Louisiana political culture helps stymie minor candidates

It’s never a lot of fun to rain on somebody’s parade, to dampen their enthusiasm, but … people not running as Democrats or Republicans in Louisiana really have no chance of winning an election, or even getting close, and here’s why. (Stop. Before anyone can point out about this guy or this guy [District 2], read below and you will understand why anomalies like them can appear – but never beyond anything than what we could consider a locally-oriented office in this state.)

Paradoxically, it’s mainly because political parties are so weak in this state in the first place. Louisiana’s political culture has placed more emphasis on personalistic, rather than institutionalized, politics, than those we see elsewhere. In other words, political power is disproportionately vested within the individual politician relative to institutions when compared to other states. An oft-quoted example is the relatively weak formal powers of the Louisiana governor, but a long history of legislative kowtowing to her. (If this sounds a lot like the rule of strongmen or juntas or caudillos reminiscent in less developed countries, well, if the shoe fits …).

Parties are one of the casualties of this cultural strain. Historically (which means mostly the Democrats), individual politicians, usually governors, have dominated their parties even more than they do the Legislature. This style has created the weakest state political parties in America and explains why they couldn’t fire a shot when former Gov. Edwin Edwards pushed through the nonpartisan blanket primary system which reinforced their weakness (P.S. earlier this week a federal appeals court declared unconstitutional its version in Washington – stay tuned for this developing story).

Louisiana’s election system outside of federal offices illustrates the little value party labels traditionally have had in its elections. Simply, parties have no control over which candidates get their labels, period – no party primary where party affiliates, either wholly (closed primaries) or partially (open primaries) can choose the party’s nominee. Thus, potential aspirants to offices can choose whatever labels they want and the party can do nothing about it (remember this guy?).

Therefore, as long as you have a solid campaign organization and enthusiastic supporters (usually built around yourself or with another powerful political figure as your patron), as a candidate you can appropriate whatever label you like on your way to being a competitive candidate. And the more powerful you are, the easier it is to take a major party label and define it around yourself because the party apparatus can’t do much to resist.

One reason why we have seen more people run as “other” in contests (technically, one does not run as an “independent” in Louisiana) in recent years is part of long-term secular changes in American politics that have increased the number of self-identified independents and reduced the proportion of major party self-identifiers; as there are more non-Democrats/non-Republicans out there, more turn up in contests. But an “independent” label has next to no meaning; even if the major parties are weak in Louisiana, “Republican” and “Democrat” are labels with considerable content, are strongly defined labels, and have remained relatively stable in meaning for decades. Since these labels convey useful information to voters about candidates, even most of those who register as “no party” will prefer one of these candidates, given what the labels tell them (presumably) about the candidates.

Having a minor party label such as “Libertarian” will improve the fortunes of those candidates who shun the major party labels because it also conveys substantive information about a candidate – but not much improvement. Simply, at this point in time, the vast majority of Americans are comfortable with one (or both) of the broad coalitions, ideologically fuzzily-defined, that represent the two major parties, and will wish to vote for candidates with those labels. Until things happen politically that cause that to change, candidates unable or unwilling to use those labels in a general election will be disadvantaged.

This is especially true in Louisiana. Much is being made of Sen. Joe Lieberman’s battle to win reelection as an independent in Connecticut. Note that this never would have been an issue were that state not a closed primary state that lacks a “sore loser” law (about half the states prohibit losers of party primaries from running in the general election). But if Lieberman wins, it will be because of a personal following he has built, plus strategic defections from Republicans from their official nominee, and the fact Connecticut has a history much more amenable to accepting “maverick” politicians than does Louisiana (who in its history the best it can do is guys like the one above and this one – hardly a credit anyone sensible wants to acknowledge.)

As a result, to be honest, this fall’s slate, and likely next fall’s for statewide offices, of independent or minor party candidates doesn’t have a 10 percent, or 2 percent, chance of winning – it’s zero barring incredible circumstances extremely likely never to occur. But that doesn’t mean they ought not to try, because more choices in elections always are better, and I give credit to them for trying.

