With Vitter's race to lose, Melancon needs luck again

In the end, Democrat Rep. Charlie Melancon asked himself two questions, his answers to which would make him choose to exit his House spot and would propel him into a long-shot contest for Republican Sen. David Vitter’s seat.

The first dealt with whether he would have the money to compete. At this time, he has only about a third of the $3.2 million that Vitter has on hand. However, with the GOP having to defend more seats than Democrats in 2010, he probably got a commitment from the national party to help as its resources won’t be spread as thinly as they could be, which could keep him competitive with Vitter.

But therein lies the problem. It is highly unlikely, given Vitter’s past demonstrated abilities in fundraising and his present pace concerning it, that Melancon will be able to stay with Vitter, much less pass him on the money front. History is very unkind to Senate challengers against incumbents by whom they get outspent, as they rarely win – and some of those few wins are because the victorious candidate poured in large sums of his own wealth.

The reason why is that fundraising ability serves as a proxy of candidate strength, since the majority of donors to campaigns are economically rational. Like investors, they don’t want to throw away their money on causes that don’t have a reasonable chance of success. If Vitter were more than marginally vulnerable courtesy of alleged martial infidelities almost a decade ago, he would not have raised and would be unable to raise the sums of money he has and looks likely to receive. Therefore, Melancon chose to enter this contest as a decided underdog, not only from the historical perspective of resources and their use as an indicator of the relative security of Vitter’s position, but also with polls showing Vitter maintaining a healthy lead on him.

Then why do it, especially when he had the alternative of running for reelection to the House? The second question’s answer operated here. Melancon’s position since the beginning of the year politically in his district has deteriorated badly. With the coming of the Democrat Pres. Barack Obama administration, his strategy of acting left but sounding right has become impossible to pursue as increasingly constituents views all his actions from a prism of Obama and the president’s decidedly unpopular liberalism there, which demand just too many visible positions that Melancon cannot duck in their taking. It also hasn’t helped that other blunders, such as revelation of his expensive southern hemisphere tour, have manifested.

Had he sought reelection, he would not have been considered the man to beat by challengers, he may not even have been favored among all candidates. Plus, because of looming constitutionally-mandate redistricting, of the various scenarios the most likely outcome would eliminate his current district by 2012 with no office that year to which to try to parachute. And so the question became very simple: do you run for reelection that is chancy in a district that might soon disappear that gave only about 35 percent of its vote to Obama, or do you run as a challenger in a (statewide) permanent district with dicey prospects where Obama got around 40 percent of the vote? Given the reasonable expectation of enough money to be competitive existed, the latter became obvious.

This analysis underscores the key dynamic of the race as it has unfolded: as pointed out before, Melancon made the move out of weakness, not from strength. If he wanted a continued congressional career, this was the least unlikely alternative for him to maintain it. More to the point, he has entered a contest that he cannot win by his own campaign efforts. Given the already low Democrat tide in the state, Vitter’s slightly reduced but formidable strength, and an evolving political landscape that chances are will not only get worse for Democrats nationally, but significantly worse over the next 14 months, if only facing Melancon, this is Vitter’s contest to lose. There is nothing Melancon can do to win this race, except …

… get lucky one more time? Good fortune has marked Melancon’s national electoral career. He was able to take the open seat in 2004 only because of infighting among Republicans left a defeated GOP candidate attacking Melancon’s opponent. In 2006, that attacking defeated candidate emerged as Melancon’s primary challenger but his previous tactics discredited him among enough of the electorate, and in experiencing a good year for Democrats nationally were keys in allowing Melancon to manage reelection. Really bad tides for the GOP in 2008 permitted him to run unopposed. It could happen again in some unforeseen way … or maybe he’s more than used up his quota of good fortune.

Depending on luck as your main asset in a campaign doesn’t make you more than hoping you can beat the odds. But for now, it’s the best that can be said about Melancon’s Senate chances as his best hope to stay in national office past 2010 and his party’s to get the seat at all.

