*********QUOTE*******
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/07/08/mitch-landrieu-new-orleans-presidency-politics-218960
Mitch Landrieu Wants to Know: Does He Have to Run for President?
A remarkably candid interview with the former New Orleans mayor about race, political ambition and America under Trump.
By EDWARD-ISAAC DOVERE
.... For a man who’s spent his entire adult life in politics, Landrieu has an almost Obama-like intellectualism. He flows between ideas he’s read in books or encountered in conversations. His mind is associative, always linking up ideas with other experiences. He can be lyrical, though sometimes to the point of sounding like he’s doling out aphorisms. There are “y’alls” and explanatory diversions. He doesn’t tweet. He says “let me finish” a lot—not because he’s annoyed about being interrupted (though that sometimes flashes, too) but because he feels like he’s in the middle of a thought, and he wants to get through the full thought.
He talks about history. About moral leadership. The power of diversity. Who the future belongs to, and who it doesn’t. But most of all, he talks directly about race and racism and reality in America. When exactly is Trump saying America was great? What was it that made it great then? He pushes people to think about the answers, and he thinks they’re frighteningly clear. He sees what he lived through in Louisiana playing out in the country, has spoken and written about how much Donald Trump reminds him of David Duke. He says he knows people can be afraid to call it out but knows what happens when they don’t. He says he can’t believe he has to be the one to say there’s no place for white supremacy in 21st-century America.
And he gives speeches like the one he delivered at the Kennedy Library in May, accepting the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award that in 2017 went to Barack Obama. In an address that sounded very Obamalike, he said, “Our democracy is counting on each and every one of you, and in your countless acts of selfless courage. When millions of us do just our small part all at the same time, there is no mountain too high, no task too daunting, no dream too big. To every American listening: You may not be the tallest or the strongest or best-looking, or richest or fastest or smartest or the most well-connected. You may look different, love different or pray different. It is of no moment nor matter. We must all choose to find a way or make one. This is our America.” He finished by quoting Tennyson’s “Ulysses” on sacred duty, invoking JFK’s call to action, sounding like a man who was building up to, “and that’s why I’m running for president.”
But he didn’t.
For now, Landrieu is more concerned about understanding why Trump happened, and figuring out what he is prepared to do about it. “If you say to yourself, ‘It’s really not about him, what were the conditions that caused us to be able to choose this level of chaos over what we thought we had?’ And then what you would have to say is, the conditions in the country should never have been where they were, because it’s clear to me, historically, without necessarily equating them, when you look at the Holocaust, you look at apartheid, you look at slavery, when you look at the Japanese internment—when we as humans did terrible things to each other,” Landrieu told me when I caught up with him two weeks later, again in Boston, where he was to say goodbye to the U.S. Conference of Mayors, “and you ask yourself, ‘What were the conditions in which human beings decided to denigrate another human being that badly?’ They were for the most part in times when people thought that they were supreme to other people because of genetics, or people were fearing for their personal livelihood or safety, and as a consequence, human beings are capable of that evil. So the bigger question for the country long term is, ‘How did we get ourselves in a position where we had to choose between bad and worse?’” ....
**********UNQUOTE********
= new reply since forum marked as read