Bus drivers concern them, but does educational quality?

The incident involving a school bus driver who had black children sit at the back of the bus is not likely to go away given the agitation dozens seemed to have over the Red River Parish School Board’s decision to accept her resignation and to leave it at that. Without the bus driver to kick around, many now blame the School Board and top system employees for allowing the driver to “escape” punishment and have called for their replacement.

To gain perspective on this situation, it’s useful to review the demographic and academic statistics of the parish, which have shown the same basic trend over the past several years. Using the latest statistics available:

On the LEAP tests, only fourth graders begin to approach the level where at least half the students are classified as “basic and above,” meaning at least the other half comprise the two lowest categories. It gets worse for eighth graders and worst of all for those in high school (Graduate Exit Exam). The Iowa Basic Test shows all tested grade levels well below the national averages. Dropout rates double those of the state average. The average ACT score at 17.2 was so low that the typical graduate could not get into any selective-admission college in the state.

All three district schools (two others are excluded because one is alternative, the other correctional) are rated in the second-lowest category on the accountability scale (although two are showing demonstrable improvement, even as that is not difficult when they are so far down to begin with, one was a “school in decline”). This means they can be punished by the state if they don’t improve soon.

The parish’s school-age population is roughly even in terms of black and white children, but black students outnumber whites two-to-one. This is because 16 percent of the school-age population attends private schools, all but two of these students being white. Given performance indicators above, it’s no surprise families of one-sixth of the children would opt out of the district’s public schools.

Meanwhile, in the parish the percentage of persons living in poverty, about 30 percent, is more than twice that of the national average, while the proportion of children living in poverty at about 40 percent is 2.5 times that of the national average, perhaps due to the fact that 14 percent of households are headed by single females (over twice the national average) and the teenage birth rate at about 20 percent is also more than twice the national average.

Simultaneously, the average revenue per student is well over the state average, over 25 percent, while the expenditure per pupil is 18 percent higher. Given that the state runs a slight deficit in its averages that means that Red River Parish’s revenues outstrip its expenditures on a per student basis by 17 percent.

Dozens of parents marched to the school board meeting over an alleged, unproven instance of racial discrimination. But where were they every year when statistics like this were coming out with certainty about the performance of their schools? Why no marches designed to pressure the School Board and system to improve its district’s shoddy educational performance? Was this the first time many of these parents even bothered to attend a School Board meeting? How many of them even voted in the last School Board contests? And is this the first time some of them even bothered to involve themselves in any meaningful way in supporting their children’s education?

The bus driver problem has been solved, but many don’t want to leave it at that. The academic performance problem has not been solved, but many never seemed to have cared about that. Misplaced priorities such as these probably explain why these parents continue to tolerate the substandard education of their children.

Commitment to free markets will kickstart N.O. recovery

In a recent analysis of New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin’s performance in spurring recovery in the city, the author curiously proposes that he cure the disease by giving the patient the same medicine that has been killing it.

Stephanie Grace argues that Nagin isn’t doing enough to stimulate recovery efforts by doing too little, because he believes in a market-driven solution whereas Grace thinks it’s a “reluctance to exert a heavy hand” which is causing slow development. In doing so, she displays ignorance about economics and human psychology.

What Grace doesn’t seem to realize is recovery, if we define that as people returning to and enterprise spreading in New Orleans, will occur only when people wish to invest their time and efforts in it. And that is dependent not on anything that government does, including planning, but is on what it doesn’t do.

Government that spends efficiently and wisely will attract development; government that doesn’t will not. Government that runs with a minimum of corruption will attract development; government that doesn’t will not. Government that slashes regulation will attract development; government that doesn’t will not. Government that understands it’s not there to redistribute wealth will attract development; government that doesn’t will not. And nobody with a straight face can argue over the past few decades that government in New Orleans (and, in fact, Louisiana) hasn’t done the things necessary to attract development – planning didn’t help then, and it certainly won’t help now.

