnamese community clustered in the eastern section of New Orleans.

Like others in the community, his life was devastated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which flooded his house with eight feet of water. And like others, he quickly bounced back, part of a resilience in the community that was chronicled here in the first months after the hurricane hit.

“I don’t want to conform to any ideology, to be put into a little corner,” Mr. Cao said.

Still, Mr. Cao said he admired Mr. Obama’s opponent in the presidential campaign, Senator John McCain, for whom he was a delegate at the Republican convention. And he said he was wary of seeing “U.S. forces too prematurely leave Iraq,” based on his appraisal of what happened in the Vietnam War.

The central insight he appreciates from his philosophical masters, the Russian and French apostles of existentialism, is the rule for living that “life is absurd but one cannot succumb to the absurdity of it.”

That would have been an excellent guidepost in his quest for Louisiana’s Second Congressional District seat. The district is perhaps 60 percent black, and Mr. Obama won about 75 percent of the vote.

The odds did not look good for Mr. Cao, but he was helped by two circumstances. Whites, fed up with the scandals around Mr. Jefferson, who is black, turned out in force, and blacks stayed home. In largely white precincts, turnout was around 26 percent, while in the blackest precincts, it was only around 12 percent, said Greg Rigamer, a New Orleans demographer and analyst.

Now, Mr. Cao will have to persuade the district’s Democrats to keep him in office, but he says he is not worried. He said the district had not really had a representative, given Mr. Jefferson’s preoccupations.

Besides, he said, “I truly espouse Aristotle’s definition of virtue: To walk in the middle line.”

History and Amazement in House Race Outcome, NYT, 8.12.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/08/us/politics/08cao.html

Voters Oust Indicted Congressman

in Louisiana

December 7, 2008
The New York Times
By ADAM NOSSITER

NEW ORLEANS — Representative William J. Jefferson was defeated by a little-known Republican lawyer here Saturday in a late-running Congressional election, underscoring the sharp demographic shifts in this city since Hurricane Katrina and handing Republicans an unexpected victory in a district that had been solidly Democratic.

The upset victory by the lawyer, Anh Cao, was thought by analysts to be the result of a strong turnout by white voters angered over federal corruption charges against Mr. Jefferson, a black Democrat who was counting on a loyal base to return him to Congress for a 10th term.

A majority of the district’s voters are African-American, and analysts said lower turnout in the majority black precincts on Saturday meant victory for the Republican.

With all precincts reporting, Mr. Cao, who was born in Vietnam, had 49 percent of the vote to 46 percent for Mr. Jefferson, who had not conceded as of late Saturday night.

The election was delayed by Hurricane Gustav.

In heavily white precincts, turnout was about 26 percent, while it was only about 12 percent in the heavily black precincts, said Greg Rigamer, a New Orleans demographer and analyst.

The exact percentage of blacks here, like the population itself, is unknown after Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, but is thought to be 55 percent to 60 percent, down from around 70 percent before the storm. The City Council has turned majority-white after years of being led by blacks.

“It’s clearly shifted,” Mr. Rigamer said of the population. “You have fewer African-Americans in the city than previously.”

But Mr. Rigamer also suggested that the corruption charges against Mr. Jefferson pushed whites to the polls in unusual numbers. “The bottom line,” he said, “is this is an issue-driven race that ignited turnout in the white community.”

In another Louisiana Congressional election that Hurricane Gustav delayed, Republicans appeared to have narrowly held on to a seat in the northwestern part of the state, as voters sent a physician, John Fleming, to replace Representative Jim McCrery, retiring after 20 years.

The big surprise of the day, though, was in New Orleans, as Mr. Jefferson, long a political powerhouse in the city’s neighborhoods, saw his Congressional career ended by a lawyer new to politics.

Mr. Jefferson, shunned by national Democratic Party figures and low on money because of his pending trial, was counting on — and appeared to be getting — strong support from local leaders. In 2006, he was handily re-elected though the bribery scandal had already been aired.

This year, a number of the city’s top black pastors announced their support for him just days before the election.

But it was not enough. Mr. Cao, promising ethics and integrity, offered voters a break from the scandals associated with the incumbent and his siblings, several of whom have also been indicted.

