Landry win sets up political and redistricting intrigue

One of the more impressive open seat wins in the country came courtesy of Republican Rep.-elect Jeff Landry, capturing the Third House District of Louisiana previously held by defeated Senate candidate Democrat Charlie Melancon. Problematically for the state GOP, it also probably will be his last win there – but a win which may affect profoundly the state’s congressional redistricting.

The district appears to be the most likely casualty of upcoming redistricting, which kicks off next year, as in about a month results of the 2010 census almost certainly will show that Louisiana will lose a House seat. If so, the very election results that will send Landry to Washington reinforce the likelihood of him having a short stay.

As previously noted, if a district has to go, dynamics point to this one. Except for the Second which will swap a Democrat for a Republican, GOP members represent all others and got reelected. Even if they don’t have much seniority (from the Fifth, Rep. Rodney Alexander has the most starting his fifth term), they have some and especially now with Republicans becoming the House majority courtesy of about six dozen new GOP members getting elected, that seniority gets magnified as a resource. Thus, Republicans would loath to do a remapping that throws two of the reelected Republicans into a district.

And Republicans largely will control the process in Louisiana. With a Republican governor and effective GOP control of the House of Representatives, only their Senate minority would stand in the way. But this should not be a problem given another dynamic of the process, the desire to keep a majority-black Second. Constitutionally, it would be impossible not to have one such district in a state where black population will be almost 30 percent and has a concentration in New Orleans. Black legislators will seek to bulk up this district as much as possible with black voters to forestall any chance of a repeat of the unusual circumstances that put outgoing Rep. Anh “Joseph” Cao into that seat the past two years. This most reasonably, on the criteria of compactness and contiguity, can be accomplished only by dismantling the Third. New Orleans-area black senators will cooperate with Republicans on this.

So this leaves Landry out in the cold. Assuming he keeps New Iberia as his residence, he likely would find his residence under redistricting in the (for now named) Seventh District of the only member of the state delegation who did not face any opponent for reelection, Rep. Charles Boustany. It’s not a contest that he would like, would draw much Republican support for, or he could win, and the same would be true regardless of which incumbent’s district in which his residence would be placed. Obviously the only non-Republican he could run against would be in the Second, but there is no geographical way to get his residence into it through any Constitutional kind of redistricting. And why do so, anyway: even if he moved to the very northeastern portion of it and hoped to get redistricted into the new Second, he still would have practically no chance of winning that presumably majority black district.

What to do, then, with a promising political career? He could step back to state legislative office, but elections for them will already have occurred and he would have to cool his heels for three years for a chance at that. But another alternative exists where he immediately could retain federal office, or at the most wait two years.

Landry could try to groom himself for taking on the Senate seat currently held by Democrat Mary Landrieu in 2014. This may not be the best alternative not so much because he’ll have had so little elective office experience and have sat out two years (although that gives him plenty of time to campaign) but because probably at least one much more experienced Republican in statewide office may wish to go for the office. Incoming Lieutenant Gov. Jay Dardenne has talked of it, but with his new job he now may be aiming more towards the Governor’s Mansion after an expected Gov. Bobby Jindal second term expiration or early departure. Treasurer John Kennedy has run unsuccessfully twice for it, so he may also have shifted his focus to the Capitol’s fourth floor offices. Drawing guys like these as an opponent will make for an uphill battle for Landry.

But Landry’s best options for continuing in a federal office might be if Boustany, or the representative in the other district likely to swallow up the northwestern part of the Third, the Sixth’s Rep. Bill Cassidy, decides to go for the Senate in 2014. Redistricting could be done, and maybe a Landry residential change if needed, so that he would end up in the district of whichever one (maybe both) wants to vie for the seat. Then Landry could try for a lateral move, although no doubt other politicians with potentially better starting bases in the new district would present a challenge.

Thus, it’ll be interesting to see how redistricting gets shaped around the political ambitions of a few Republican congressmen. Unless the GOP feels like wasting their new asset and Landry accepts an abbreviated House career, some interesting machinations may be on the way.

Political careers wax, wane, or vanish in LA elections

As of tonight’s results in Louisiana, one political career got a permanent boost, another was thrown into question, and a third likely ended too soon.

Commentators were too quick to dismiss Republican Sen. David Vitter’s career when in July, 2007 he admitted to commission of a “serious sin” believed related to interacting with a prostitution ring. Thereafter, he essentially refused to speak of the situation and when the campaign came for his reelection he focused on issues compared to his opponents and fought back with assertions of their foibles. Dictating the terms of the campaign, he won convincingly.

