On the heels of its showing,
yet again, the continuing serious troubles of Sen. Mary Landrieu in her reelection bid,
Southern Media and Opinion Research also released results
from a number of other queries. Sen. David
Vitter continues to be the early favorite to win it all for next year’s
governor’s race, even if facing the as-yet unannounced (but likely)
candidate New Orleans Mayor Mitch
Landrieu. But more interesting was the nugget that Jindal now has about as
much approval as disapproval to his
numbers, with the former at about 48 percent, almost a couple of points below
the latter, and representing an 11 point improvement over a poll done by the
outfit about eight months ago.
That reading was after Jindal had
abandoned
a thorough and helpful tax reform for the state that, had he stuck to it in
modified form, was more likely than not to have prevailed, and instead acquiesced
to tax and spending increases in his budget instigated by a coalition of
Democrats and populist Republicans. Yet his ratings had been falling for many
months before, off of a 2012 legislative session where he spearheaded
monumental changes in education delivery and afterwards where by administrative
actions he closed
out superfluous prison space and revolutionized
(for Louisiana; par for the course most any other place) the state’s role in
direct delivery of health care.
This explains why his popularity
took a hit. To paraphrase former governor and current candidate for Congress
Prisoner #03128-095, known before being sent up the river as Edwin Edwards, some of those
who give lip service to the idea of reform government find they don’t entirely
like it when they actually have it. Cautious in his reform efforts in his first
term, in all likelihood partly to win a second term convincingly, immediately
after Jindal’s reelection the ambitious agenda laid out over the next two years
they found contradicted a bedrock principle of the political culture for so
long in the state inculcated into them, populism, or the winning of political
support by using the state to redistribute resources to those voters and donors
to campaigns.
By way of example of someone who
talks reform but when presented with its consequences reverts to opposing it, yesterday
a House committee perfunctorily dealt with approving HB
128 by state Rep. Kenny Havard,
which largely mirrors a similar attempt defeated last year, that would
interject such legislative oversight into the contracting process for operation
of institutions such as prisons and hospitals as to strangle
privatization efforts entirely, even as these both in the state and outside
have proven to save taxpayer dollars with no reduction in quality of service. As he did last year, even as the facts speak
otherwise that either he remains ignorant of or simple disregards, Havard
claimed this was not an anti-privatization bill.
You see Havard, who also claims
he’s a conservative, by his
own reckoning has in his district 3,000 constituents who work at two state
prisons and the remaining state mental health hospital. Future potential
reconfiguration of these (which seems unlikely given the other two mental
health facilities run by the state have been privatized, in the case of the one
that has operated that way for at least a fiscal year producing
savings of about 8 percent, and that other prisons have been identified as
more cost-effective to close or privatize) would put some people out of work
and for others perhaps suffer pay cuts with the new operators because, guess
what, contractors operate on the basis of marketplace efficiencies, not on who
has the most political muscle to steer taxpayer monies to whom. And if that
were to happen, these voters might blame Havard for this and show him the door,
because of the widespread expectation that is it a primary function of
government to directly provide jobs and pump money into economies stemming from
the state’s wretched populist history.
Of course, he’s not the only one
among policy-makers who talks out of both sides of his mouth on these kinds of
issues, trying to convince audiences that they’re friends of taxpayers all the
while trying to sell them out in playing the populist game. And there are
plenty in the mass public as well who rail about too much government spending,
but as soon as they discover more efficient and effective government means
reducing or eliminating some government check they receive, suddenly they
embrace cognitive dissonance in defending the largesse they receive from
government.
It’s this segment of the mass
public that has punished Jindal’s popularity as these measures of his went
against the grain of that populist element in the state’s political culture.
Gingerly throughout his first term, but with gusto in the first half of his
second, Jindal and allies went about pulling up the roots of populism in a way
that many will wither, providing an estimable service to the state and its
citizens. But he paid the price in popularity.
Yet this year he almost
entirely reined in any such dramatic reform efforts; indeed, the only
really controversial issue on which he has indicated preference (even as he has
yet to provide much in the way of substantive assistance) is in support
of the populist impulse behind rejection of the Common Core State Standards.
His other efforts continue to be digested, and so it’s natural that the segment
of the population provoked by these transformations should drift back towards a
more mellow view of him.
If Jindal aims for a national
political career after finishing out his term next year, it’s unlikely he would
attempt anything else ambitious that runs counter to the populist impulse in
the state’s political culture as a means to keep an aura of popularity at home.
Continued governance in a style such as holding the line on taxes and with news
such as a record
number of jobs in the state with low unemployment levels over this period
will pay off with a steady increase in his public approval. This poll catches
the beginning of this trend where caution trumps boldness.
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