The “Hail Mary” to try to burnish
embattled Democrat Sen. Mary Landrieu’s
office-holding credentials came earlier this month. Now has come the “Hail Mary”
that seeks to damage the front-running opponent to unseat her Republican Rep. Bill Cassidy – and neither will get the
job done,
Polling
shows Landrieu trailing badly in the runoff phase of her reelection
attempt, after disappointing electoral returns in the general election.
Immediately after Nov. 4, where she barely led Cassidy but came up way short of
a majority mainly because of the presence of candidate Republican Rob Maness,
she tried to shore up a main support to her campaign narrative, that being allegedly
her effectiveness and indispensability
to the state, by trying to get through the Senate a bill to override Pres. Barack Obama’s
objection to the extension of the Keystone XL pipeline. That effort
failed by one vote, so the spin there became that at least she had gotten
it to a vote after years of obstruction by Senate Democrats.
The next phase in the operation was
to find a way to impugn Cassidy. To wit, right before Thanksgiving, ostensibly separate
accounts essentially simultaneously hit the Internet about how Cassidy, who
worked on a contractual basis with the Louisiana State University Medical
Center in Baton Rouge while as a Member of Congress, had seeming
inconsistencies in his performance to fulfill it. Basically it was argued
that he had shortchanged the school about an hour-and-a-half a week in that
salary.
If we seek to understand the
political behavior in and political culture in Louisiana, we must interpret
correctly what the capstone 2014 elections signal in regards to electoral
preferences in the state. Incomplete,
if not erroneous, attempts to do so fail to accomplish this.
It’s not that 2014’s results, which
will culminate in the dumping of the last statewide elected Democrat likely for
some time, represent some kind of sea change. Rather, they stand as marker of
the completion of a process that began some decades ago. As previously
noted, Louisiana’s political culture has changed significantly in this time
period as in-migration brought a competing political culture, educational
delivery improved substantially that increased the cognitive capacity of the
public as a whole by which to evaluate politics, and informational channels
exponentially enlarged, freeing citizens from overreliance on established elites
such as politicians, political organizations, and the traditional media for
knowledge about politics.
These forces have transformed the
political culture into what the instrument that symbolizes that the tipping
point has passed, Rep. Bill Cassidy,
calls the “post-pork”
paradigm of Louisiana politics. To expand on this, that means that a critical
mass of voters have formed that place issue evaluation before candidate image
and (what actually happened long ago for many people calling themselves
Democrats) partisanship. For national contests now, a controlling bloc of
Louisiana voters now are enabled to understand policy implications emanating
from issues important to their well-being, to know with accuracy candidates’
preferences and actions relative to those issues, and to relate the two.
The next step in state Rep. Joe Harrison’s
war on efficiency in state government may end up backfiring in becoming the
impetus to more efficient government in the area of elderly affairs policy.
For the past few years, Harrison
has tried to birth an entire new bureaucracy in this area, commencing when the
Gov. Bobby
Jindal Administration sought to fold oversight of all elderly affairs
matters into the Department of Health and Hospitals. This would have threatened
the absurdly decentralized system that empowers and directs money to local nonprofit
agencies, one in each parish, known as Councils on Aging. Federal law has
states designate Area Agencies on Aging to disburse federal dollars, overseen
by a designated state agency, in Louisiana’s case the Governor’s Office of
Elderly Affairs.
GOEA’s functions would have been
subsumed by DHH, but resistance from COAs, where Harrison became their legislative
point man, resulted
only in a partial transfer. Unlike other states, most of which create a
dozen or two AAAs as implementers, in Louisiana half of all AAAs are COAs, with
four others acting as umbrella organizations directing the other half. This
creates much inefficiency in administration, with many functions duplicated and
lack of standardization of processes and procedures that falls to GOEA to
coordinate. Worse, it gives COAs as a whole outsized influence in this policy
area with little incentive to induce efficiency as that would scale back their
individual authority and budgets.
Once again, budget adjustments
towards the middle of Louisiana’s fiscal year have had to be made, illustrating
a particularly problematic part of the state’s fiscal structure that hampers
ability to budget accurately and to capture revenues efficiently without
hampering economic growth.
The Gov. Bobby
Jindal Administration announced
it wrung cost savings of around $50 million from government operations, involving
noncritical services and mostly from a spending freeze, vacant job
eliminations, and contract curtailment, of which about five-eighths must be
approved by the Joint Legislative Committee
on the Budget, and cobbled together about $130 million more revenues to
close the gap of $181 million. Of the revenues, about $24 million comes from a
funds sweep, around $74 million from underestimating revenues dedicated to
other purposes that could be repackaged into the general fund, and the
remainder was bonus tax amnesty receipts. None of the revenues found can be
counted upon to show up in the future.
The sixth of these in seven years
begs a few questions, starting with why the powers that be involved in revenue
determination, essentially the staffs of both the Governor’s Office and Legislature Fiscal Office, seem to miss on
revenue projections. In fact, from the first budget over which Jindal had
control, fiscal year 2009, through the last fiscal year for which data are
complete, FY 2013, the average overestimation was about $375 million – and FY
2009 actually turned out to be underestimation of about that magnitude, meaning
successive years had much higher overestimations. And in reality the
estimations usually are pretty good on the general fund side, which is mostly
income and sales taxes, where over the FY 2009-13 period all but one year had
forecasts barely under the actual results, that being FY 2010 when the forecast
overshot the actual by nearly $1 billion.
Louisiana’s Sec. of State Tom
Schedler seems all out of whack about a constitutional exercise, for
reasons that don’t appear obvious or even fathomable, as the first phase of the
state’s fall elections has come to a close with the remainder in full swing.
Over the past few weeks, not only
in Louisiana but in many places across the country, the group Americans for Prosperity, a
social welfare organization best known for gaining vigorous support from industrialists
David and Charles Koch, whom the political left demonizes as the Svengalis of
American politics, has been sending out postcards to some registered voters. In
Louisiana, they appear to take the form of indicating whether the voter has
voted in the past two national elections, while in other
states reports are these also may include neighbors’ voting frequencies.
