Ray Nagin, mayor of New Orleans, is arguably the most controversial chief executive of a major city since Mayor Richard Daley was unleashing his convention cops in Chicago 41 years ago.

Part of that notoriety is a direct result of Hurricane Katrina, which not only devastated Nagin's city, but put him on the national news networks around the clock during the crises before, during and after the storm.

Viewers in other parts of the country saw Nagin struggling to explain why rows and rows of unused city buses were not used to transport evacuees, blasting the federal government in press conferences and vacillating on his original evacuation order. The conclusion tended to be that Nagin was a disaster in the midst of a disaster.

In New Orleans, however, it was more complicated than that. A New Orleans native (born in Charity hospital on June 11, 1956), Nagin won election in 2002 in a stunning upset, then proceeded to stage a high-profile purge of corrupt city employees. New Orleans who were tired on decades of official skullduggery rejoiced.

Indeed, Nagin's approval rating was high when Katrina approached the city in August of 2005. Earlier, the mayor had ordered the city to evacuate in the face of Hurricane Ivan, which missed New Orleans altogether.

The criticism Nagin received (especially from city residents involved in the tourism industry) for guessing wrong with Ivan may have been what made him hesitate with Katrina on his doorstep. The mayor didn’t issue his mandatory evacuation order until Aug. 29, and then seemed occasionally impotent and befuddled when 90,000 people stayed put and were punished by the flood that was the storm’s aftermath. Nagin and President George W. Bush – whom the mayor had once supported – took verbal shots at one another.

Yet even with all that, Nagin was re-elected in 2006 and remains mayor today.

He first rose to prominence in New Orleans through his job as head of Cox New Orleans, the Crescent City's only cable television company. When Cox arrived, Cox’s customer approval rating was less than 50 percent. When he left, after having been promoted to a vice president, it was 85 percent.

The Cox position kept Nagin in contact with city government (which set cable rates), and an MBA class at Tulane in 1993 sharpened his political perspective. In 2002, using mostly his own money, he defeated Police Chief Richard Pennington, City Councilman Troy Carter and State Sen. Paulette Irons to become mayor.

Always outspoken, Nagin has raised hackles in recent years by expressing dismay about the number of Mexican workers in the city participating in the post-Katrina cleanup and declaring that God wanted New Orleans to be a majority African-American city (a "chocolate city," Nagin called it).

Most recently, he and his wife Serena were in the news for being quarantined by Chinese authorities while on a trip there because their seat on the airliner had been close to someone suspected of being infected with swine flu.

Image: New Orleans mayor C. Ray Nagin, 2006.