There he was, on the shore of Lake Charles in Calcasieu Parish, the lieutenant governor leading the evacuation as Hurricane Rita hit.

He could feel when the hurricane wasn’t there, and then when it suddenly was. That’s the closest Mitch Landrieu can compare to May 7, the day he left office as mayor of New Orleans. Until then, he slept with his cellphone on his chest, always on edge, waiting for the police chief or fire chief to call — or if he left the phone downstairs, to be awakened by the officials banging on his door. The morning of his departure, he got up, went to new Mayor LaToya Cantrell’s inauguration, sat through her speech and wished her well. That afternoon, a tugboat caught fire on the river. One of the barges it was pushing slammed into a dock. Another barge hit a ship.


“My immediate reaction is, ‘Well, let me pick up the phone,’” Landrieu says, “and say, ‘Where are we and what are we doing?’ And then I realized, that’s not us. That’s them. Now, the next thing you think is, ‘What can we do to help?’ And the answer is nothing.”

For the first time in 30 years, he had no power. No office. No platform.

But he still has a lot to say.

After eight years in his dream job and as he nears turning 58 in August, he wants to take a moment by himself to think. But ever since his speech last year about taking down four Confederate monuments—when he launched himself into the center of a national conversation about race and racism, and saw the hate that others see, and confronted what’s inside America and Americans—he hears at every turn people urging him to think about running for president, and telling him that he’s made for the moment to go up against President Donald Trump and what his presidency has unleashed in the country. And maybe he is, he thinks. But with a 2020 field that could include a dozen or more serious Democrats, he wonders: Is running for president the only way to get anyone to pay attention?

“You’ve never had a president, Republican or a Democrat, speak like this and give license to the kind of darkness that you see going on,” Landrieu said in June, in Brooklyn, in a way not many white southerners tend to do publicly. “And I don’t think you can let people run from that without being called out for it on this particular issue. There is plenty of room in the United States of America to have a vociferous debate about left, middle, right. On the issue of white nationalism, and white supremacy, that is a notion that ought to be rejected forcefully by everyone on the political spectrum. It looks sometimes the same. People make it like you can blend in, and you can’t do that. You’ve got to call it out for what it is.”

Landrieu dwelled on the reconstruction of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, starting fresh from destruction and re-conceiving what the city could be, making decisions that were not always the most popular—some of which remain controversial.

“I think we’re going to come out of it OK,” Landrieu said, “but we’re not going to come out of it by accident.”

For a man who’s spent his entire adult life in politics, Landrieu has an almost Obama-like intellectualism. He flows between ideas he’s read in books or encountered in conversations. His mind is associative, always linking up ideas with other experiences. He can be lyrical, though sometimes to the point of sounding like he’s doling out aphorisms. There are “y’alls” and explanatory diversions. He doesn’t tweet. He says “let me finish” a lot—not because he’s annoyed about being interrupted (though that sometimes flashes, too) but because he feels like he’s in the middle of a thought, and he wants to get through the full thought.

He talks about history. About moral leadership. The power of diversity. Who the future belongs to, and who it doesn’t. But most of all, he talks directly about race and racism and reality in America. When exactly is Trump saying America was great? What was it that made it great then? He pushes people to think about the answers, and he thinks they’re frighteningly clear. He sees what he lived through in Louisiana playing out in the country, has spoken and written about how much Donald Trump reminds him of David Duke. He says he knows people can be afraid to call it out but knows what happens when they don’t. He says he can’t believe he has to be the one to say there’s no place for white supremacy in 21st-century America.

And he gives speeches like the one he delivered at the Kennedy Library in May, accepting the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award that in 2017 went to Barack Obama. In an address that sounded very Obamalike, he said, “Our democracy is counting on each and every one of you, and in your countless acts of selfless courage. When millions of us do just our small part all at the same time, there is no mountain too high, no task too daunting, no dream too big. To every American listening: You may not be the tallest or the strongest or best-looking, or richest or fastest or smartest or the most well-connected. You may look different, love different or pray different. It is of no moment nor matter. We must all choose to find a way or make one. This is our America.”

He finished by quoting Tennyson’s “Ulysses” on sacred duty, invoking JFK’s call to action, sounding like a man who was building up to, “and that’s why I’m running for president.”

But he didn’t.

