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Will Mitch Landrieu run? New Orleans' ex-mayor isn't sure it's his moment

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Charles Blow, The New York Times

NEW ORLEANS — "I am not already running for president." He continues, "I haven't done anything that a person who was running for president would do."

That's what the former New Orleans mayor and currently whispered-about presidential possibility Mitch Landrieu told me Friday afternoon as we sat at a window table in a hotel restaurant in the French Quarter.

I have known Mitch for a while. Like most people, I call him Mitch. We are both born and raised sons of Louisiana. He swept into the hotel lobby, greeting and razzing the staff, all of whom seemed to light up at the sight of him. He seemed relaxed, the way a person is when in transition, not beholden to the previous labor nor fully engaged in the next.

Landrieu, 58, has spent 30 years in politics, but he really began to be talked about as a possible presidential contender when he moved to take down Confederate statues in the city and gave a powerful, poetic speech explaining why.

Mitch is now asked about running for president so often that his answers sound like ones that have been honed by repetition, shaved down sharp and smooth.

He recalls a recent exchange he had about the subject.

"Someone said to me the other day, 'Are you running?' I said, 'No.' They said, 'That's what everybody says.' I said, 'What do the people who aren't running say?' " We laugh.

But it seems to me that much of Landrieu's trepidation, whether he articulates it as such or not, is that on the one hand he's not exactly aligned with this moment but rather speaks to a previous era that prized pragmatics and didn't condemn compromise. And on the other, he envisions a future in which America's intractable racial problems can actually be resolved.

As he told me:

"Centrism has come to be known as a lukewarm version of not standing for anything so you'll stand for everything. I call myself, like, a radical centrist. Every organization I've taken over has been in, like, meltdown, and I had to build it back up. So, it requires really hard, tough decisions. But, those things always require some level of compromise."

Yet as he spoke, it seemed to me that "radical" wasn't the correct word. He was simply describing himself as an effective centrist, one who gets results. The sad thing is that in a time of national intransigence, gridlock and hyper-partisanship, effectiveness is radical.

But the problem facing Landrieu is that being any kind of centrist Democrat when the party's progressives are ascendant would be perilous.

The other issue is, ironically, Landrieu's noble quest to be a racial healer.

"The thing I'm most excited about is, I'm leading an initiative to try to knit the South back together across race and class." He says it's called the E Pluribus Unum Fund, and its primary funder is Laurene Powell Jobs' Emerson Collective.

He continues, "We're in the planning period to see if there is a need to, or a desire to, actually build an institute for racial reconciliation in the South somewhere."

But he recognizes the conundrum the all-important black Democratic primary voters in the South would be in when faced with a white man from the region and black candidates from beyond it.

"You don't know how African-Americans in the South are going to perform if a white Democrat from the South is running against three really good African-American candidates," Landrieu said. "We've never had that before. You could have it this time. You could have Kamala Harris, Cory Booker and Deval Patrick. So, that theory has never been tested before."

It would be a hard debate stage to manage without looking like a white savior, coming to fix America's race problem and saying that he was a better choice to do so than the women and minorities in the race.

But that is not Landrieu. One thing that I've always admired about him is that he's not race blind, but race conscious. He talks straight about race, its complexities and its absolutes.

During our talk, he says flatly: "Donald Trump is a racist. Now, I've really refrained from making that accusation because the headline is, 'Mitch calls Donald a racist; Donald calls Mitch baldheaded.'"

And he's doing precisely what many of us have insisted white America do: He is a white man fighting to dismantle white supremacy, so that the burden isn't only on the shoulders of the oppressed.

"You can never countenance white supremacy," he said. "You can't accept it. You don't need to think about it. The judgment, the historical judgment on this, in my opinion, is closed. Now, people have a First Amendment right to say whatever they want, wherever they want, but the body politic, the people of the United States of America, cannot give any room for fertilization or growth of white supremacy. That will lead us to a place that will lead to a world war."

That's how Mitch talks. That's how Mitch thinks. That's who Mitch is.

I doubt he will run this cycle, even though he says it's "ego gratifying" to be considered and even though he couldn't help dropping remarks like: "If I had my choice and I was flipping a coin, I would pick mayors before I would pick senators or congressmen."

Mitch is still trying to figure out if this is his moment, but even if it isn't, I'm sure he'll one day have a moment.

Charles Blow is a columnist for The New York Times, where this column originally appeared.