It may be news to Grace, but no plan in the world can stimulate New Orleans’ recovery, nor can government, especially one known by reputation by potential investors and intimately by its residents as such a poorly run, intrusive one. Free markets cause growth; government solely causes problems when it interferes with them (except in the case of extensive public works projects such as, in this case, levee building). Only free markets with any reasonable anticipation of how government intends to meddle, and minimally so, with them have any hope of bringing the progress Grace would like to see to the city – totally at odds with its recent policy history.

At least she unconsciously stumbled upon the proper course of action. It’s not that Nagin and the city haven’t come up with a five-year plan or whatever which has delayed things, it’s that Nagin has done too little to reassure citizens and investors that government won’t interfere with their individual desires (and that the Army Corps of Engineers can’t yet completely guarantee a minimal level of flood protection, but hopefully that will be resolved by next hurricane season). Simply, he needs to follow the advice I gave months ago: declare which parts of the city will receive a normal (for New Orleans; to the rest of the world, inadequate) level of service, and which areas will face relative underprovision, then get city government otherwise out of the way.

That’s all markets need to know to make investment decisions and for citizens “looking for signs of progress and guidance on how they can come home.” Whether Grace wishes to admit it, conservative principles, long abandoned in the city’s governance, exemplified by reliance on the market, promise to make New Orleans better than it ever was. Any government intervention beyond the above suggestion will keep it the backwater it had become long before Katrina hit.

Upcoming most meaningful Secretary of State race ever?

Even if the Secretary of State is the third-ranking executive official in Louisiana, the citizenry typically has little interest in a position which, under normal circumstances, consists of shuffling a lot of paper (although in these times perhaps more accurately a lot of electronic files) and overseeing many of the states’ museums. But with the hurricane disasters striking in 2005, suddenly this contest has taken on a much greater importance, and not only because it is a special election.

Republicans have two strong candidates in former party chief Mike Francis and current state Sen. Jay Dardenne. Only one Democrat eventually settled on the contest, state Sen. Francis Heitmeier. It’s difficult to come up with three more contrasting major candidates. Francis is known as a bedrock conservative but has no elective experience. Dardenne has reformist credentials but on some social and spending issues deviates from conservatism. Heitmeier is a liberal taxer-and-spender who engages in populist rhetoric and resides in the inner circle of good-old-boy politics that have dragged Louisiana to the bottom of quality-of-life state rankings.

Heitmeier is almost certain to make the general election runoff, given his resources. Dardenne and Francis will fight for the other spot, with the former perhaps having the edge because of superior monetary resources to date (both he and Heitmeier bump up against senatorial term limits next year, but they can use cash raised for that office for this race, and they both have a lot). Regardless of who is in there with Heitmeier, who wins subsequently will tell us much about the state of Louisiana politics going forward.

The potential importance of the office became obvious when current unelected Secretary of State Al Ater committed to a wasteful voter outreach program of information dissemination, and supported relaxation of standards to prevent fraudulent voting and creation of satellite voting centers – all of which cost state taxpayers millions of dollars with very little impact. Francis indicated he opposed all of this while Dardenne voted against loosening standards but for satellite voting and Heitmeier voted to parrot Ater’s waste and lowering of standards.

The contest also serves as a harbinger of 2007 fortunes. With at least a couple of hundred thousand voters still displaced out of state, disproportionately Democrats and black, accentuating the continuing Republican realignment in the state, a GOP winner would confirm an accelerating trend and be only the third instance that a Republican not elected prior as a Democrat won a statewide state-level office as a Republican for an initial term (Gov. Dave Treen – incidentally, an ex-States’ Right partisan – being in 1979 and Suzanne Terrell as the lame duck Elections Commissioner in 1999). Heitmeier is the archetypical officeholder that has plagued Louisiana for much of the twentieth century, so to keep his ilk out of power would send a major signal that the electorate finally is ready to get serious in the 2007 state contests by potentially creating GOP majorities in all branches of state government.

