Leadership Quote by Billy Tauzin

Tauzin’s sentence has the nervous rhythm of a politician trying to talk confidence into existence. It’s pitched as reassurance to displaced New Orleanians after Katrina, but the reassurance is conditional in a way that gives away the deeper anxiety: people won’t come back unless government can sell them a believable future. The repeated “really” is doing overtime, less emphasis than self-soothing. He’s not describing a plan; he’s describing a mood he hopes to manufacture.

The striking move is the clause that’s supposed to sound tough: “regardless of whether the levees held or not.” Read literally, it’s almost nihilistic. The levees were the story, the failure that drowned homes and trust. Promising security while hand-waving the levees suggests either magical thinking or a shift in responsibility: if we declare the city “secure,” the burden moves to residents to return and restart the economy, even if the infrastructure remains a question mark. It’s disaster politics as optics management.

There’s also a subtle reframing of citizenship into consumer confidence. “Citizens…contemplating coming back” are treated like investors waiting for signals. “Then…a rebuilding process would really take shape” implies rebuilding is less a public obligation than a market response triggered by the right messaging. The intent is to project resolve, but the subtext exposes a government trying to substitute narrative for engineering, persuasion for protection, after a catastrophe that made credibility the scarcest resource.