Landrieu credibility eroding as "mistakes" mount

Once is coincidence, twice is happenstance, an aphorism Sen. Mary Landrieu rather would not hear but who invited it by self-reporting yet another campaign funding violation, and proffering an explanation for it that doesn’t quite hold water.

Just days ago, Landrieu’s office admitted a humiliating incident that it wrongly billed its taxpayer-paid office account for campaign travel expenses involving chartering a plane, a consequence of trying to submit a certain campaign image to voters. Its defense was that a simple clerical error had been made – despite the dubious nature of the claim and even as the apparent practice of the vendor is to send her office the bills and then it sorts them out.

But now another instance, in some ways even more interesting, has popped up. Landrieu’s office now says it will reimburse out of the campaign account at least part of a $5,700 charter bill for the Shreveport to Dallas leg that also included a leg from New Orleans on Sep. 22, 2013. Flying into Shreveport was on official business during the weekend, but the next morning she had to head back to Washington. So she took a charter flight from Shreveport to Dallas where she could catch a commercial flight the next day, but only after she engaged in some fundraising activity there before leaving.

LA legislator laziness demands procedural changes

Here we go again, and this time Louisiana’s legislators have no real excuse for giving the impression that they don’t really know what they are voting on, nor should they have any excuse to try to fix this.

A number of sitting justices of the peace and constables just now are kicking up a fuss after they have appeared to figure out that a bill signed into law two months ago disallows them running for their jobs again this fall. Act 495 removes an exception to the law that permitted those already elected to office as of Aug. 15, 2006 to be eligible for reelection without the age limit of being younger than 70 when beginning a term of service that otherwise would apply. It is estimated to affect around 160 officials, only some of whom already are over 70.

Justices of the peace fitting that loophole were the only elected state judicial officials excepted from the state’s 70-year-old age limit (the constitutionality of age limits having been upheld). They handle civil claims under $5,000, can issue orders pursuant to those, and perform marriages. Constables carry out those orders and also have minor law enforcement powers associated with that ability.

Landrieu charter choice keeps haunting her politically

Sen. Mary Landrieu’s political campaign has caught the political equivalent of herpes as it battles a series of damaging outbreaks that won’t go away stemming from her activities of last Nov. 8, because these revelations too usefully destroy her campaign narrative.

The infection began when Democrat Landrieu on the morning of that day hitched a ride on Air Force One to Armstrong International Airport outside New Orleans with her co-partisan Pres. Barack Obama, yet then failed to accompany him to an appearance at the Port of New Orleans, citing she had a “long-standing” commitment for a campaign function in Lake Charles, some 180 miles from Kenner. Commentators snickered and her Republican opponents and their supporters baited her about how this was an attempt to “hide” in order to avoid being seen with Obama, who then and now continues to be deeply unpopular in Louisiana.

Later, Landrieu would claim that could not be the case, being as she appeared in photographs with Obama (as well as her brother New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu and Gov. Bobby Jindal). But it’s one thing to be in a few snapshots that may or may not appear in Louisiana media outlets; it’s another entirely to stand or sit next to him on stage and walk by him for an extended period with several hundred constituents about that certainly would get media coverage that hundreds of thousands of more constituents would see or hear.

Retirement issues inconvenience potential candidates

Retirement issues have created a ruckus around one north Louisiana politician, and raise a potentially distracting issue for another.

Last month, almost nobody seemed happy in the aftermath of the passage of Act 859, which on the surface seemed to make mere semantic changes to the law about investigating law enforcement officers. At least that’s how it started out, but on the final day of the session, in a conference committee because of minor disagreement over versions of the bill between the chambers, a provision appeared that undid a law passed a few years ago on behalf of a narrowly-defined class of individuals – estimated at exactly two – which seemed if not innocuous, then unnoticed by legislators who passed it unanimously, and then got Gov. Bobby Jindal’s signature on it.

