Blakely Blasts New Orleans Recovery Process

"'New Orleanians expected someone else to do it all along,' Blakely said in an interview with CalTV, the University of California-Berkeley's online television station. 'They never expected to do it themselves.'

Controversial comments are nothing new for Blakely, who in a New York Times interview during his tenure at City Hall called some New Orleanians 'buffoons.' Typically, his statements have been filled with bravado about what he did to engineer the city's recovery. This time, however, he said he never really wanted to oversee the recovery and should have left his post earlier than June.

'I should have left a little earlier, for two reasons: One, my health wasn't good. Secondly, I had other things I wanted to do, and administering a recovery is not one of them.'"