For now, Landrieu is more concerned about understanding why Trump happened, and figuring out what he is prepared to do about it. “If you say to yourself, ‘It’s really not about him, what were the conditions that caused us to be able to choose this level of chaos over what we thought we had?’ And then what you would have to say is, the conditions in the country should never have been where they were, because it’s clear to me, historically, without necessarily equating them, when you look at the Holocaust, you look at apartheid, you look at slavery, when you look at the Japanese internment—when we as humans did terrible things to each other,” Landrieu told me when I caught up with him two weeks later, again in Boston, where he was to say goodbye to the U.S. Conference of Mayors, “and you ask yourself, ‘What were the conditions in which human beings decided to denigrate another human being that badly?’ They were for the most part in times when people thought that they were supreme to other people because of genetics, or people were fearing for their personal livelihood or safety, and as a consequence, human beings are capable of that evil. So the bigger question for the country long term is, ‘How did we get ourselves in a position where we had to choose between bad and worse?’”

Landrieu is truly concerned about where America is heading. He talks to friends about what’s gone wrong. But he sincerely doesn’t know if he wants to step into another hurricane.

“I’m not trying to be, you know, be evasive here,” Landrieu told me. “The answer to your question is: I do not know. I don’t know.”

Landrieu says he’d like to believe there’s a way to play a role in the national conversation without running for president, knowing that in Washington, the assumption is that any politician who says anything bold or interesting must be on the next jet to Iowa. He worries that without that kind of platform, voters will be at an all-you-can-eat buffet, and he’ll be off to the side with a pot of gumbo, trying to get people to taste what he has once they’ve filled up their plates.

“I am now, as I sit here as a 58-year-old person thinking about, ‘What’s my future look like?’ I could go into politics, I could go into the private sector, I can go into the philanthropic community, I can do a combination of all of those things. I’m trying to figure out what makes sense for me, in terms of how to fulfill, what’s in my heart, and where my talent meets opportunity and my responsibility,” Landrieu said. “Now, part of me says, ‘I made a 30-year contribution.’ Then I feel selfish about that and think, ‘Well, yeah, yeah, that’s true, but you had a pretty good life and you still got to give back. You better figure out how to do it.’ And Father Thompson’s always in my head—the Jesuit priest who said, ‘You always got to help people.’”

For now, there’s no wink-wink travel or fundraising. He doesn’t have consultants, other than a rickety breakfast-nook cabinet of Donna Brazile, James Carville and Mary Matalin. He doesn’t have a team—just a few former staffers who kick in as volunteers for the couple of events that he’s still doing, juggling everything from booking his hotel rooms to backreading speeches. He doesn’t keep a list of pros and cons about whether to get in. He doesn’t have a timetable for getting any of those. “There’s something authentically organic about being unsure,” said one person who knows Landrieu well.

What he does have is a loose affiliation of people who watched that speech last year about removing the Confederate monuments, or heard about that speech, and fell in love: a scattering of Obama alums, desperate Democrats convinced that the bald white guy from the South could be the only way to answer Trump, thought leaders and prominent African-Americans who keep pushing him.

Barack Obama has taken a shine to him, and invited him in for a private meeting at his office in Washington in the fall. Being outside Washington but figuring out how to address big issues in politics gets a lot of Obama alumni going, too, and some have not so quietly been encouraging him to run, and saying they’d be interested in working on the campaign. “There’s something about him,” one former top White House aide told me in the spring.

Mike Bloomberg is a fan, and when he invited Landrieu in October to a big event in New York, Oprah Winfrey introduced herself, told him that she memorized the monument speech, that it is one of the very few, up there with Obama’s famous 2008 race speech, that made an impact on her personally, according to people who heard about the conversation. She invited him to dinner in Beverly Hills in the spring during a swing for his book tour. She’s already recorded a long episode of her SuperSoul Sunday podcast with him, her subtle way of highlighting the politicians she’s interested in. (Originally slated to run in July, the podcast has now been split in two and pushed back to August 6 and 8, and will run along with a piece about him in O Magazine—turning more of her resources out to highlight him.)

“I have a very strong premonition that we don’t yet understand what moment that we’re in. And I think people are creating prescriptions for an illness that they have not yet appropriately diagnosed. I do think it’s an illness, though,” Landrieu says. “I don’t think that this is a good space for the country to be in, unless you think that cataclysmic, transformational, dysfunctional change which seems erratic and implausible is a good thing to go through.”

The line Obama used all the time in the 2016 campaign and since, is that if you had to be born at any time in history, in any country, you’d pick now, in America.

Right, Landrieu says. But that wasn’t the feeling that drove Trump’s win and power.