Roads ideas divorced from new Jindal budget direction

Bad ideas disproportionately remain in currency, and thus it seems the idea of raising gasoline taxes and others of extracting additional revenues from the public do not go away when it comes to considering funding for roads construction in Louisiana, both for the existing but especially contemplated ones.

Frustrated this past session when he could not get his idea to index the cost of living to gasoline taxes enacted into law, state Rep. Hollis Downs got the Legislature to pass a resolution to study the issue. Naturally, at the top of his list was this idea, accompanied by establishment of toll roads and, the only suggestion which may not cost taxpayers more, public/private partnerships in operation.

But conspicuously absent from the roll was the idea on which existing legislation already is based, designed to bring hundreds of million of extra dollars annually for road building. Currently, funds collected from taxes and fees directly related to transportation such as 80 percent of the state’s 20 cent per gallon retail gasoline tax are supposed to go only to the actual building of transportation projects. Until that became law last year, those hundreds of millions could be used for any purpose and they were outside of these kinds of projects. These proceeds would amply eat into the estimated $12.6 billion backlog of roads projects.

Shreveport correct not to socialize gas leasing risk

While much attention has deservedly gone to Pres. Barack Obama’s various attempts to socialize risk at the federal level, that issue has broken out at the local level in Shreveport as well.

At this time last year, the frenzy that accompanied mineral rights leasing reached its apogee as natural gas prices hovered at their highest levels ever, dramatically higher than two years previous. Northwest Louisiana got caught in the perfect good storm because just months earlier came confirmation of a huge gas discovery known as the Haynesville Shale. Residents, businesses, nonprofits, and governments suddenly discovered they had a marketable commodity, potentially a lot of it, in the middle of the greatest boom for it ever.

Some were agile and took immediate advantage. On the government side, DeSoto Parish was the nimblest, deciding quickly to use the traditional route of going through the state’s Mineral Board and cashed in near the peak that by doing so will provide benefits for its citizenry (if with wise governance) for years to come. Others, like Bossier Parish, hemmed and hawed and/or tried to do it themselves and eventually were unable to do anything but wait on forced unitization directed by the state. Shreveport moved cumbersomely, in part hampered by already-leased land at next-to-nothing at the instigation of former Mayor Keith Hightower, and hadn’t reaped anything but searched to do so

Individuals apparently fared the same. While some just dove in and got deals of varying worth, a few hired expertise to help them. Others took to the Internet, neighborhood fora (sometimes convened by the leasing companies themselves), and other inexpensive resources to educate themselves on what made for a reasonable lease and negotiated. Some informally banded together or talked among themselves to determine a good set of conditions. These strategies paid off for many such as in south Bossier, where a number of landowners individually negotiated and signed with one of the two big forces in the scramble, Petrohawk, in the $20-25,000 range per acre with a quarter royalty, by the end of summer.

But others gambled with time and organization, principally those with already-existing neighborhood associations. In Shreveport, many eventually coalesced into one group and the associations began to solicit their residents to sign letters of intent to allow the specific association, or in Shreveport’s case the group of them known as the ShreveCenter Coalition, to negotiate on their behalf. The thinking was akin to that used by labor unions in negotiations with managements: the larger the pool of the represented, the more coercive power they had that theoretically would make for a better deal.

The only problem was, the gamble failed. The record prices did not sustain and leasing activity – and return for rights holders – plummeted. So by the time these organizations got it together enough to be in a position to bargain from what they thought was strength, likely those individuals involved had forgone better opportunities if undertaken separately in the past than what they could get now and in the future collectively, in many cases substantially so.