Because his opponents relentlessly tried to remind voters of the admission and to build a case connecting other actions of his to make Vitter appear untrustworthy and generally immoral and failed spectacularly in the minds of voters, his margin of victory especially means Vitter now has become inoculated from these charges. Louisiana Democrats must be particularly galled that the result has removed this presumed issue from the field of play (unless Vitter propagates a future scandal) for 2016 or beyond if Vitter wants to continue serving as senator. This job he has locked down for life, barring some ethical slipup.

The defeat of newcomer to running for office Caroline Fayard for lieutenant governor probably means that her meteoric rise has passed its apogee. Running against an experienced politician, Sec. of State Jay Dardenne whose past centrist record aggravated some conservatives and probably led some to pass on this race, she had the opportunity to present herself as a blank slate for a do-little office that has no issue content during an election where anti-Washington/big government sentiment could spill over against an opponent like Dardenne, and had poured in maximal resources (perhaps with illegalities committed by state Democrats’ PAC in reporting) in an all-or-nothing effort that came up short.

This creates a problem for her going forward, because after this campaign, she no longer can claim to be a political outsider. Further, she is unlikely to get such an ideal candidate in an ideal environment that got her as close as a very liberal Democrat can get to winning statewide office. And should she run for any other statewide office, issues will be more important and, unless she executes a total sea change in her attitudes in a way that seems genuine to voters, she is on the wrong side of those issues for the majority of the public and will be distrusted if she persists in trying to pass herself off as more less liberal as her previous political activity suggests. In short, she probably never will have such a strong opportunity to win that kind of office and the brief phenomenon of her political popularity may be over.

Fayard might have political life left in her even if this was her best shot, but one incumbent who certainly does not despite good conditions is Anh “Joseph” Cao who did about all he could to hold onto his seat in Congressional District 2 that is 66 percent Democrat and 61 percent black registration. His faced an uneven black Democrat opponent, got plenty of money to deploy, performed great constituent service in his two years in office, and made some votes unusual for a Republican but which could put him in good stead with a district of its demographics. Even the rainy weather in the district, which folklore insists is an advantage for Republicans outside of rural areas, may have helped.

It’s possible that Cao may have a shot at the state-level seat for which he tried in 2007 but he may well exit electoral politics entirely. That’s a loss for those who value integrity in politics.

If not transformative, Jindal strategy still beneficial

While the strength of political columnist John Maginnis’ efforts typically comes from his reporting of insider news about Louisiana politics, sometimes he makes a keen, trenchant observation at a deeper level of analysis. He gives us such a gem that deserves further exploration concerning Gov. Bobby Jindal’s governing philosophy.

As Jindal’s statements, backed by his actions for the most part demonstrate, he is a conservative reformer in a state where the two often go hand-in-hand but seldom are genuinely pursued. Decades ago, “reform” meant getting corruption out of state politics, but recently it has come to mean additionally removing populist tendencies from state governance to focus more on service and efficiency than seeing it as a font of pork and employment opportunities. This has dovetailed with conservatism’s emphasis on smaller government and allowing people to keep more of their own resources.

As such, Jindal has been the first and only true conservative to govern Louisiana. The other two elected and one converted GOP governors of the post-Reconstruction era, Dave Treen, Buddy Roemer, and Mike Foster, presided over large expansions of Louisiana government and stumped for tax increases. Jindal neither has increased taxes (and not even any significant fees, reversing himself the one time it was tried) nor has he been at the helm of a large expansion of state spending (technically, state spending has gone down while he’s been in office but that was an artifact of disaster recovery money coming in from the federal government.) Jindal also can point to his support of income tax cuts, promises that he will not raise taxes, a state government continuing to decline in size both in terms of dollars spent and personnel employed, and a willingness to cut unneeded spending of state dollars on such things as earmarks.