“We are not in a place where the world is about to take us over, and we ought not be in a position of crouched fear and hunched-in and isolated. We ought to be feeling much better about ourselves. But here’s the thing: We’re not,” Landrieu says. “And so I’m not trying to diminish people’s feelings. I think the question is, why do we feel that way? Because there’s an answer there, and I don’t know what the answer is at the moment.”

***

Landrieu, who hails from Louisiana’s most powerful Democratic political dynasty, got into the family business in a hurry. His wife got pregnant on their honeymoon. Also before they headed home: He called his father, Moon Landrieu, who’d started in the statehouse and New Orleans City Council before being mayor for eight years and then secretary of Housing and Urban Development, to tell him he was going to come home and run for state representative himself, for the seat his older sister Mary (the future senator) had just left to become state treasurer.

Outgoing Gov. Edwin Edwards invited him and a bunch of incoming colleagues to lunch at the governor’s mansion on Feb. 18, 1988. He drove up, doing for the first time the commute he’d do over and over again for the next 20 years. He remembers it raining hard outside. He remembers Edwards doing his best to undercut Buddy Roemer, who’d just beaten him.

An aide came in saying there was a call.

“Edwin Edwards picked up the phone and said, ‘Mitch, it’s your mother’—in front of all these legislators,” Landrieu said, chuckling now. His wife had gone in for a scheduled doctor’s appointment but was being rushed to the hospital. The umbilical cord was squeezing the infant, suffocating it. He sped home. His daughter Grace was born that night. She was six weeks old when Landrieu was back in the capital to take the oath of office as state representative.

He held the job for 16 years, then spent six years as lieutenant governor, through Katrina, through Rita, first under a Democratic governor who famously botched everything, and then under a Republican who came in with a technocratic move to the right. Along the way, he ran for mayor twice and lost, almost ran a third time, and then, on what would have been the fourth try, jumped in less than two months before the election. He got 66 percent of the vote in a five-way field. The runner up got 14 percent.

He spent eight years rebuilding the city and, as he likes to say, reimagining how it could be built, because of how much had been destroyed. There were choices about police and charter schools and development that he compares to be asked to cut off your wrist or your ankle. Most were at least a little unpopular. Take a real look at Landrieu’s record, dig deep, say his critics, and he doesn’t look like the hero that people who tuned in only for the monuments speech see.

But ask Obama: Sometimes all it takes is a speech.

Or ask Jack Schlossberg, JFK’s grandson, explaining that they gave Landrieu the Profile in Courage Award not just for taking down the monuments, but also for “explaining to his city and our country why that decision was the right one.”

Landrieu wrote the monuments speech himself and didn’t show it to some of his closest advisers until after it was mostly finished—a searing, searching explanation of the four Confederate monuments he’d ordered taken down in the middle of the night, what they meant and what getting rid of them meant. Reporters didn’t get a heads-up that it was going to be major. Staff didn’t get national TV cameras in the room. It went viral on its own, but with a long incubation. The New York Times ran the full transcript five days after he delivered it. The Washington Post put the full video on its site two weeks after. There was a flurry of op-eds and tweets. Suddenly, he was being talked about everywhere, and the presidential talk came immediately.

The first time I asked him about running for president was about a month after the speech, two hours after he’d officially taken over the Conference of Mayors. He’d played a video about how his father had removed the Confederate flag from the city council chambers all the way back in 1969, taught him about diversity and desegregation, then built that up into a speech in which he didn’t say the president’s name, but did say, “America’s greatness is alive and well in cities and towns across this country—from urban to rural to suburban, from coast to coast.”

He already had a practiced never-say-never-but-I’m-probably-not-unless-I-do answer.

But the presidential buzz built, and he clearly enjoyed that it was building. He could say over and over it was a crazy question, and meanwhile turn the speech into a powerful, best-selling book, turn the book into a book tour, and spend many days during his final few months as mayor in Washington or New York or Ohio or Texas or Arkansas, under the umbrella of promotion, or finishing up as the leader of the Conference of Mayors.

Still, most Democratic insiders will tell you they’re surprised Landrieu 2020 is a possibility.

“He’s a great leader, and I never try to say to people what their political ambitions would be. It’s up to him,” said Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey, heading in to the Profile in of Courage Award ceremony, and clearly surprised by a question of a presidential run. “He is a national leader regardless of what his political ambitions may be, beyond what he’s already done in his life. He’ll never lose the platform that he has. He’ll be a voice, especially for racial justice and looking at the South as not a political wasteland for Democrats.”

For the handful of Democrats who are watching, it has all fed the idea that there must be some plan, when there really isn’t.