The only problem is this violates Art. X Sec. 29 of the Constitution. Because it made a change to retirement benefits, the entire bill in that form had to be advertised at least 30 days prior to passage, at least twice. Now it’s incumbent on the State Police Retirement System to sue the Legislature to have the law declared unconstitutional. Yet no action seems forthcoming at least until the board meets in early September.

GOP chickens may roost by its blanket primary support

Qualifying for federal elections in Louisiana begins next week, and Republicans have to hope that a decision too many party elected officials and leaders realized too late does not come back to haunt them.

Four years ago the state reversed course on its decision to have closed primary elections for these offices, where only voters who are affiliated with a party (or under that version no-party voters if allowed by the party) could vote to nominate a candidate for the general election. This system promoted greater accountability and provided incentives for issue preferences of candidates rather than their personalities to be evaluated by voters. After the 2008 and 2010 elections, the blanket primary system, which actually does not include a primary but heads straight to a general election, was reinstituted.

Besides strengthening parties because of their increased value as aggregative mechanisms that could bestow the most important asset to a candidate, a nomination, closed primaries also helped parties in their ability to forward stronger general election candidates by disallowing interference by non-party elements in that process. Lack of that ability may prove decisive in at least two 2014 contests.

Landrieu acquiescence acknowledges desperation

Understand that Democrat Sen. Mary Landrieu’s acceptance of four debates with opponents to her reelection signals definitively that she gets it that her prospects to return to Washington are in trouble.

Back in the good old days, debates – where candidates actually verbally sparred back and forth for hours, instead of rushing to drop in as many relevant sound bites as they can before hustling to the next question as these have become today – served a useful process for the politically interested who could spread this information to others that they otherwise could not acquire from any source. These days, the interested person pretty much can find everything and anything about a candidate’s issue preferences through watching plenty of television advertisements and/or reading mail pieces and/or (most comprehensively with views from all sides) making a few mouse clicks. The casually interested will pay no attention to these, unless something dramatic happens that gets reverberated through news stories and campaign communications forcibly delivered to their eyeballs, eardrums, mail boxes, and in-boxes.

For these reasons, as information about candidacies increased and became more easily disseminated over the past few decades, debates have devolved, from candidates’ perspectives, into going on patrol in a minefield. A candidate can do nothing on his own to derive any benefit from a debate; rather, he only can harm himself by saying something stupid that makes him look uninformed, ignorant, or “uncaring” enough to voters. Any debate participation produces gains only if one or more opponents make unforced errors that you avoid. In other words, it’s a gamble as to whether you won’t blow it to your detriment and if others do to your benefit.

Potential suit fails on facts, logic, constitutionality

If a bad idea is useful enough once, a thousand uses are not too many, or so the Louisiana National Association for the Advancement of Colored People seems to think in response to the East Baton Rouge Parish School System School Board’s recent decision to reduce its membership from 11 to 9 members.

The state’s NAACP is threatening to file suit over the change made last month that will take an arrangement of six majority-white and five majority-black districts and make it a five majority-white and four majority-black arrangement. This happened despite that within the district black residents actually narrowly outnumber whites, 47.1 percent of it compared to 46.5 percent.

While the promised suit’s contents have yet to be revealed, it may well attempt to use an argument similar to the systemic racism theory advocated in a suit being heard this week about redistricting Baton Rouge’s city courts. That is, even if districts are created that have narrow black majorities, blacks are less likely to be registered to vote and also even if registered to vote in elections, because past racism has conditioned them along these lines as evidenced by these lower totals relative to whites, mono-racial voting patterns of the past, and past district election results where blacks only have won elections where a majority of those voting were blacks.

Holden run ploy to keep Guillory out, get others in

Baton Rouge Mayor Kip Holden not only can’t win statewide office, but his decision to run for lieutenant governor also will contribute to dooming another candidate disliked by his party.