But when we look closer at his record, all sorts of conditions begin popping up. He did indeed stump for income tax cuts (as well as speed up some smaller business tax cuts) and signed them into law – after remaining silent on the issue much of the time as they wended their way through the Legislature and then finally hopping on board. Maybe state spending now is going down under his watch – but that’s largely conditioned by broad national economic forces that is punishing the state’s revenue picture and, adjusting for recovery dollar effects, the budget would have crept upwards, although at a slower level than his predecessors but upwards nonetheless, without this overwhelming exogenous imperative. He did initiate efforts to reduce employment in state government – but state money applies to only about half of the classified service in the state with rest largely out of his control. He did veto hundreds of legislators’ line items steering money to local and nongovernment concerns – although some others have been allowed to continue and Jindal allows his own forms of corporate welfare that hand out substantial dollars.

This record has induced some buyers’ remorse among some conservatives who supported Jindal, presumably because they believed that Jindal would come in and produce a combination of aggressive tax cutting, reduction in state spending and overall size of government without trying to bribe companies to locate in the state, and decisive halting of pork barrel practices. Having in sum total only incompletely, and by some appearances less than enthusiastically, pursued these goals, Jindal to some comes across disappointingly or, to the particularly stubborn among them, as disingenuous.

In conceptualizing this kaleidoscopic record, Maginnis, in a discussion of more specific and recent matters, hits upon a perceptive summary of it: “whether he'll be known as a transformative governor, an incremental reformer – which is not bad – or just another can kicker.” In reviewing the kinds of changes he has succeeded in and has striven for, which of these categories best describes him becomes clear.

About the first thing Jindal went after upon getting into office was ethics reform. It was good, solid change for the better both in defining ethical practices and in their enforcement – but it could have gone further and been better. Jindal also has tried to eke better performance out of the state’s classified civil service and its higher and elementary and secondary education systems, for which the returns are not yet in. More tinkering, largely successfully, to produce better service delivery spending less money has come in the areas of workforce development and health care, featuring themes of scaling back direct government involvement. General overall reductions in state spending also have come at the margins.

Across the broad spectrum of Jindal’s initiatives, a theme emerges: Jindal prefers to downsize government, thus making it lives within its means and opening the possibility of reducing its bite on the citizenry, by having entities outside of government do something where they can do it better, and where that is not possible to try to make government work better, with occasional outright elimination of certain, relatively low-impact, functions. So far it has turned out to be a cautious, but effective strategy.

We can speculate endlessly why Jindal seems to prefer this mode of governance. He’s always been interested in policy implementation, he’s uncomfortable with big battles and grand gestures, it’s the least risky strategy to position himself for future national office, extant political forces prevent anything but this strategy, any or all of these and even other motivations may explain how he governs. Regardless, we must recognize that it does signal a significant departure from Louisiana government’s economically liberal, populist past.

Perhaps while Jindal’s campaigning and governing rhetoric leads one to believe he’ll be a transformative governor, he is certainly an incremental reformer who quietly and with a minimum of drama that, as it continues to accumulate, has produced a significant change in the state’s governing philosophy. And should he keep it up, that’s not bad.

Politics must take back seat to deal with budget reform

Eyebrows of political watchers rose when they caught on to the link that had popped up a week earlier on the front page of Louisiana’s Division of Administration web site, which broadly addressed budgetary concerns but also threw cold water on some of Treasurer John Kennedy’s suggestions for cutting the state’s budget.

For months, Kennedy has been stumping for this set of ideas which he says would save over $2 billion annually compared to the present for the state within three years, gestated from his service on the Commission on Streamlining Government. Some are good, such as establishing larger spans of control where possible in state government, or change state law to nonemergency emergency room visits by those on Medicaid.

But others, some of which already were noted long before the state’s executive branch addressed them, are already being implemented, will do far less than Kennedy advertises, or fail to accurately address the actual situation. For example, the idea to placing greater emphasis on enforcing true necessity for Medicaid hospitalization already is racking up savings, the recommended LaHIPP program implementation cannot possibly reach the savings levels Kennedy asserts, and the tactic to eliminate 5,000 positions as they come open each year, given the distribution of where vacancies occur, would cause some critical shortages in some areas and would tend to impact disproportionately lower-level jobs that would end up working at cross-purposes with the genuine need to reduce span of control.

Kennedy seemed nonplussed at the emergence of this document and disinclined to defend thoughtfully the policy recipes of the ones critiqued by the DOA. He is going to meet with Commissioner of Administration Paul Rainwater this week to discuss his list. Rainwater’s comments showed a slight annoyance at the publicity Kennedy’s plan has received, in no small part because Kennedy actively has plumped for the plan all across the state through interviews and speaking engagements, with Rainwater claiming he never bothered to coordinate with DOA on the ideas.

