If you don’t live in Georgia, you probably hadn’t heard Kasim Reed’s name before last week, unless you pay close attention to politicians who might soon step into the on-deck circle of national attention. The mayor of Atlanta since 2010, Reed was well regarded but not well known elsewhere, at least until a few inches of snow last Tuesday brought the Atlanta metropolitan area to a frozen halt and his name rapidly became synonymous with an unfolding crisis of government ineptitude and callous nonchalance. Loud partisan criticism on television no longer comes as any surprise, but watching the habitually cheerful Al Roker tear into Reed and Georgia Governor Nathan Deal for ignoring weather reports before the storm was another thing altogether. The extent of Reed’s responsibility for the traffic disaster turned out to be more complex than most people initially assumed, but even with storm-dimmed vision one could see that the snow didn’t just bring Atlanta’s highways to a stop—it may have put the brakes on Reed’s political ascent.

Reed’s election as mayor was the culmination of a lifelong ambition. Twenty-six years ago, as a college freshman, Reed was given to introducing himself as the future mayor of Atlanta. (I lived one floor above him in a Howard University dorm and was the recipient of one such introduction.) Within a year of taking office, Reed’s successful effort to renegotiate the city’s pension obligations led Thomas Friedman to praise him as “one of the best of this new breed of leaders” who “combine fiscal prudence with growth initiatives to make their cities, their states, or our country great again.” Before Reed had even settled into his time as mayor, there was talk that perhaps he’d set his sights too low in college.

The perception that Reed could be the first black governor of Georgia solidified over the course of 2012. As Cory Booker, another young and telegenic mayor (born, like Reed, in 1969) was emerging as a larger-than-Newark figure in American politics, Reed was diligently working to win passage of a transportation-funding referendum against an unusual coalition of opponents that included leaders of the N.A.A.C.P., the Sierra Club, and Tea Party activists. (The initiative, which would have raised eight and a half billion dollars for roads and public transit, was crushed at the polls, which may be a reminder that highways are the third rail of Atlanta metropolitan politics.) At the same time, Reed helped to build support in Washington to fund the expansion of a deep-water port in Savannah, more than two hundred miles southeast of Atlanta. The port was only tangentially connected to the economy of the city that Reed was elected to lead, but it was precisely the kind of project that cultivates allies in a part of the state that is crucial to a bid for higher office. When Booker ran afoul of the Obama campaign late in the spring of 2012, having criticized the President’s ads attacking Mitt Romney’s work in private equity, Reed took Booker’s place as one of Obama’s go-to surrogates for Sunday-morning political chat shows.

Since 2002, when Governor Roy Barnes was turned out of office—in part for his opposition to flying the Confederate flag over the state capitol—Democrats have lost every gubernatorial election in Georgia. They have perennially pinned their hopes for statewide electoral victory on a possibly vast number of unregistered black voters—as many as six hundred thousand, by some estimates, more than twice the margin of victory in the last gubernatorial election. The negative publicity accompanying the snow fiasco would seem, at least for the moment, to have dented any hope that Reed could ride a wave of newly registered black voters into the governor’s mansion. But it also says something more ominous about the dominant role of spin in our political culture, for which Booker—whose unforced error with the Obama campaign gave Reed a higher profile to begin with—serves as a preëminent example.

Four years ago, when a storm encased Newark in ice and snow, Booker famously took to the impassable streets, shovel in hand, to aid stranded constituents. His frosty heroics earned Booker adoration far beyond Newark’s city limits. And yet, almost by definition, a storm in which the mayor has to take clearing snow into his own hands is one that has been badly mismanaged. As the New York Times later reported, at the time of the 2010 storm, the city had no contract for snow removal. Booker’s high-profile shovelling gambit diverted attention from a crisis that might not have been fatal to his ambitions for higher office but would certainly have been a stumbling block.

Reed’s reaction to his own snow problem last week presented a stark contrast. In the midst of the storm—the one caused by the media, not by the climate—Reed held a press conference where he sounded less like the sharp young communicator on display during the last Presidential election and more like an old-fashioned big-city pol unmoved by the plight of his constituents. The next morning, he appeared on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” where he pointed out that the snowbound commuters whose pictures were all over the networks were actually stranded far outside the city of Atlanta—a claim that was both true and politically useless.

As Rebecca Burns pointed out in an excellent piece for Politico, what we think of as “Atlanta” is actually a jigsaw puzzle of municipalities, counties, and townships. Only about ten per cent of the population of the Atlanta metropolitan area lives inside the city itself, and the blame for the snow debacle lays at the feet of something like a half dozen mayors, along with the state Department of Transportation and Governor Nathan Deal. In fact, most of the streets inside the city looked considerably better than the images of jammed highways seen on television screens across the nation. After an ice storm in 2011, the city bought snowplows and bulked up its resources for snow removal, which is why some—but not all—Atlantans were able to get from one end of the city to the other last Tuesday without excessive delays. So Reed was mostly correct when he described the situation as a crisis of coördination rather than action: the surrounding counties and towns were at least as lethargic in their responses to the weather, and Deal was slow to declare a state of emergency.

In previous years, Atlanta’s thoroughfares have been overwhelmed by the Super Bowl, the N.B.A. All-Star Game, and a now-discontinued annual collegiate bacchanal called Freaknik. Last week’s snowstorm was only the most recent in a long list of traffic calamities that demonstrate the perils of combining massive suburbs with anemic public transportation. All of this points to a situation that was not entirely of Reed’s making, yet made worse, both in terms of its political impact and the annoyance of the affected motorists, by his insistence on pointing that fact out. (In his defense, Atlanta’s sprawling nightmare required substantially more shovels than Booker’s weather problem in Newark.)

Nor was Reed the only Georgian who should have looked northward for inspiration. Nathan Deal might also have taken a page from his own counterpart in New Jersey. Deal cast blame for the debacle on poor weather forecasting, an argument that only further infuriated freezing voters. He might have fared better had he cast himself—in the style of Chris Christie’s Bridgegate press conference—as a furious fellow sufferer, even if his own actions had some responsibility for creating the suffering in the first place. (On Monday, Deal announced the formation of a “Severe Weather Warning Task Force” and promised an internal review of the state’s coördination failures.)

Reed’s star was rising fast enough to inspire the occasional gossipy blog post about the unmarried mayor’s dating prospects, but his personality—unlike Booker’s—has had little to do with his success. His political support is less a product of charisma than the perception that he embodied sharp, tough-minded competence, which makes last week’s fiasco doubly damaging, even if his own culpability should come with an asterisk. The network of interstates and roads that ring the city has already come back to life, but Reed’s future prospects may not be resuscitated so quickly.

If there is a lesson for the mayor, it may be that politics doesn’t reward accuracy or nuance when the public perceives their deployment to be nothing more than self-interest. When a crisis hits, you can take the blame, or you can leap so acrobatically into what looks like an attempt to resolve it that voters forget that they were looking for a scapegoat to begin with. In either case, he would not be the first politician whose fortunes depended upon the adroit use of a shovel.

Photograph by Ben Gray/AP.