Coward Blanco hypocritically addresses Jindal's plans

If former Gov. Kathleen Blanco thinks she can rehabilitate her sorry record as the state’s chief by certain criticisms of her successor, she’s only going to remind everybody of her own failings and look like a hypocrite in the process.

Delivering the keynote address to the Louisiana Women’s Conference, Blanco criticized Gov. Bobby Jindal’s plans to cut further funding to higher education. Jindal has asked a temporary commission to find ways to save $146 million in higher education as the state faces a deficit that could be as a high as $2 billion the fiscal year after next. The second-largest of the few areas that can be cut in deficit situations in higher education, and Jindal wishes to avoid this future scenario by planned, coordinated moves now.

Blanco said that this she considers “nothing short of heresy” and “it takes real leadership and real courage to do the right thing, and I don't see much leadership or courage coming out of the state Capitol right now.” How soon she forgets, or tries to make us forget, and how always she wishes to misrepresent things.

In the aftermath of the hurricane disasters of 2005 (marked by her gross incompetence in responding to them for which, predictably, she blamed others), Blanco ordered steep cuts in – you guessed it – higher education and the Legislature made that formal in the next budget. With the budgetary picture much brighter for 2007 because of the huge amounts of federal dollars being pumped in, those cuts were reversed and more added on. Now Jindal faces an even bigger projected deficit, because of a sagging economy made worse by Washington, than did Blanco, and she criticizes him for doing the same things, except he’s actually trying to do it rationally and look for efficiencies rather than take the pell-mell approach of panic she employed?

Additionally, the exercise in looking for efficiencies in higher education is completely justified when we review the familiar statistics: Louisiana is in the top ten states in number of institutions, in per capita spending on higher education, and is in the top three for per capita number of institutions. It’s hard to argue there isn’t room for improvement with these kinds of numbers, and the commission on Jindal’s orders is supposed to do it.

And Blanco rivaled Prisoner #03128-095 as Louisiana governors who showed the least leadership by ducking so many politically difficult decisions. She did nothing to curb the burgeoning health care budget through sensible reform, she allowed slush fund spending to escalate, and instead of looking to make priorities, have government prune a bloated bureaucracy, and discontinue unneeded programs, she cowardly tried to snatch more taxpayer money from the people through things like sick and tobacco taxes to keep feeding the voracious appetite of government. This stiff had less courage than the Cowardly Lion before he met the Wizard of Oz.

So just chalk this one up to extreme, but perhaps expected, hypocrisy on Blanco’s part, as it’s a familiar behavior for her. She knows what a failure she was and she thinks, as the vapid do, that by tearing down others it makes you look better. But we the Louisiana public know better than that.