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" Esquire magazine is coming to Ray Nagin for some wisdom? Am I getting Punk&amp;#039;d? My press secretary must be settin&amp;#039; me up. Where&amp;#039;s the hidden camera?  Yeah, my shoe-shine guy, that&amp;#039;s how I came to be sitting here. But it&amp;#039;s a little more complicated than one shoe shine. I was doing very well in corporate America. I&amp;#039;d done some entrepreneurial stuff, started a professional ice-hockey team in New Orleans. There were a lot of successes. Then the mayoral race started heating up. There were fourteen candidates, and everybody was dissatisfied. I was going around town talking to people and trying to figure it out -- paying attention but not really paying attention. Then I had dinner with my son and his friends. They were getting ready to graduate high school, and I asked them what they planned to do after college. To a person, they all said they didn&amp;#039;t see a future in New Orleans. That kind of stuck with me. So I started talking with people and it hit me that the city needed to do something very different. I was getting my shoes shined by my guy, a really earthy guy who has a lot of wisdom. We&amp;#039;re talking about politics, and he looks up at me and says, &amp;quot;Man, you ought to run for mayor.&amp;quot; At the Superdome, a young man came up to me holding a baby. He&amp;#039;d run out of diapers. He&amp;#039;d run out of medicine. His baby was sick. The guy&amp;#039;s saying, &amp;quot;Help me! Take my baby.&amp;quot; What could I do? That&amp;#039;s the definition of helpless. People asked me why I stayed. Why didn&amp;#039;t you go to the emergency operations center in Baton Rouge? I said, My city is in crisis. I&amp;#039;ve got thirty thousand people suffering. I want to feel what they&amp;#039;re feeling. I don&amp;#039;t want to be eating in a fine, air-conditioned restaurant. I didn&amp;#039;t want to lose my connection to the people. I didn&amp;#039;t want to lose my sense of urgency and outrage. That&amp;#039;s what you heard in that radio interview when I went over the edge. The thing that finally tipped me was a claim somebody made that there were forty thousand National Guard helping us. At the time, there were only two hundred. The accumulation of all the false statements just added up. I was emotionally spent, and I let all my emotions out during that radio interview. Afterward, I said to myself, Oh, my God, I have really screwed up. I have basically called out a president and a southern governor. Maybe the CIA will swoop in and do some secret poisoning and I&amp;#039;ll be dead in two weeks. To this day, I haven&amp;#039;t heard the full interview. But if I were in the same situation again, I don&amp;#039;t know that I&amp;#039;d change anything. I was just being real. I was just crying out for all the people of New Orleans. Candor is the only way I know how to do it. I&amp;#039;m way too old to change. At the end of the day, I believe truth is stronger than any lie that&amp;#039;s out there. The president and I have developed a pretty good relationship. I don&amp;#039;t know if it&amp;#039;s because I&amp;#039;m brutally honest. I don&amp;#039;t know if he felt he had to get close to me because I was such a wild card. But I can tell you that any time I sit across from him, he listens. And if I make a good point, he makes things happen. Brownie? You talking about the FEMA dude? If he were coming to eat in New Orleans, what would I serve him? You know, I&amp;#039;m still amazed at how out of touch he was. I&amp;#039;m reading about all his e-mails after his guy was telling him this thing is ready to explode. And he&amp;#039;s worried about how his suit looks and what fancy restaurant he&amp;#039;s going to have dinner in and whether or not he has to wait in line. So I&amp;#039;d probably serve him a little humble pie.  I don&amp;#039;t know if there will ever be racial equality in this country. Your question makes me think of the government&amp;#039;s response to this event. It makes me wonder whether the response would have been different if this had been Orange County, California. It probably would have. It would be a doggone shame if we&amp;#039;re spending more money in Iraq than on rebuilding this area of the country. If it were my decision, I&amp;#039;d knock the Superdome down. If I couldn&amp;#039;t knock it down, I&amp;#039;d just open the roof and gut the whole inside -- totally modernize it. If you just dust it off and paint a little bit but don&amp;#039;t reimage it, the legacy will be horrible. 9/11 came with an enemy. This was a hurricane. There was no place for the people&amp;#039;s anger and frustration to go. So they look around and say, That guy on TV -- maybe he could&amp;#039;ve done a better job. As people start to analyze what went on, they&amp;#039;re going to figure out that I was in there swinging. I was doing everything possible, and I made more good decisions than bad. Just before Katrina, my daughter had been to a birthday party and gotten this fish. She wanted to take it with her during the evacuation, and I told her I didn&amp;#039;t think she could get it on the plane. So she asked me to take care of it. She said, &amp;quot;I want to see my fish the next time I see you.&amp;quot; So here I am in the middle of this crisis -- no air-conditioning, the hotel room&amp;#039;s 110 degrees, the water in the tank is practically bubbling -- and I have to take care of this fish. Every night I&amp;#039;d come back to my room totally exhausted to get my two hours of sleep, and I&amp;#039;d feed this fish. It was a huge connection, and I was really concerned that this fish was gonna die. Incredibly, somehow it survived. I was setting off to see my family for the first time two weeks later, and as I got to the helicopter I realized I forgot the fish. So I held up the helicopter and got the damn fish. I took it to my daughter and it&amp;#039;s still alive today. One of the best moments I&amp;#039;ve ever had in New Orleans is seeing Bourbon Street filled on a weekend night not long ago. Just watching the city breathe again. Oh yeah, there&amp;#039;s gonna be Mardi Gras. You ought to come and enjoy yourself. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/interviews/a1933/esq0106wilnagin-100/>