Democrat Holden confirmed long-circulated rumors that he would make a try for the office in 2015, which actually does very little in basically serving as the head of the Department of Culture, Recreation, and Tourism (present occupant Jay Dardenne did away with the formalities and did not fill that cabinet post in favor of doing it himself). It certainly can’t hurt him, as his mayor-president term will continue through 2016 and he could run for that again; indeed, what funds and name recognition he has left over from inability to win this statewide office he could use towards securing a fourth term at the helm of the consolidated government.

And he assuredly will not win, barring incredible fortune. Winning statewide as a Democrat is a tough proposition, but it becomes impossible when one is a black liberal known most recently for backing to success an increase in taxes to pay for a rapid transit system plagued with mismanagement if not outright corruption, getting humiliated by defeated attempts to raise taxes for massive, if questionable in need, infrastructure projects, and whose prime economic development strategy these days is to annex unincorporated land in order to beggar potential growth competitors to Baton Rouge.  Even if the office he seeks is picayunish, with its only real appeal being waiting around for the governor to leave office one way or the other, and the scant actual areas of authority of it have little to do with being a chief executive of a consolidated government (with less power than a typical mayor), a majority of Louisiana voters will turn their noses up at that record as an indicator of how he would serve in the state’s #2 office.

Eroding populism drives devalued Landrieu endorsement

Just as one Louisiana U.S.senator uses well the fading power of populism in the state’s political culture to keep ahead of his rivals, the other uses it as well in hopes of staying in power.

In the transformation of politics, in a functioning representative democracy this comes from the bottom up. That is, as change sweeps the grassroots, it changes the matrix of candidates available and ultimately those successful, in turn eventually translating into policy change. But it occurs most slowly at the lowest levels of government because of the asymmetry of information availability. Specifically, for the mass public there is less information about politics available at the local levels, in part because there is less interest among the public (because, unless directly impacted, what local governments do seem less important in the world and often are seen as less controversial) and because existing elites, incumbents in particular, face reduced competition in provision of information and therefore find it easier to combat opposing views.

Transformation becomes blunted at the lowest level, providing shelter for elites as the world changes around them, as the public has greater difficult in learning of elite actions, of the consequences of those actions, and in connecting the two. As transformation occurs, the disconnection between policy desired by the public and policy-makers’ actions must yawn to a greater extent before the public begins to place responsibility onto the policy-makers in question, and to sanction them for deviations. In Louisiana, the contradictions between liberal populism and principled conservatism started becoming clear enough to provoke a substantial electoral response at the national level about 25 years ago, while at the state level it began about a decade ago.

Vitter's fusion approach makes candidacy formidable

Again, Republican Sen. David Vitter, candidate for governor in 2015, has demonstrated that he remains best equipped among Louisiana politicians to navigate the changing political culture of the state for electoral purposes.

Uniquely imprinted in South with the stamp of populism, or the belief that government primarily is to be used as a tool for redistributing resources to favored interests from those that aren’t, Louisiana has struggled intellectually to detach itself from this past. Even as liberalism finds itself far more compatible ideologically to this, many who claim to be conservatives in the state have their belief systems diluted with the notion that place more emphasis on the need for government to use its powers to provide some kind of subsidy or assistance to certain groups against presumed hostile forces as a result of this legacy.

But as educational attainment levels (with qualitative improvements within those levels) have increased, political information has become more plentiful and less costly to access, and economic growth has brought in conservative out-of-state immigrants whose formative political cultures lacked it, populism has less and less effectively has served as a mask for the violations liberalism brings upon the tenets held by conservatives. Even two decades ago, many economic liberals infested state and local offices, buttressing their positions by enunciating conservative social issue preferences, and embedded themselves because of a public with lesser cognitive capacity that discouraged being able to think ideologically and of a paucity of information about politics generally available to it. This environment made much more difficult understanding the internal contradictions liberalism presented within its own philosophical and data-denied incoherence and externally to core conservative values held by many who were becoming increasingly able to understand cause and effect in policy.