The importance of this office in Louisiana’s electoral history may never have been as high as it will be in this particular race.

Lee film public relations disaster for Louisiana

Never mistake the vast majority of movie critics for sophisticated critical thinkers (although there are exceptions to that rule, one present, one past), which is why Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center drew jeers and Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke garnered applause at the Venice Film Festival – while the sensible American public probably is reacting in the opposite fashion.

In almost a self-parody of their lack of intelligence, many critics thought Stone’s effort too emotionally-laden (and too pro-American) while they heaped praise on Lee’s effort which was nothing but an intellectually-void screed based on one long emotional whine that lacked utterly any real critical, sophisticated analysis of the politics surrounding Hurricane Katrina’s destructive visitation a year ago. And the punch line is it was Stone’s film that is fiction based on fact, while Lee took a story of fact and turned it into fiction.

I haven’t seen World Trade Center but the public certainly has been blessing it at the box office. However, I have seen When the Levees Broke and can tell you that, among the American public, it’s probably going to do more harm than good if its goal was to arouse sympathy that produces a political payoff of more and quicker aid to New Orleans.

This is because Lee, in his quest to argue that the response to the hurricane was conditioned by a callous conservative Bush Administration and racist America, has to highlight the most insipid arguments and whiniest people in order to sell that ridiculous thesis. Just to give some examples from the film:

A number of people criticized the rescuers' response, mainly led by the federal government, some casting aspersions that poverty and race had something to do with it. But turning on the History Channel later after the second part of the Lee film aired, one could watch a (genuine) documentary on the tremendous efforts made by federal troops to rescue people, and after that you would have to conclude the Lee film must have been about some other disaster, given the truth you had just seen compared to the people he put on camera describing it.

Others whined about how they were cooped up for days then sent to distant locations, oblivious to the fact that the American taxpayer were coughing up all the money to pay for this and first responders from all over the country were putting their lives on the line to help them out. Do these people even know the meaning of the word “gratitude?”

Still others were pictured standing around, carping about all the things they had lost (a couple drinking beer in the process), not truly realizing that that was all they had lost, just things. They had their lives, if they had common sense they had had insurance, and, while they were waiting around for others to help them after their $2,000 blank check courtesy of the American taxpayer (assuming it wasn’t spent fraudulently with other bogus claims), others were taking matters into their own hands and pulling themselves up from bad luck (curious that Lee never obviously showed any of the destruction – or steady rebuilding by residents – in mostly-white hard-hit Lakeview). Lee never bothered to put the latter on camera.

After a pedestrian media career, liberal radio talk show host Garland Robinette transformed himself from drive-by talking head, corporate shill, and occasional concealed weapon-carrier to be everybody’s angry man after the storm, and in the film pugnaciously and obnoxiously carried out his wild man act, accusing the federal government/Bush Administration of slighting Louisiana – despite the fact that the slow pace of recovery has been almost entirely attributable to the actions of state and local politicians. Viewers probably don’t know that Robinette largely has been AWOL in substantive (as opposed to easy shots, admittedly numerously provided by Louisiana politicians) criticism of those politicians before and after the storm.

Perhaps the most asinine comment of all came from Tulane professor of history and frustrated wannabe Kerry Administration member Douglas Brinkley, author of an entirely simplistic, inadequate tome on the disaster, who said more explicitly than even Robinette that the feds/Bush were shortchanging Louisiana on relief money. So he’s telling us that the lion’s share of the recovery money which is going to Louisiana provided by the Bush Administration/Congress totaling $110 billion isn’t enough? That the typical American taxpayer who has paid $2,000 each for this gift isn’t coughing up enough? (Actually, few taxpayers will pay that much; a small percentage, America’s higher-earners, will pay the majority of it.) How much is enough, $250 billion?