No doubt politics explains some of the pique for both parties. On some of the good ideas from the list, the DOA and its boss Gov. Bobby Jindal have been slow to act or to make the wider public aware they have been implemented while Kennedy grabs credit for them. For his part, Kennedy appears to have overstated the value of his package, possibly to score political points as he runs neck-and-neck with Sec. of State Jay Dardenne (and maybe Jindal) as the most progressively ambitious politician in the state; regardless of the merits of the ideas, one gets the sense that Kennedy is as interested in raising his political profile for a future bid for higher office as he is in trying to save the state some money.

That a summit needs calling at all illustrates the perils of multiple, independent executives in a state. In trying to deal with budget difficulties in the short run and to bring about more efficient government in the long run, getting both Jindal and Kennedy on the same page will provide for more energy in accomplishing these objectives with less wasted on trying to claim political credit.

Vitter success signals further loss of media influence

In his quest for reelection, Sen. David Vitter took a page from the Gov. Bobby Jindal playbook, the wisdom of which was demonstrated yet again in last night’s only widely-televised, major-party only forum between just the Republican and his Democrat challenger Rep. Charlie Melancon.

When nearly 3½ years ago Vitter found it politically necessary to admit publicly to a “serious sin,” believed related to a prostitution ring, he knew it could wreck his political career unless he could persuade a majority of the voting public to view the situation as a temporary deviation from the past which he now genuinely regretted and would not repeat, relying on the people’s approval of his record and issue preferences and their willingness to empathize with the battle to overcome sin. His problem was that this interpretation was threatened to be swamped by political opponents who would fixate only on the incident, aided and abetted by media channels knowing scandal draws consumers, or who disliked Vitter, or both.

His fellow Republican Jindal to a degree at that time was following a similar strategy during his run for the governorship. Jindal’s campaign knew the state’s media as a whole did not want to see a conservative like him elected to office so the organization put a lot of effort into direct communication with voters instead of passively relying on the media to relay fairly his issue preferences and assessments about him as politician. It paid off with Jindal’s election a few months later and served as a template for Vitter’s damage control.

Thus, Vitter’s campaign concentrated on raising much money, having won the backing of enough supporters who would forgive his behavior and respond to what they saw as a sincere repentance and agreed with his issue preferences and record in office. This enabled him to buy enough communication channeling to get out his broader message. At the same time, it allowed him to ignore in large part the media news sector since with these resources he did not have to depend on it with fidelity to allow his message out, much less shill for him as it might do for some other candidates. So, Vitter got out of the business of giving interviews and became very selective in answering questions in impromptu sessions, thinking otherwise the media comparatively would mention little of his story and concentrate on its own presumably different narrative, shared by his opponents.

Next week, it looks to pay off for Vitter and we are none the worse for it. Because Vitter said little directly to the media since his revelation has done nothing to reduce the onslaught of information we have about him, his record, and his policies, from him and his detractors. His office still cranked out press releases, his remarks in the Senate and in committee were reported here and there, and he met with constituents and had “town hall” meetings over the phone (although randomness in selection of those to participate in these meetings was not a criterion), providing plenty of information dissemination. Oddly unreported by the media was that his opponent Melancon did exactly the same things for months during and after the debate over health care legislation that he facilitated, and Melancon spent millions trying to create his own narrative about Vitter full of character assassination and distortion, so it cannot be said, with all of this and what appeared as news in the media, that Vitter’s strategy deprived voters of any necessary information about the campaign.

But, as identified right from the time Vitter spoke up, it did deprive the media of the two things they want more badly than anything else, data by which to shape stories and maintaining the perception that they are relevant. You must understand that it’s not just that the media dislike this strategy, it offends them, the suggestion that they cannot get information they seek for their own purposes and that they don’t matter. This is why to many in the media it’s not that they only dislike Vitter’s issue preferences but that they also have personal grudges against him because he is denying them what they think is rightfully theirs. Vitter knows this, and knows therefore they won’t go out of their way to disseminate his campaign message at the expense of their different narrative.

Reporting of last night’s debate confirms Vitter’s assessment. For example, one report about Vitter’s criticism of the spending bill in early 2009 that Melancon supported noted “Vitter said the stimulus, which financed infrastructure projects, cut taxes for 95 percent of taxpayers and provided aid to state governments, a failure that has not lived up to its promise of creating jobs or ‘saving’ existing ones.” Two statements in that characterization were false yet were presented as fact.