Mr. Jefferson, 61, awaits trial on federal counts of soliciting bribes, money laundering and other offenses. Prosecutors contend that he used his Congressional office to broker deals in African nations, and say he received more than $500,000 in bribes.

Mr. Cao, 41 and known as Joseph, fled Vietnam at age 8 after the fall of Saigon. His father was a army officer who was later imprisoned for seven years by the Communist government. Mr. Cao, who has never held elective office, has been an advocate for the small but prominent Vietnamese community here and has a master’s degree in philosophy from Fordham University.

“Knocking Jefferson off is something you don’t want to bet on,” Elliott Stonecipher, a Louisiana political analyst, said Saturday night. “These elections continue to show us that there is a smaller, different and more progressive New Orleans that is emerging.”

Voters Oust Indicted Congressman in Louisiana, NYT, 7.12.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/07/us/07louisiana.html

Many Children Lack Stability

Long After Storm

December 5, 2008
The New York Times
By SHAILA DEWAN

BATON ROUGE, La. — Last January, at the age of 15, Jermaine Howard stopped going to school. Attendance seemed pointless: Jermaine, living with his father and brother in the evacuee trailer park known as Renaissance Village since Hurricane Katrina in 2005, had not managed to earn a single credit in more than two years.

Not that anyone took much notice. After Jermaine flunked out of seventh grade, the East Baton Rouge School District allowed him to skip eighth grade altogether and begin high school. After three semesters of erratic attendance, he left Baton Rouge in early spring of this year and moved in with another family in a suburb of New Orleans, where he found a job at a Dairy Queen.

A shy, artistic boy with a new mustache, Jermaine is one of tens of thousands of youngsters who lost not just all of their belongings to Hurricane Katrina, but a chunk of childhood itself.

After more than three years of nomadic uncertainty, many of the children of Hurricane Katrina are behind in school, acting out and suffering from extraordinarily high rates of illness and mental health problems. Their parents, many still anxious or depressed themselves, are struggling to keep the lights on and the refrigerator stocked.

For some, like Kearra Keys, 16, who was expelled from her Baton Rouge school for fighting and is now on a waiting list for a G.E.D. program, what was lost may be irretrievable. For others, like Roy Hilton, who stands a head taller than his third-grade classmates, recovery may lie in the neighborhood school near the New Orleans duplex where his family has finally found a home.

The families profiled in this series were among the last to leave Renaissance Village when the Federal Emergency Management Agency closed it in May. The government was trying to nudge the poorest, least-educated and sickest evacuees toward self-sufficiency — or at least toward agencies other than FEMA.

More than 30,000 former trailer residents landed in apartments paid for by the federal government until March 2009, a small fraction are in the hands of private charities or government housing programs for the disabled, and thousands more simply traded in their trailers for other temporary quarters. Case managers promised by FEMA to help these families find permanent homes have yet to start work in Louisiana.

Many of the adults are at least partly victims of their own poor choices. But the children are another matter. For them, the experts prescribe the one thing that has been hardest to obtain: stability. Their parents sometimes work against that goal.

Jermaine’s father, Joseph Griffin, has had trouble holding on to steady work and said he did not see much value in his son’s attending school this semester because he had already missed so much class. “If he doesn’t get no credits for it, what sense does it make for him to sit up in there?” Mr. Griffin said. “I was going to try to get him a job.”

The health problems of Hurricane Katrina children are daunting. When the Children’s Health Fund, whose mobile health clinics have provided the only doctors and psychologists available to many of these families, reviewed the charts of children seen this year, researchers with the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University found that 41 percent under age 4 had iron-deficiency anemia — twice the rate for children in New York City’s homeless shelters. Anemia, often attributable to poor nutrition, is associated with developmental problems and academic underachievement.

Forty-two percent of the children, who lived in trailers laced with dangerous levels of formaldehyde, had allergic rhinitis or an upper respiratory infection, the study found.

More than half of those ages 6 to 11 had a behavior or learning problem, yet in the East Baton Rouge School District children can wait for as long as two years to be tested for learning disabilities.

“Not only has their health not improved since the storm,” the study said, “over time it has declined to an alarming level.”

