Despite electoral result, Maness political future dim

Defeated Republican Senate candidate Rob Maness apparently on his terms endorsed Rep. Bill Cassidy for that office. Which leads to the question of whether he really got anything politically out of that as it relates to any elective future he might have.

Despite almost immediately after it became clear that he would not advance to the Dec. 6 runoff that will feature Republican Cassidy and Democrat incumbent Sen. Mary Landrieu he said he would endorse Cassidy in short order, it was not until six days later that Maness actually did so. Whether he held out the endorsement in exchange for being given a prominent place at or even putting on a “unity” event where he delivered it is unknown. However, that he did not endorse immediately suggests some kind of bargaining went on.

That was a wasting asset of sorts for Maness if he expected to have any future political career, for the longer he held out, the more Republicans would suspect his interests in running for office has little to do with party-building and assisting with implementation of the Republican agenda. The more quickly he bestowed his imprimatur, the more favorably the majority of Republican activists who doubted his commitment to the party’s fielding winning candidates – after all, his presence in this one cost Cassidy an outright win – would come around to embracing him as a future stalwart in office-seeking endeavors, if not becoming a part of the state GOP’s activist network.

UNO political science Ph.D. program worth keeping

We interrupt an important election season and therefore also a steadily-building backlog of local and state policy issues that deserve (and will get) discussion to bring you what may seem trivial to many, but which is near and dear to my heart: the University of New Orleans looks to want to move forward with the elimination of its doctoral degree in political science. On the whole, there are better alternatives that should be pursued.

It’s hard to blame UNO, battered as it has been by the aftermath of the hurricane disaster of 2005. Not only the considerable physical damage done to the campus that prevented holding traditionally-delivered classes for months and cost so much to repair that siphons money still, but also and worse were the demographic changes that sapped enrollment. UNO was designed explicitly to serve as an urban university geared towards non-traditional students, and when that market became somewhat hollowed by the disaster, enrollment tumbled and today is barely half of where it was a decade ago, exacerbated by the ongoing effort to right-size the overbuilt higher education sector in Louisiana, which shifted more revenue-raising to tuition rather than from taxpayers, making enrollment an even bigger factor in funding.

As a result, the school engaged in a self-study to determine which programs to retain or to restructure in order to bring costs more in line with identifiable revenue generating activities. That report has been issued, with the president Peter Fos to deliver the final recommendations to the University of Louisiana System in December. A couple of dozen programs are recommended to be reconfigured, and a few eliminated.

McAllister leaves as he represented, with buffoonery

Thus ends ignominiously Louisiana’s Fifth Congressional District’s year-long infatuation with Rep. Vance McAllister, although he parted company with his constituents through one more demonstration of the insufferable ego that was his downfall.

In remarks given after it was painfully clear he would not return to Congress, finishing a distant fourth last week in his reelection bid behind Monroe Democrat Mayor Jamie Mayo and Republican Dr. Ralph Abraham, he immediately offered his services to both to instruct them in the ways of Washington, as well as to vet them in order to compete for his endorsement.

Which should carry about as much weight as North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un’s endorsement of the video game about his exploits “Glorious Leader.” If Abraham is not laughing at the hubris of the incumbent who carried 11 percent of the vote, this low total caused by his throwing away of a secure seat in getting caught playing tongue hockey with a married staffer not his wife and who then reneged on a promise not to run again, in saying Abraham should get his stamp of approval, Abraham should be guffawing at his advice that Washington was dysfunctional unless there were elected “real people with common sense.” Like the guy who as soon as he gets elected cheats on his wife, right?

Vote that removes Shreveporters' taxing discretion on tap

OK, the good news is Shreveport got through 15 ballot items in recent conducted election, including one that would have raised hotel and campground taxes by two percent of their value that got a richly-deserved rejection. The bad news is, a more serious and as unnecessary tax increase is coming up for deliberation in two years.

