Georges disconnect from voters hampers election bid

Now it’s John Georges that has gone into desperation mode? As Louisiana gubernatorial candidates flail against Rep. Bobby Jindal’s juggernaut, they keep criticizing him over things that frankly don’t matter or are entirely distorted.

Last week it was state Sen. Walter Boasso who tried to make Jindal out to be supporting one thing when Jindal’s own words previously that day entirely contradicted Boasso’s assertion. In effect, it made Boasso look small in comparison to Jindal (which is really saying something). Boasso recognizes that Jindal is threatening to win outright without a general election runoff, and has pledged to do anything to win himself.

Now Georges, running as an independent although previously calling himself a Republican, is playing the petulance card. He probably has realized that he could be the second-choice voter among more of the Republican Jindal’s supporters than Democrat Boasso or Democrat Public Service Commissioner Foster Campbell, so if he detaches Jindal voters, by negative attacks, he thinks they’ll float on over to him.

Even though he claims he’s not a politician, Georges is making the same mistake that so many do: winning votes is not just a matter of getting others not to vote for somebody else, but then to get them to vote for you. His latest whining about Jindal shows how little he understands this.

In a candidate forum not attended by Jindal, Georges asserted, “When someone applies for a job and doesn’t show up for the interview, you don’t give him the job.” Forgetting for the moment that while Jindal may have only twice participated in these forums he has “interviewed” hundreds, if not thousands, of times across the state in church, civic, and other gatherings, when has Georges ever even interviewed for a real job? He’s spent his career stepping right into the family business, from a privileged background.

This puts him in marked contrast to his three major competitors, all of whom come from working class or lower middle class immigrant backgrounds, whose families and they had to work hard even to approach the level of affluence into which Georges was born. And this is what Georges doesn’t get: one senses that his campaign is baffled why it doesn’t do better with all the money and the agenda he has (which doesn’t differ from Jindal’s by much), because they do not understand that you just don’t walk into a political executive’s job depending upon the people’s votes no matter how successful you have been in the business world.

Despite his darker skin and obvious high-faluting intelligence, Jindal does a much better job of showing how his wants and desires, and the ideas he proposes to achieve them through government, match those of the typical citizen of Louisiana. In short, Georges doesn’t grasp what Jindal, or even Boasso and Campbell, understand about the lives of ordinary Louisianans.

It’s why his form of criticism of Jindal came out the way it did. It’s also why he will be fortunate to get into a runoff with Jindal, and why he will lose with or without one.