Leadership Quote by Billy Tauzin

Tauzin’s Venice-New Orleans comparison is a politician’s sleight of hand: it takes a real image people instantly recognize - a beautiful city “in water” - and uses it to launder catastrophe into something like inconvenience. The line’s casual arithmetic (“365 days,” “a few days”) performs reassurance by pretending the argument is just common sense. If Venice can do it, why can’t we?

The subtext is less comforting. Venice “survives” because it’s built on a lagoon with centuries of infrastructure, a different topography, and a civic identity designed around water. New Orleans’ flooding is not lifestyle; it’s failure - of levees, planning, maintenance, and, crucially, political will. By flattening those distinctions, Tauzin shifts the frame from responsibility to resilience, from preventable disaster to regional toughness. The sentence quietly suggests that suffering is tolerable, even expected, as long as it’s temporary.

Context sharpens the edge: Tauzin was a Louisiana power broker whose post-politics career included leading the pharmaceutical lobby. He’s speaking from the worldview of institutional self-protection, where the imperative is to calm markets, deflect blame, and keep the story from becoming an indictment of governance. The quote works because it’s rhetorically nimble: it borrows Venice’s romance to dress down New Orleans’ vulnerability, turning a question about neglect and inequality into a folksy pep talk. That’s why it lands - and why it stings.