Not all vignettes feature such crass people and attitudes. A few reinforce the idea that big government by its nature is inefficient, showing people with legitimate gripes and heroic struggles who acted much more gracefully. But what the casual viewer gets out of all of this is a highly-distorted picture of what Louisianans and New Orleanians are like. Through Lee’s prism, they come across as self-important claimers of victimhood who are entitled to impose on the generosity of America.

Again, the people portrayed and commentators utilized no doubt represent the distinct minority of those affected by the hurricane, and, again, Lee needs these kinds of people to try to fob off his view on an American public which has become increasingly skeptical of the need to spend larger and larger sums on an area representing a half of a percent of the American population that has a well-deserved reputation for dysfunctionality in governing. But this film just manages to achieve the reverse: it only reinforces America’s impression of Louisiana as blaming others for problems it could lead in solving, preferring to waste its time by sticking its hand out demanding no-strings-attached charity.

Another chance, another disappointment for Louisiana?

Budgetary estimates continue to trend in positive directions, meaning Louisiana has yet another lucky chance to make up for prior mistakes in its fiscal management. But because those who have made those mistakes continue to hold power in the state and given the timing, whether this actually happens remains questionable.

Early indications predict a budgetary surplus of around a half billion dollars. Despite the 2005 hurricane disasters, Louisiana has gotten lucky because the price of oil has remained high and construction workers (among others) have taken a disproportionate part of their share of federal rebuilding dollars and gambled it away (which I guess why many are construction workers). The state takes a cut of both, and added to all of the temporary recovery funding flowing in, has created this desirable situation.

The problem is, the state has been down this road before with its Democrat Gov. Kathleen Blanco and Democrat-controlled Legislature. After the disasters when prudence dictated cuts, they responded but missed the opportunity to cut permanently the truly unnecessary, low-priority and/or inefficiently done items, settling on blanket cuts (as well as using chicanery in computing what could be spent). Then much of that got restored instead of allocating it to reduce long-term, growing, unresolved and underappreciated problem areas such as underfunded pension plans and road needs.

Unfortunately, the Blanco administration talked about but didn’t deliver optimal use of “extra” funds. The Legislature was little better: it brushed aside efforts to tackle the $12 billion-plus pension deficit, didn’t do anything out of the ordinary to reduce the road backlog, and was unable to use some of the money to offset insurance hikes that every citizen, directly or indirectly, will have to pay as a result of the disasters. The same forces that caused no positive change continue in power into 2007.

Worse, that is an election year. Blanco well may succumb to her liberal instincts and spend money blindly to pay off constituencies that will get her votes but to the detriment of the entire state. With Public Service Commissioner Foster Campbell almost sure to enter the race against her thus pressuring her from the left, the temptation will be greater to for her to co-opt that agenda and thereby behave irresponsibly. Democrats in the Legislature, whether running for their same jobs or others in the other chamber, likely will do the same.

The refrain is old: Louisiana looks to have yet another chance to progress and start pulling itself out of the last-place ranking morass its liberal/populist history has produced. Let’s hope the usual result, missing that chance, won’t happen again.

Faulty ruling requires LA Supreme Court intervention

Faulty jurisprudence has kept Joe Shyne’s Shreveport City Council campaign alive for the moment, but it appears likely that the Louisiana Supreme Court will have to take up this matter to resolve it fully.

Reversing the lower court decision by Judge Jeanette Garrett, the Louisiana Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a pardon issued by former Gov. Mike Foster, which restored all rights except gun ownership to Shyne after his conviction on federal corruption charges, did in fact apply to a federal crime and thereby got around Art. I Sec. 10 of the Louisiana Constitution’s prohibition against convicted felons running for office until after 15 years have passed since sentence completed. Since Shyne’s sentence ran out (including probation) in 1998, he otherwise is ineligible to run for office.