Medical care, counseling and child care are hard to find. In that respect, LaTonya London has been lucky. Her youngest children, born while the family lived at Renaissance Village, have two of the 16 Early Head Start slots — down from 200 right after the storm — reserved for evacuees of Hurricane Katrina in Baton Rouge. The baby, Edbony, was born with no forearms. Darren, 2, was two months premature and suffers from asthma and delayed speech.

The eldest of Ms. London’s five children, Darrell, 7, has developed behavior problems so serious that he has already been suspended several times from first grade, causing Ms. London to abandon plans to start vocational training, she said. In response, she has resumed counseling sessions for Darrell at the mobile clinic.

Dr. Irwin Redlener, the director of the Children’s Health Fund, notes that there is as yet no comprehensive method of tracking these children, who are supposed to be the subject of a long-term study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The key to giving these children a future, doctors and educators have long said, is providing them with a sense of stability — a home that seems permanent, a school where they can put down roots. The recommendation is underscored by the gains made by those families that have found a toehold.

After months of looking, Laura Hilton, who is functionally illiterate, finally found an apartment in New Orleans for her and her two sons, George, 17, and Roy, 11, that was within walking distance of Roy’s school. Laura’s husband was murdered in New Orleans after the storm, and at the trailer park the Hilton children attended school only fitfully. Roy was known for being both endearing and utterly ungovernable.

Now Roy, who is at least three grades behind and needs special education, tutoring and counseling, can hardly be persuaded to leave school when the last bell rings. He helps teachers on their work days and shows up for Saturday detention even when he has not misbehaved. He fights less, and recently volunteered to sit in the principal’s office at recess to keep from getting into trouble and losing his field-trip privileges.

“When he first came in, I was like, ‘Why me?’ ” Wanda Brooks, the principal at the James Weldon Johnson Elementary School, said. “As a school, you’re frustrated — why didn’t somebody look at this when he was 10?” But then she got to know Roy.

“They begin to talk to you, and you begin to realize what the child went through,” Ms. Brooks said. “He has not gotten over his dad’s death.”

Roy has received special attention from a male role model, Edward Williams, the football coach at Johnson. On a recent morning, Mr. Williams went into Roy’s classroom to find him sulking at his desk while the other children practiced a dance routine.

Drawing Roy aside, Mr. Williams told him: “You got to get up and move around. You got to try.”

Moments later, Roy was dancing.

But life outside the trailers has not been a relief for every child. With its white tent that served as a community center, Renaissance Village reeked of impermanence, though for many young children who lived there it was almost the only home they had known.

Since the park closed, Adrian Love and her father, Alton, have moved into a Baton Rouge apartment (her mother, a crack user, lives in New Orleans). Mr. Love, who has not been able to hold a job since the storm, does not allow Adrian, 9, to play outside much, instead writing out long-division problems for her in a notebook after dinner.

On Adrian’s first report card this year, she got straight A’s. But she sees her friends from Renaissance Village only rarely. “I wish I still lived there,” she said.

Despite her wistfulness, Adrian projects a poise that makes her seem resilient.

Children who had no serious problems before the storm are likely to recover well, said Toni Bankston, who until recently was the director of mental health at the Baton Rouge Children’s Health Project. But, she estimated, only about 60 percent fall into that category.

Ms. Bankston has particularly grave concerns about the children who have fallen so far behind in school that there is little chance of their catching up. “What you’re looking at is our future juvenile justice, our prison population,” she said.

In October, Jermaine Howard returned to Baton Rouge and moved into the one-bedroom apartment occupied by his father, brother and grandmother. With the help of Sister Judith Brun, a nun who has been working with evacuees since the storm, he enrolled in ninth grade at Broadmoor High School.

That process alone provided a snapshot of the chaos of Jermaine’s life. From several plastic baggies and a dented metal canister, the family could barely amass the documents needed to prove his address.

School administrators balked when they discovered that he had previously been registered under his father’s last name, Griffin, not the name on his birth certificate. Jermaine, with tears in his eyes, was forced to explain that his mother was in prison. He was told to pay a visit to the ominous-sounding Board of Hearings. Then came the kicker: because he had already missed so much, he would receive no credit for this semester.

“Nice to see y’all,” the school guidance counselor said by way of welcome. “Just too bad it wasn’t about three months ago.”

Many Children Lack Stability Long After Storm, NYT, 5.12.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/05/us/05trailer.html