First, there was only a one-time tax rebate in the bill, not any permanent tax cut as is implied. And if the reporter had anything more than surface knowledge about the issue or enough initiative to understand the issue further, she would have known that tax rebates are almost totally ineffective in providing any kind of economic stimulus. Second, the article implies that a significant portion of the $862 billion in the spending bill went to infrastructure. In fact, almost none of it did, less than one percent while almost all spending in it ended up as transfer payments. Again, a more knowledgeable and/or less lazy reporter would have known these things and not merely parroted the common refrain repeated in the newsroom.

Nor did this report accurately describe Melancon’s actions. Concerning spending restraint, it noted “Melancon cited his support for congressional "pay-go" rules that say any new tax cut or spending proposal has to be offset by a corresponding cut elsewhere,” without ever revealing that many Democrats including Melancon routinely violated PAYGO in the past four years to allow favored spending by them, including for the spending bill and that it’s a sham in any event because so much spending is not covered by it.

Not all coverage of Vitter’s campaign has been so shoddy (this article provides a more balanced approach to the same debate) but it does validate Vitter’s suspicion that his message would receive short shrift in the traditional media and vindicates his strategy. And the success he will enjoy only will encourage future politicians, aided by ever-evolving technology that makes this easier to accomplish, to concentrate further on direct outreach to the citizenry at the expense of the news media which will aggravate those in it further as they realize the influence they believe is ordained to be theirs over politics continues to erode.

Sangisetty ignorance, liberal fealty dooms his chances

While Rep. Charlie Melancon has run a campaign for Senate full of character assassination and distortion of his opponent and his record with little mention of current and significant issues, and state Rep. Cedric Richmond mostly has tried to draw sharp distinctions in issue preferences between himself and his opponent for the House Second District spot, political newcomer/dilettante Ravi Sangisetty has tried something in between. But it’s still leading him into electoral disaster.

Like the others a Democrat, Sangisetty is trying to keep Melancon’s present seat in the hands of the party but has run up against the salient fact of the 2010 election cycle: national Democrats in power in the past two years overreached with a very liberal agenda in a conservative country, highlighting the internal contradictions of liberalism and how it poorly matches to reality compared to conservatism, thereby presenting in stark relief to voters the invalidity of the ideas associated with Democrats. As such, he is considered a heavy underdog against Republican Jeff Landry.

While Melancon badly trails, and Richmond nurses a small lead, Sangisetty falls somewhere in between. Like Melancon’s approach in his race, he has tried a strategy trying to smear Landry with distorted personal attacks that has no basis in reality. But he also has tried to appropriate the label of a “conservative Democrat,” trying to stress on social issues that he appears as conservative as does Landry. He even claims he won't support the current Democrat leadership for Speaker of the House. One wonders why he didn't just run in the GOP primary that Landry won, with rhetoric like this, but that would be incompatible with his fiscal liberalism.

As such, he’s attempted to undo the damage of his association with the party leading the country into increasing debt and slower economic growth by accusing Landry of wanting to disrupt the defined benefit pension plan Social Security to make it less secure – despite the fact that the presumed insurance plan takes in less than it pays out and will run out of money (that already is a debt obligation of the federal government) in less than 30 years to pay for benefits. Landry wants to allow voluntary privatization of a sort. Yet, here again, Sangisetty can’t avoid the cost of liberalism.

Democrats resist ideas Landry likes such as allowing workers to use Social Security payments in defined contributions plans like individual retirement accounts (such as is done in Chile and other countries and in some U.S. states), or even to invest a small amount of proceeds in other than government accounts because ultimately they want to control the funds. It allows for more government jobs to be created, more taxpayer dollars to be spent, greater sums that can be dealt with (such as lending it to government itself), and, generally, this retains greater control over the people. It comports to their philosophy that government runs knows best how to manage people’s resources, especially when Democrats are in charge.

Which historical study and empirical analysis decisively refutes, as a recent analysis specifically on this issue corroborates. Researchers noted that had a working couple now reaching retirement age whose jobs tracked the median income at the beginning of their working lives had invested the same amounts of their Social Security payments 90 percent in large capitalization equities and 10 percent in small capitalization equities (considered a risky strategy), even in retiring the year after the worst stock market 10-year performance since 1926 they would still have beaten the return on which their Social Security payouts would have been based by 75 percent. If they then shifted it all into a conservative investment portfolio, the payout rate they would enjoy would be twice that of Social Security’s (and keep in mind that on a sum 75 percent larger).