In this spring's legislative session, HB 1097 by state Rep. Barbara Norton originally would have made permanent by state law a quarter-cent sales and use tax that the city is allowed to charge above and beyond constitutional and statutory limits to the city’s rate. This tax hike initially came in 2003, when the city has concerns that it lacked resources to supplement funding for fire and police protection faced with a greater appreciation of threats from terrorism in the wake of the 9/11/2001 disasters. With no discussion the Shreveport City Council unanimously approved of a resolution supporting this bill.

R.S. 47:338.16 required that after the initial four-year period that it could be renewed by the citizenry for a period of six years, and thereafter for five-year terms. These renewals having occurred successfully and overwhelmingly twice (and in fact the city was so confident of the last election it appeared on the ballot less than a month prior to expiration), it’s now scheduled to expire at the end of 2017.

Maness endorsement drama shows lack of commitment

We are finding out whether Rob Maness ran for the U.S. Senate in Louisiana because he was in it for the sake of the state and country, as mediated by the conservative philosophy that he often articulated, or whether because he was in it first and foremost for himself.

Typically when a vanquished legislative candidate, such as Maness who drew votes from a respectable seventh of the electorate in the general election, is of the same party of a candidate who bested him courtesy of Louisiana’s blanket primary system and says he agrees with most every issue preference of that candidate, in this case of fellow Republican Rep. Bill Cassidy, an endorsement follows in short order. Initially, Maness indicated that would be the case. But as of three days after his defeat, none has been forthcoming.

If Maness were a noble conservative, there shouldn’t be any hesitation to endorse Cassidy who in office has a very solid conservative record while the incumbent Democrat Sen. Mary Landrieu’s is very liberal. For that very reason, many were perplexed when some 18 months ago in announcing his running for the Senate Maness, only recently had moved to the state and having laid zero groundwork in making connections to Republicans and conservatives in the state, proclaimed that the state’s people that he was a “genuine” if not “uncorrupted” by Washington conservative as opposed to Cassidy and therefore conservatives had to vote for him, when the record emphatically contradicted his caricature of Cassidy.

Skrmetta must step up to prevent takeover of PSC

Even as Democrats and liberals went into retreat nationally in elections earlier this week, including the disastrous showing of Louisiana’s Sen. Mary Landrieu, a liberal masquerading as a Republican could wrench away a moderate conservative majority on the Public Service Commission next month.

Almost as stunningly underwhelming as Landrieu’s performance Tuesday night was that of Republican District 1 Commissioner Eric Skrmetta, who actually trailed Forest Bradley Wright by a percentage point at only 37 percent. It never should have been that close, for Wright, who got routed two years ago in a different district running as a Democrat and has strong support from leftists in the environmental movement and the state’s solar industry and others with hands out for subsidies that the PSC can provide through its regulations, seems a poor match for a district that has trended more and more Republican and conservative.

But Wright cleverly ran as a Republican in a race that people usually are ill-informed about. He also spent almost as much money as Skrmetta, almost half of which came from identifiably solar energy interests. The irony there is that his campaign criticized Skrmetta from accepting donations from other energy concerns directly regulated by the PSC, which amounted to about a third of Skrmetta’s total haul over the past few years, while pledging not to take any, even though he has taken the lion’s share of money that he raised from concerns that directly benefit from PSC actions, even if they are not directly regulated. For example, the PSC has wrestled with the issue of net metering, whether it ought to make ratepayers without solar power subsidize those that have it. Skrmetta has opposed that, but Wright, who worked for alternative energy interests, would serve as a sure tool shilling for these interests if he replaced him.

Election disaster puts Landrieu career on life support

Such was the Republican wave Nov. 4 that, had one not known the date, upon hearing Democrat Sen. Mary Landrieu’s reflective, almost elegiac in content, remarks as the vote nearly had come in, one would have thought it was Dec. 6 and she was issuing a concession speech.

GOP gains nationally were on the high end of Congressional picks, including taking control of the Senate, and even the gubernatorial contests that they were expected to have small net losses turned out to be a net gain. It won’t be known for days, but hundreds of state legislative seats in net will turn over from Democrat to Republican as well.