“He flies a bit under the radar compared to some others,” a prominent Democratic operative wrote to me in May, when I mentioned I was watching him at the Profile in Courage ceremony. “I don’t even know who works for him.” (A moment later, the operative added, “actually, it’s smart ... running under the radar is smart.”)

Most people who run for president have been thinking about the White House their whole lives, and certainly their whole political careers. Not Landrieu. He doesn’t quite look the part anymore, but when he was younger he was both a competitive tennis player and a musical theater talent. He can still swing a racket, sing an operatic “Ave Maria” at a funeral or a parody show tune in a sketch at this year’s Gridiron Dinner and play the washboard with a zydeco band every once in a while. He says his dreams were of Wimbledon and Broadway. The governor’s mansion, definitely, though he knew that running statewide after the decisions he’d make as mayor would be impossible—but he was fine with that trade-off to get his dream job.

“Life has a way of leveling off, you know, what your ambitions are, when, you know, your talent doesn’t line up with your ambition, or the circumstances don’t allow it,” Landrieu says. “It would be completely disingenuous to say that it doesn’t give me great joy and pride to think, after having served 30 years in office, that I did a good enough job to get a couple of really nice honors and awards from my peers that recognize the great work that I did and my team did and my city did. And it makes you feel really good that people say, ‘Hey, man, you know, you got game. You know, you might could do something bigger and better.’”

He’s been trying to figure out himself what it is that’s going on.

“One of the great virtues of being the mayor is doors are always open to you. You travel a lot, you listen to a lot of people, and you see things that other people can’t see; you make connections that people can’t make. … And as a consequence, I start articulating a message that I’m hearing from these people. So in some instances, I’m actually giving back to the people not just what I think—and so they respond to that,” Landrieu says.

Not that he’s fully doing the “aw shucks, who me?” routine.

“I’m not trying to diminish me. What I’m saying to you is that there is a yearning—I can feel it now,” Landrieu says. “I can feel that there are people who are yearning for America to take a different direction than the one we’re going through right now.”

Steve Benjamin, the Columbia, South Carolina, mayor who was Landrieu’s deputy at the Conference of Mayors before taking over as chairman last month, recognizes the thought process underway.

“I know that he would not embark on some quixotic quest without seeing that there was a real opportunity to do something there,” Benjamin said, talking about how much White House political wisdom has been torn up. “I do believe that once—if—he sees a path, he’ll probably take it.”

Benjamin, who got his own start organizing with his local NAACP, noted that the Charleston chapter—which last year had Joe Biden address its meeting—has asked him how to connect with Landrieu.

“He’s rang some bells,” Benjamin said.



***

The day that Starbucks held its diversity training and Roseanne Barr got fired for tweeting that Valerie Jarrett was the combination of “Planet of the Apes” and the Muslim Brotherhood, Landrieu was on stage at the Brooklyn Public Library, having a conversation with the executive director of a museum a few miles away dedicated to a 19th-century free black community.

“It’s not a joke. And if it is, it’s a sick joke. And it’s a joke rooted in hate,” Landrieu told them, speaking of the upsurge of white nationalism. “It needs to be called out and confronted for what it is.”

These are seeds, Landrieu said. Don’t let them grow like they’ve grown before. “We have to be humble enough to say that human beings can be taken to dark places,” Landrieu told the audience of 150 people, almost all of them white, in the small auditorium. “And unless you confront that, we could actually go back there today. … Don’t be confused: We are in a moment that we have not been for a long time where people are beginning to re-litigate issues that we thought we had settled a long time.”

The event ended, and he headed to a folding table in the hall to sit and sign books.

“So, Jimmy Carter?” asked a bald white man with a beard, hoping he was looking at the dark horse for the Trump era. He did a quick thumbs-up. “Let’s hope.”

People waited for over an hour to meet Landrieu.

A younger white woman, clearly born far from any levees, shook his hand.

“Your story feels like my life story,” the woman told him. “I hope you run in 2020—and if you do, I’d love to come work for you.”

He smiled, mumbled something.

“He did exactly what you’d expect,” she said afterward. “He demurred.”

For 30 years, he says, he’d think about how every time he spoke publicly, he was speaking on behalf of his state legislative district, then as lieutenant governor for the state as a whole, then the city. He’s been speaking just for himself for only six weeks.

But as he contemplates his future, he’s finding his voice—and it sounds a lot like a recent Democratic president who launched his national career with a speech. “We spend a lot of time in this country wanting to litigate whose fault it was,” Landrieu said in Brooklyn. “We may never be able to figure out whose fault it is, but this thing is clear: I know whose responsibility it is to fix it. Because we’re the only ones who can.”