Spat started by deposed illustrates hypocrisy, paranoia

Perhaps for political reasons, the Lafayette Daily Advertiser and Baton Rouge Advocate editorial pages are letting a spat between the husband of former Democrat Gov. Kathleen Blanco, Raymond “Coach” Blanco, and Republican Louisiana House Speaker Jim Tucker foment. It showcases a struggle between old and new politics in the state, and the hypocritical ranting of a tired old man who fortunately has been ejected from the political scene and the power that went with it.

Blanco, who retired six months ago from a high-paid, cushy job in charge of facilities and students at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette that he held throughout his wife’s political career, started things off with a critical letter to the editor in the Advertiser, reprinted in the Advocate, about Tucker’s leadership in the budgetary dealings in the just-completed regular session of the Legislature that saw higher education having to absorb a several percentage-point hit to its funding. He accused Tucker of being too negative in attitude to give more money to higher education.

Tucker fired back (which followed the same Advertiser-to-Advocate pipeline), writing it was more important to prevent tax hikes and to achieve savings that no doubt could be realized in examining higher education through his authorship and passage of a bill that would so exactly that. He opined that Blanco’s comments were rooted in petty politics of the past, and that he opposed a tax hike to accomplish increased funding that Blanco presumably supported. Blanco then responded (again, utilizing the same pipeline), writing he never suggested a tax hike in his letter, but argued that increased spending in other areas sanctioned by Tucker sapped money from higher education, and asserted that was more reminiscent of politics of the past.

Typically, opinion pages allow a subject to go forth, allow one response, and move on. They also typically don’t reprint something fairly similar from another newspaper. So this calls into question the political motives of the two newspapers, neither of whom like Tucker, and whether Tucker will be allowed, if he wants, to be published on the subject. Even if he does, for reasons of political niceties Tucker is unlikely to expand upon the motives of Blanco, which reveal the real reasons behind the initial letter.

They being, unless there is a level of cognitive dissonance and tolerance in the Blanco household that makes those dynamics present in the marriage of the conservative Republican Mary Matalin and liberal Democrat James Carville look puny, then according to Blanco the conversations in the bedroom with this wife must have been very interesting and contentious. If Raymond Blanco thinks Tucker is a big-spender of the old school type, he apparently either knows nothing about his wife of some four decades or he was very skilled in hiding the violent disagreements they must have had over her free-spending ways. With even the faintest whiff of a budget surplus she hankered to spend it all, and strove time and again to raise taxes to allow for increased spending when there wasn’t one.

Perhaps the most prominent example of this came when, after a big surplus was determined in 2006 to exist because of federal recovery dollars pouring into the state in the aftermath of the hurricane disaster of 2005, Blanco tried to spend it all on various projects. But the Legislature denied her, in part because the minority Republicans in the House rallied to prevent it. Even though she overcame that opposition during the next regular session, the political defeat more than anything else other than her disastrous handling of the disaster response, sealed her fate that led her to decline running for another term.

Oh, and, by the way, the leader of that opposition that sank her spending plan temporarily was Tucker. That and now Tucker’s leadership to prompt examination higher education, where Raymond Blanco still has friends and influence that will be threatened through a greater emphasis on efficiency and value in higher education, it what sticks in his craw about Tucker (prompting Tucker to write obliquely about his “petty personal attacks”). This is why Blanco spends his days in retirement penning poisonous diatribes, because Tucker was instrumental in driving his wife out of power, and thereby perhaps him into premature retirement, and now threatens his bailiwick of nearly a half century.

I can understand Blanco wanting to have something to do now that he no longer gets to strut around his little fiefdom, but to keep himself occupied by railing against somebody as not being sufficiently fiscally conservative when he apparently did nothing to influence his wife to stop the runaway spending of her term in office shows a unique mixture of hypocrisy and selective memory (not to mention paranoia if he truly thinks that four percent cuts in higher education equals means it is “being crippled to the point that it will be derided nationally and unable to produce a well-educated, well-trained work force”). Bitterness, not honesty, typifies his contribution to this yawp of his, and disqualifies it from being taken seriously.