Between the two of them, singer Lauren Daigle is laughing last and loudest compared to Democrat New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell as another visible decline of the city under recent mayors.
This past weekend, Daigle performed, in well-received fashion, at the Super Bowl in New Orleans. She saw this as vindication for events of over three years ago, when Cantrell made a play to cancel Daigle appearing on the television show Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve that was set to have a satellite location in New Orleans.
Daigle said she was in talks with the production to appear in the hours before 2021 rolled in around Jackson Square, but before anything concrete formed a couple of months prior Daigle on a whim had participated in a concert by a friend there. At the time, orders issued by Cantrell through emergency Wuhan coronavirus pandemic powers limited outdoors gatherings to 50 people with masks (despite that already evidence had accumulated that mandates to wear face coverings outdoors didn’t do a thing to prevent virus spread, and subsequently more confirmation came). The size of the crowd was considerably larger and many didn’t cover their faces.
So, Cantrell took it out on Daigle, contacting the ABC television network not to include her in that year’s festivities. Whether that made any difference, Daigle was not in that lineup.
Apparently, four years makes quite a difference. Ironically, in between, ABC cancelled New Orleans. Starting just over two years ago, for reported reasons of lack of local support and tourism the network forsook the city, and other networks also left it for central time zone locations of Nashville and Austin in a kind of cruel reminder of the states Louisianans were fleeing to during the governorship of Democrat John Bel Edwards. New Orleans mirrored that by losing almost 30,000 people, or nearing 8 percent of its population, between mid-2020 and mid-2023.
As New Orleans has swooned, so have Cantrell’s fortunes. Her professional and personal behavior has led to multiple federal judicial cases against her and she has been hit with ethics lapses. Her policy missteps continue to multiply, the most prominent of which being the city’s botched security upgrades in the Vieux CarrĂ© that a domestic terrorist exploited on New Year’s Day. It’s so bad that the state has to spend millions of dollars annually to supplement law enforcement.
Nor does thin-skinned Cantrell take it very well. Pressured by a recall petition that ultimately didn’t quite make it, when satirically savaged in 2023 by a carnival krewe known for its political commentary followed by apparently an obscene gesture from a rider, Cantrell sent it right back.
But city voters stupidly put her back in office without any real competition in 2021. That pattern doesn’t bode well for upcoming fall elections that could allow as equally inept, if not as corrupt, city politicians to enter or remain in office for the next four years. Only the electorate can save New Orleans from further, different kinds of cancellations as it increasingly becomes a city that, already well on its way to people not wanting to live there, people don’t want to visit, either.
No comments:
Post a Comment