So when Sangisetty echoes Pres. Barack Obama that Landry “wants to give Social Security over to the very Wall Street gamblers that have gotten us into this economic mess,” he’s just showing his ignorance about the concepts Landry rightly and astutely promotes. Despite all his efforts to try to escape the fact, Sangisetty just mouths failed bromides that a majority of the district’s residents have had ample opportunity to see through by his party’s performance in office over the past two years. It’s why his political career will be short, ending this Tuesday, and not be sweet.

Richmond numbers assertion shows lack of confidence

You might have thought it was isolated to the Rep. Charlie Melancon candidacy, but now it appears at least one other Democrat challenger in Louisiana has decided to use the same playbook – float unreliable poll numbers in an effort to boost their campaigns for different reasons.

Melancon has made it a habit throughout, his latest effort being to trumpet another poll by for-hire-by-Democrats-only Anzalone-Liszt that had him down only by three points to incumbent Republican Sen. David Vitter, despite every single independent poll, and almost every poll, for more than a year during the campaign showing Vitter with double-digit leads. (There are a number of ways a poll can be skewed for a client, such as by leading questions to “push” a respondent in a certain direction or by manipulating the weighings by demographic characteristics in a direction favorable to the client.)

But reality reared its head again as pollster Magellan Strategies, one that usually works for Republicans, confirmed yet again that Vitter held a huge lead, 17 points. Further, it provided internal numbers to show it pulled a representative sample and there is no indication it asked leading questions – information not provided for the poll on behalf of Melancon. It also was consistent with the latest, if a bit aged, independent polling. As typically there has been at least a 10 point gap between Democrat-leaning polls and independent ones, Melancon probably is actually down 10-15 points.

However, now Democrat state Rep. Cedric Richmond, challenging incumbent Republican Rep. Anh “Joseph” Cao, seems to have gone to the same page Melancon studies. His campaign has released poll results by the same firm asserting that he has a 17-point lead. Using the same metric for the Senate that this adds a 14-point bump to the actual Democrat totals, Richmond may be hanging on to only a three point lead over Cao.

Melancon’s motivation for his publicizing the questionable results has been long clear – he didn’t want an impression that the race has been over for some time that would discourage support of him. Yet Richmond has been considered the favorite since he won the party nomination, so his need to circulate these numbers means he continues to feel pressure, perhaps even sensing an erosion of his position with the intent being to try to head off an oncoming collapse. Consider that if Richmond truly felt confident about his position, there would be no need to do this as whatever he was doing without this out there was working and need not be tampered with.

In short, that Richmond took this path indicates Cao is hanging in there close to him. Richmond still is the favorite, but a really big wave that appears to be building in the GOP’s favor could do what only months ago seemed impossible, reelect Cao.

LA policy-makers complain, don't lead on fiscal issues

When Gov. Bobby Jindal accused some state officials last week of preferring whining over leading, he hit on a major reason why the state has come to a perilous fiscal point.

Louisiana state government, as a whole, is just flat-out inefficient at what it does. Worse, we know many of the reasons why and continue to let them happen. When state Treasurer John Kennedy points out that, in per capita terms, Louisiana has almost twice as many state employees than the national average, or that the span of control of supervisors is almost half the average, he points out symptoms of specific problems that can be rectified.

Higher education in Louisiana in real terms has seen a less than five percent reduction over the past three years, yet as of last year was in the top ten states in per capita spending and in the bottom ten of graduation rates. It operates with too many schools and governing boards when other states do with far fewer of each. State-provided health care pays for too many procedures and for too many not really needed because of lack of coordination and patient responsibility. It also has a sprawling, duplicative structure of charity hospitals and parish health units that could be handled easily by the private sector for reduced costs with likely better outcomes. The same goes for care facilities for the developmentally disabled. Nursing homes get sweetheart deals with taxpayer funds. And these are just the big ticket items in the state’s general fund.

The existing fiscal structure is all wrong. It pumps money to certain places without any ability to create priorities, exacerbating the monetary difficulties in the big ticket problem areas funded through the general fund. Finally, its tax structure is not broad enough and thereby discourages economic development.