The wave manifested itself in her contest for reelection by having her pull only 42 percent of the vote – a bare 16,000 votes ahead of her runoff competitor Republican Rep. Bill Cassidy with mid-major Republican candidate Rob Maness pulling over 200,000 votes. Only in Louisiana with its blanket primary system could an incumbent with such a terrible total against major party competition be in any contention to hold onto to the seat – as if. Those numbers alone make her a politically dead woman walking, yet it gets worse.

GOP complacency could prevent Landrieu ousting

With Louisiana’s Senate and Fifth and Sixth Congressional District contests likely unsettled this week, a past pairing of Senate and House runoff contests is instructive as to how these will proceed next month.

Because of the state’s blanket primary system, where all candidates regardless of party label run together with a runoff if necessary if no candidate secure half plus one of the vote, and federal law and court rulings that call the initial contest a general election, the runoff if needed must be done later in the year, in 2014 on Dec. 6. This creates an unusual situation when it occurs district- or statewide with few, if any, local contests scattered around, when almost all other races for national offices elsewhere in the country have been settled.

As a result, conventional wisdom holds that runoff turnout with few, if any, other candidates or issues on the ballot should decline. And reviewing the two instances of House election runoffs in Decembers of non-presidential election years (it wasn’t until 1998 that the state had to schedule them then, and 2010 was the brief period during the closed primary experiment for federal offices that didn’t require a runoff), in one instance turnout dropped by 30 percent, and in the other, the Fifth District contest of 2002, by 7 percent.

Filings show supporters, chances of Shreveport aspirants

With the filing of campaign finance reports for Shreveport’s mayoral candidates, it becomes clearer which factions have lined up behind what candidates in a contest that has jumbled typical alignments, and who will be competitive.

State Rep. Patrick Williams leads the way with money raised. He has presented himself as an outsider to current Shreveport city government, and even though he is a Democrat was able months ago to secure pledges of support from some prominent Republican activists and officeholders. His donor base matches the eclectic nature of his public endorsements.

On his September submission (which does not actually list him as running for mayor but for reelection, which allows him to charge expenses for that office, repeated on his October one,) are some of the usual suspects, such as nursing home and medical interests, black Democrat activists and officeholders, trial lawyers, unions, and leftist interest groups. But a couple of Republican officeholders appear as well as some GOP activists, and some local newspapermen. Perhaps most notably are remnants of the white Democrat power structure that last controlled city government under the aegis of former Mayor Keith Hightower.

Landrieu race card play signals all in to avoid runoff

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Democrat Sen. Mary Landrieu’s mushrooming desperation over retaining a spot in the Senate is that when she inevitably played the race card, she did not do so in its usual manner, off the bottom of the deck. Rather, she displayed it openly and proudly, as if she thought this was the thing polite people do, without any shame, lacking any self-awareness how by doing so that confirmed she had about as much character as the pictorial symbol of her political party – or that it shows complete surrender to a strategy of that plays to the worst in people that likely will not work to bring her electoral victory.

That when Landrieu declared on national television that unfavorable feelings in Louisiana about Pres. Barack Obama – who had a white mother and black father but who identifies himself as a black American – were as a result of “The South has not always been the friendliest place for African-Americans …. [making it difficult] for the president to present himself in a very positive light as a leader” did not come accidentally at the time in the campaign that it did. With the last dozen polls showing her behind Republican Rep. Bill Cassidy heads-up, early voting not providing any helpful news for her campaign, and just having had the last candidate debate, where Cassidy committed no errors, she really has to go for broke, and the standard (pun intended) Hail Mary play in the Democrats’ playbook is to plead with voters, particularly their base, to stop thinking and start emoting, juiced by scare tactics and attempted delegitimating of those who disagree with you on the issues.

The strategy has the upside of mobilizing that base. It’s a dog whistle to low information voters, particularly blacks, that opposition to the likes of Democrats such as Landrieu and Obama only can result from racist motives, and therefore implies that to allow the opposition to her to win would create more racism in American government. It’s intended to frighten the base enough to get it to the polls to vote for Landrieu.