In Monday night’s mayoral debate, moderators Norman Robinson and Chris Mathews tried. They pushed and pushed the candidates but got little of substance from any of them. Each had his talking points and strayed little from them. On Tuesday’s op-ed pages, the columnists called them on it.

Stephanie Grace’s column was headed, “Candidates duck rebuilding debate.” Early on, she says, there was hope that the massive needs of this city would provoke vigorous debate over the decisions the city would have to make on land use. Shall we turn the lowest sections of the city from residential neighborhoods into parks or industrial development? It seems the candidates are afraid to take the most reasonable stand, that some areas should be deemed unsafe at any cost and left alone. In order to be elected, they take the path of least resistance. “Trust me with your vote,” they imply, “and I’ll do the right thing later.”

Columnist Jarvis DeBerry told the kind of candidate he was looking for, the man or woman who would capture his vote. “Anybody who steps up and offers me the bitter-tasting, hard-to-stomach truth…will have my support. And I’ll be happy to give it.” Alas, no one of the two dozen candidates qualified, he says. “Don’t get me wrong,” DeBerry writes. “I understand that at its most basic level, a political campaign is nothing more than an elaborate version of the note that gets passed to the cute girl in the 7th grade reading class: ‘Do you like me? Check yes or no.'” None of the mayoral candidates want to say anything that will offend. “We’re being talked to as if we’re children, children who are too immature to be told how dire our situation really is, too petulant and self-centered to appreciate how much sacrifice our recovery will require of us.”

The Times-Picayune has just won two Pulitzers. One was awarded for meritorious public service for the paper’s coverage of Katrina and its aftermath. The other was given for distinguished reporting of breaking news, again for Katrina. I notice that the Sun Herald, newspaper of the Mississippi Gulf Coast, received the public service award, too. That should not imply that the way to get a Pulitzer is to have a major catastrophe occur on your watch; many papers do not rise to the occasion the way these two did.

On Elysian Fields Avenue Monday morning, the wrecking machines were tearing down the beloved Baptist church on that street. Ironic how a grand edifice like that, one which has stood imposingly on that corner for over 40 years, can be reduced to a pile of concrete and rubble so quickly. Ironic and sad. I expect a new, smaller, more functional building to go up on that corner before long, and won’t we all be glad.

Perhaps the weirdest moment in Monday night’s mayoral debate came when each candidate was allowed to ask another a question, and Peggy Wilson asked incumbent Mayor Ray Nagin if he really wants all the welfare cheats, the pimps, the drug dealers, the murderers back. “Do you want those people back?” Nagin answered, “I want everybody to come back to the city.” Then he added, “The ones I’m not excited about coming back are the people that have been involved in very serious crimes.”

People ask me who I’m voting for. I live in River Ridge, in Jefferson Parish, not in New Orleans. I wish I did live there, just to vote this Saturday.

Each candidate was asked which of his/her opponents they might choose to serve as the city’s chief administrative office, if elected. Each had an answer, but Virginia Boulet got the biggest laugh when she said, “Ray Nagin.” Then she added quickly, “Just kidding.”

The crime rate in New Orleans has dropped severely, which it should since over half the population lives outside the area. In the fourth quarter of 2004, the city registered 64 murders. In the last quarter of 2005, the number was 9. Rape dropped from 45 to 17, and armed robbery from 356 to 18. Overall, crime dropped 68%.

Preservationists in New Orleans are trying to ward off the bulldozers from destroying historic homes that were severely damaged. The National Trust for Historic Preservation has its people in town, sorting through all the homes appointed for destruction, trying to find those with historic value that can be salvaged.

Monday, two more dead bodies were discovered in the Lower 9th Ward. That brings to 17 the number found since March 2. The official body count of Louisiana victims of Katrina–which includes 199 who died while in other states–stands at 1,282. Another 987 people are still listed as missing as of April 5.

The lead news item in one of our city’s nightly television programs Monday was “Church group to give one billion dollars to rebuild New Orleans.” A coalition of the National Baptist Convention USA, the National Baptist Convention of America, and the Progressive Baptist Convention–all historically African-American denominations–have sent in their representatives and they estimate that will be the cumulative value of their assistance. The small item in Tuesday’s Times-Picayune took up 5 paragraphs and said only that they would help churches assemble loans and other sources of income and match them with developers for reconstruction projects. That sounds right. A billion dollars from the federal government is chump change; but it takes a lot of tithes in a lot of offering plates to make a billion dollars.

I spent two hours in the dentist’s office Tuesday, most of it in the waiting room while Dr. Jim fixed the teeth of a skateboarder. I got acquainted with his mom and little sister and heard their story of evacuating from Katrina from the Northshore (Mandeville) on Sunday before the storm hit on Monday, August 29. “We fled to Destin,” the mother said. They dragged along their boat and rented a house on a waterway one block from the beach, and went out on the boat every day. After a full month of that, she had her fill. “I don’t ever want to live on the beach,” she said. Then she admitted that so many people they knew suffered in the evacuation, she does not tell them where her family rode out those four weeks. “I almost feel guilty,” she said. There’s a lot of that going around.