Election season in New Orleans has never been shy. The debates are fiery, the accusations louder still, and the comment sections often feel more like a street fight than civic discourse. Yet what unfolded under a recent campaign video for mayoral candidate Frank Janusa reveals a strain of desperation that says more about the state of our politics than about the candidates themselves.
The Women’s Republican Club of New Orleans posted a condemnation of Janusa’s opponent, Helena Moreno. In a single comment, they accused her of being a “socialist/Marxist/progressive,” claimed she is not a natural-born American, and connected her name to everything from the Aspen Institute to Common Core to LGBTQ rights. None of these attacks had anything to do with filling potholes, repairing drainage, or balancing a budget, the very issues that most citizens actually care about.
Citizenship is not determined by the imagination of political opponents. If Helena Moreno is on the ballot, she has met constitutional requirements. Suggesting otherwise without evidence is propaganda. To invoke the Aspen Institute or DEI as demonic forces does not generate solutions for our city, it only reveals a refusal to grapple with New Orleans’ true crises: failing infrastructure, generational poverty, housing insecurity, entrenched corruption, and crime.
When I responded with these concerns, Frank Janusa himself ( or a representative of his campaign) replied to my comments, not by addressing his supporters’ rhetoric, but by aiming his criticism directly at Moreno’s record. He asked, fairly, why the city has deteriorated over her years on the City Council. Why are our streets still crumbling? Why are our schools still failing? Why is the city still running deficits?
Those are questions that deserve answers. But we must also keep perspective: Helena Moreno has served on the City Council, not as mayor. Council members share responsibility, but they do not hold the executive authority of the mayor’s office. To suggest that Moreno alone bears responsibility for every pothole and every deficit is a distortion of political reality.
At the same time, Janusa himself must answer questions. Voters know him primarily as a “Republican businessman.” That may sound impressive, but private wealth and public leadership are not the same. Running a business requires profit margins; running a city requires a moral compass, accountability, and the ability to govern across fractured communities. Respect for professional success is due, but New Orleanians are right to demand more than slogans before entrusting their future to a newcomer.
The hard truth is that New Orleans’ decline cannot be pinned on a single individual or political party. It is the product of decades of corruption across party lines, compounded by disinvestment and shortsighted planning. Long before today’s campaign slogans, power struggles between Baton Rouge and New Orleans weakened the city’s autonomy. The rot runs deep, and it will not be solved by pretending one man, Republican or Democrat, can undo a century of neglect with a party label alone.
Real change will not come from fear-mongering about socialism, or fantasies about ideological purity. It will come from pragmatic, disciplined, service-driven leadership. The kind of leadership that measures itself not by the loudness of its slogans but by the integrity of its results.
New Orleans deserves better than campaign desperation. It deserves leaders willing to speak truthfully about our problems, to resist the temptation of recycled national talking points, and to deliver solutions rooted in the realities of this city.
Because governing New Orleans has never been about red or blue. It has always been about character. And right now, character is what we need most.
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