But in a decision that has the hallmarks of washing, wringing, folding, spindling, and mutilating the Constitution to achieve a desired effect, the Court argued that the literal wording of the relevant section, an amendment added in 1998, didn’t actual mean what it says:

State, local politicians helped cause, made worse disaster

Hurricane Katrina roared ashore a year ago, landing but a glancing blow on the New Orleans metropolitan area, but that was enough to overtop and to cave in levees, flooding 80 percent of the city (and practically all of St. Bernard Parish). And what have we learned in this past year about who or what was most responsible for the destruction visited and lives lost, and how to move forward? In order of culpability:

#1: Inseparably, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Orleans Levee District. The ACE did as well as could be expected in the implementation phase, with whatever shortcomings appearing there because of difficult circumstances to foresee (for example, designs and technology from a half century ago being made to work in the present). But it fell down dramatically in the supervisory phase, letting flaws creep in, allowing some contractors to do substandard work and not keeping a close eye on the OLD which paid scant attention to flood protection. In recent years, the OLD has been more interested in building marinas and bringing in gambling facilities while reducing levee responsibility to ridiculous drive-by inspections that smacked more of an excuse to entertain than perform any serious maintenance. Had the ACE kept a tight watch on contractors and a secure leash on the OLD, or the OLD had actually done what it should have, the breaches and overtopping may not have happened at all.

#2: Gov. Kathleen Blanco and her predecessors. Among other things, Blanco delayed federal troop assistance out of fear she would not receive proper political credit, remained paralyzed in leadership in the first couple of days of the tragedy, and even could not perform the proper procedures as governor to facilitate the recovery effort – even though only a year earlier an exercise was run simulating such a catastrophe and real-life Hurricane Ivan had presented the same threat. Since then, she has been incredibly slow to respond (Mississippi, by contrast, had its basic procedures by the beginning of October, before Blanco even had put together a group to coordinate any recovery effort), in part because of her lack of awareness and of her desire to put political expediency ahead of practical effect. Blanco bears some of the blame for the OLD’s underperformance, since she appoints some of its members, as did her predecessors.

Hightower fails to meet needs, creates more burdens

All the Bob Odom-built sugar mills in Louisiana cannot produce enough of the white sweetener to sugarcoat the colossal drain on the city of Shreveport caused by its new convention center and, worse, soon-to-be-opened publicly-owned hotel.

Mayor Keith Hightower, whose political fortunes will be tied with his bringing the center about to fruition and any appearance of success of it, along with the city-paid managers of it, have done their best to spin some favorable news out of it by announcing it had exceeded initial expectations in a number of categories. Of course, they neglected to mention a couple of things, one being that it takes years to judge the performance of such a structure, so any conclusions rendered now mean nothing.

The other they downplayed is far more troubling: will the revenue, both direct and indirect, the facility is anticipated to bring in pay for the operating costs? The managers answered that concerning direct revenues: no, not ever. They predict the best case scenario of losing only $900,000 annually (so far it’s twice that), but then city officials incredibly optimistically argue that the remainder will be made up by the hotel and money pumped into the local economy by out-of-town visitors.

Oh, really? Leaving aside for the moment that the hotel is predicted to lose even more money than the center, let’s just investigate this claim that sales and occupancy taxes will make up the difference. To begin, assume the loss per year is only $980,000 (a figure this low essentially sneered at by perhaps the most preeminent researcher in this area, the Heritage Foundation’s Ron Utt, who thinks the loss will be much higher in the face of declining convention demand and increasing supply). Let’s also assume that for every dollar spent that otherwise would not have been spent on Shreveport hotels and restaurants as a result of the center, the city sees 7 percent of that.

Doing the math, it shows that convention attendees and exhibitors would have to spend $14 million a year. Assuming the typical person in these categories spends $350 in Shreveport for their trip. This means the center would have to books events that total per years 40,000 people visiting Shreveport, or about an 800-(non-local-)person convention a week! Also keep in mind that the vast majority of events, as admitted by the managers, so far booked are local in nature. Even if it can achieve half of this level, that’s still a $490,000 loss a year.