LA Democrats can't see Vitter wins because of issues

Republican Sen. David Vitter is about to get reelected to office, and Democrat activists from their standard-bearer in this contest Rep. Charlie Melancon on down are too closed-minded to understand why it’s going to happen. Let me assist them, beginning with the words I wrote (after detailing why Vitter should not resign) posted Jul. 11, 2007, right after Vitter made acknowledgement of commission of an unspecified “serious” sin:

… any punishment for Vitter would have to come from the ballot box. And the public in other instances has shown that, as long as he votes the way they want (he does for a majority in the state) and for the best public policy (his conservative voting record affirms that) that’s where they hold their real trust in him …. Three years provides much time for Vitter to continue to perform in this way to shore up any support which now may be flagging, as long as it is not demonstrated that his past misdeeds went beyond infidelity and that his repentance is sincere (meaning the behavior did stop some time ago). At this point, Vitter would be highly unlikely to leave office early, and must be considered the favorite win to reelection in 2010.

It’s reported that Democrats seem perplexed why Vitter will defeat, probably blowing out by double-digits, Melancon. They blame the state’s media for not being “aggressive” enough about reporting the scandal (Vitter’s phone number appearing on a list of calls to an operation of a woman accused of running a prostitution ring as his subsequent – a view representing a wholesale flight from reality. As I noted previously, a year after his statement, in the previous six months no fewer than 128 mentions were made of the incident in the largest Louisiana newspapers or in wire stories – over two every three days. It hasn’t really abated, either – 89 such references have been made in the previous six months from today, one every other day during the height of the campaign season.

Melancon claims it’s “partisan” politics; “Some people, because he is a Republican, because he isn’t a Democrat, because of what, I don’t know,” have decided the scandal is not an issue, Melancon said. Well, let me clue in this dunderhead, who finally makes sense when he admits it’s because of “what, I don’t know.” OK, here is that “don’t know” you and so many other Democrat operatives have been looking for: it’s the issues, stupid.

What I wrote over three years ago came to pass. Vitter has faithfully captured what the majority of Louisianans want, advocating a conservative agenda the superiority of which has been magnified by the inadequacy of liberalism when translated into policy over the past 21 months, of which Melancon has been a willing and unrepentant supporter. Historically, Louisiana voters have been more willing to concentrate on issues than personalities when they are aware or perceive that their issue preferences have been met.

In days gone by, it was more perception. Liberal populists like Melancon’s one-time boss Prisoner # 03128-095 (better known as former Gov. Edwin Edwards) would create the perception they were doing good by giving away stuff which worked when Louisianans typically were much less educated than now and information sources were far fewer. Thinking they were getting good policy, voters responded by putting the likes of these characters into office despite their ethical shortcomings in their personal lives.

Today, the Louisiana electorate has a greater ability to understand when the issue preferences of the majority are and are not being addressed by candidates. Vitter has done that to its liking, Melancon has not. And Vitter has pulled this off despite the image he has for being the exact opposite of the typical Louisiana politician which enables them to charm voters into casting for them despite having issue preferences that differ from the majority of their constituents.

In a conservative state, the majority favors conservative politicians who deliver. The only apparent reason why Melancon and his ilk can’t see this is sour grapes born of an out-of-touch, blind arrogance where they will blame every other facet for their defeat except the truth: not only are their ideas wrong intellectually, they are wrong for the Louisiana electorate as a whole.

Dilettantes Fayard, Sangisetty try to fool LA voters

As Democrat candidate for lieutenant governor Caroline Fayard has tried so hard to craft an image of being an ordinary Jane concerned enough to take on the political establishment, revelations about her spotty voting history has become perhaps the biggest chink of the several in that armor, joining Third Congressional District Democrat candidate Ravi Sangisetty damaged for the same reason.

Days ago it was revealed that Sangisetty had never voted in his life for federal office. This weekend, the presumed “establishment” candidate opposing Fayard, Republican Sec. of State Jay Dardenne, asked her in a debate why she had missed votes at least half the time (Dardenne, as one might imagine having been state senator and in his present position, appears to have voted in every election for over a decade.)

Even though Sangisetty never has voted in a federal election, he gave the maximum $4,600 to U.S. Sec. of State Hillary Clinton’s failed presidential campaign in 2008 – which makes very questionable his credibility of his excuse why he didn’t vote, that his voice “didn’t matter.” So he doesn’t think voting matters, but giving money does? What does this tell us about him relative a job he wants where the most consequential thing you do is vote – and one where the receiving of money sometimes corrupts?