New Leadership Grades: From Pass/Fail to Black/White

Written by Anthony Oluwatoyin
Tuesday, February 21, 2006

Finally, Michael Brown got one right. The much-maligned, former Director of the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has just handed out grades to all the main parties involved in the Katrina/Rita hurricane fiasco.

He gave President Bush an “A-”. U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Chertoff and Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco shared “Gentleman’s Cs” (C- and C+ respectively).

The only clear-cut failing grade went to the black Mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin. A disgraceful “D.” Actually, that was generous of Michael Brown. As a former professor, “I gotta tell ya” (to summon my best Liberano-Canadianese), Nagin’s real grade is “F - -,” F minus minus, a grade I used to reserve for student work that was not even fit to be graded.

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Only Nagin, the lead man right at Ground Zero of the whole disaster, still has his smirk virtually intact. The man who failed to order school buses and city buses to evacuate poor black residents to safety, the simplest and most serious task of all, has now rebounded even from his racist “chocolate city” repopulation project. (“I gotta tell ya,” even I didn’t think he could pull that one off.)

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