But the news gets much worse. When all is said and done, including the interest paid on the bonds to build it, the city will have forked over in the neighborhood of $200 million for the center. That’s $1,000 for every resident in Shreveport at current population levels, for the privilege of something that will lose them about another half million dollars a year. And just how many police officers could the city hire at half a million a year to keep city councilmen from being shot at and small businessmen from being murdered?

And again, there’s the hotel to consider. The only independent study ever done to assess its profitability concluded it would lose hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Throw in the roughly $75 million in principal and interest it will take to finance the hotel and with the center’s cost, just think how much of the infrastructure problems facing Shreveport, totaling in the hundreds of million of dollars, could have been solved in the near future. Instead, taxes and fees will go up to reverse the crumbling – one reason being the city’s bonding capacity has been stretched beyond recognition by these facilities.

The sheer folly of it all was stated no better than by Utt, whose remarks deserve to be quoted here in full: “What your folks are doing is deplorable. It's an awful waste of money. Are there no unmet needs in Shreveport? Of course not. If you want to benefit the city, you might want to think first about what are truly the public needs that only government can provide.”

As Hightower closes out his mayoral reign and after, look for him and his pals to try to distract the public as much as they can from these facts, that inescapably lead to the conclusion that Democrat Hightower – and a City Council Democrat majority – cared more about building monuments to themselves as part of an economic development strategy that preferred to boost egos and deliver business to cronies rather than to empower the peoples’ ability to grow the economy, through preserving the city’s assets and reducing the monetary burdens (taxes, fees, regulations, and the like) on the citizenry.

Blanco will continue to politicize disasters for campaign

Some observers have speculated that Gov. Kathleen Blanco has, in some way, deliberately delayed disbursements of recovery monies from the 2005 hurricane disasters in order to have them appear closer to next year’s election day to assist her reelection efforts. That explanation seems unlikely – Blanco has been the main reason why it has taken so long for these funds to get out but because it’s probably a function of her ineptitude and unshakeable faith in pursuing blank check, big government solutions controlled by her, which the federal government had to take time to moderate and to allow federalism to play out.

Still, in the upcoming 13 months one can expect Blanco to run a campaign having it both ways. On this issue, she will try to deflect the public’s attention away from her lack of leadership and ideology at cross-interests with Louisiana’s majority by blaming the federal government (or New Orleans’ which does deserve approbation but does not excuse Blanco for her mistakes) while at the same time publicizing heavily that she is (inaccurately) largely responsible for the money that does come dribbling out.

The fact that her main opponent is very likely to be Rep. Bobby Jindal makes even more expected this strategy. With no real positive record to run out, Blanco’s only chance of winning is to emphasize the redistribution aspect of her term, in the hopes that a majority of voters will feel that, in classic Louisiana style, that they have gotten enough goodies doled out to them, while simultaneously attacking Jindal by linking him to the mythology she and others have tried to create that the problems of preparation and response to the disasters were not primarily Louisiana’s and hers, but the federal government’s – and Jindal is part of that organization.

For his part, to counteract this, Jindal must point out how Blanco’s unsuitable actions caused needless harm, emphasizing how the federal government in general and he in particular, steadfastly corrected for Blanco’s dithering and excesses. He must know he cannot out-liberal Democrat a liberal Democrat on the check-cutting part, but must make clear his intervention was helpful in getting the ultimate solution in place, despite Blanco, in a way that provides good stewardship and wise use of taxpayers’ dollars.

Jindal can really negate this Blanco ploy should he be successful on a related issue, getting the federal government to bump up Louisiana’s offshore extraction royalties to levels commensurate with other coastal states to be used to combat coastal erosion. This he should contrast to Blanco’s flailing efforts entailing a wasteful, nuisance suit.

It’s unfortunate that the disaster issue took on political overtones, but from its first hours of it already Blanco was making decisions based upon political considerations. That genie has long left the bottle, and so Blanco’s opponents to win will have to accept that template and use it against her.