The other major force in local leasing, Twin Cities, which works on behalf of Chesapeake Energy, now dealing with a buyer’s rather than seller’s market decided to forgo negotiating with the associations. That is their right, but it was not taken kindly by the associations which began to implore Mayor Cedric Glover to withhold approving leasing of Shreveport public lands desired by Chesapeake until they would work through the associations. Glover appeared to agree when he made critical remarks about the City Council’s unanimous vote to lease 740 city acres to Twin Cities, and threatened a veto.

For whatever reason, Glover let it go. Politically, a veto would have been disastrous. There are three kinds of potential voters out there, those agitating for him to have the city assist their efforts, those who have leased or who are negotiating that didn’t or wouldn’t get any help from that strategy, and those who have nothing to lease. The latter two groups are larger than the first and they would question why the city is depriving itself of money to support a special interest.

In the final analysis, tying leasing of city properties to negotiating with some collectives is nothing more than a socialization of risk to compensate for bad decisions made by a select few on behalf of less-involved others. Why should the entirety of Shreveport suffer with the loss of potential revenues just to shore up opportunity costs to what appears to be a tactic that went sour – and not even a guaranteed benefit to them because there’s no guarantee associations could bring in a better deal even if they are dealt with in the process. Plenty of other citizens on their own got what they considered good terms, so why should the Shreveporters in these neighborhoods be any exception?

Budgeting reform needs eyes on implementation to work

It’s a great time to be student of public administration in Louisiana as every politician, appointee, and former official who left their offices both voluntarily and otherwise spout one or the other of every trendy budgeting reform of the past three decades, in order to address large projected state deficits in the near future. But what we don’t hear any specifics about is how it’s going to be done.

We heard a current treasurer advocate a hiring a freeze, a former governor (somewhat contrary to what he actually did in office) stump for zero-based budgeting, a former legislative staffer suggest the derivative of assessing need and then construct revenue packages to match, and the current commissioner of administration expand upon (and thereby connect to its recent outcome-based budgeting initiative) the current (presumed) performance-based budgeting regime. All told, together they covered almost all of the reform ideas that emanated from the academy in the 1960 and 1970s.

But only Commissioner Angéle Davis seemed to grasp the essential truth of the situation when she lamented how the current performance-based system (tying appropriations to performance measured by ability to achieve assessed priorities) was not working well because of a disconnection between actual appropriations and achievement. Instead, the old incrementalist approach – take last year’s budget as a baseline, and then try to increase it from there except in tough times when tactics try to avoid as much decrease as possible – holds sway throughout state government, she asserted.

Landrieu playing well her hand on health care debate

In contrast to the grave difficulties that Democrat Rep. Charlie Melancon is having in trying to pull off the balancing act of supporting liberalism in the face of a conservative constituency, his co-partisan Sen. Mary Landrieu has weathered the buffeting of the radical attempted overhaul of U.S. health care policy politically much better.

Landrieu solidly has provided support for liberal initiatives in her dozen years in office, yet has been able to spread the perception that she is moderate enough for conservative Louisiana. Melancon has tried to do the same thing but has gotten caught out because he has not been as politically astute as Landrieu (who does have the advantage of being a senator and whose greater seniority amidst these fewer competitors allows her to carve out attention) in finding a presumed moderate approach on a signature issue.

She struck gold with her stumping for the Wyden-Bennett “Healthy Americans” version of health policy reform. While still very liberal in that it would reduce competition through forced standardization and increase government oversight of health insurance that it makes it worse than the present regime, it is the least radical of all the Democrat plans being floated about. She has gotten great traction out of this since she signed on to it prior to Pres. Barack Obama’s taking office and subsequent Democrat attempts to stuff more radical plans down the American peoples’ throats.

If when all the dust settles the plan now supported by Landrieu is close to what gets enacted into law, if anything does, she’ll get that electoral gold mine. No matter what liberal votes she casts over the next six years, she will be able to claim she stopped radical health care reform and did something about the issue at the same time. Even though her preferred solution is on the liberal side, it is the contrast with what might have been that will benefit her, and it is something that will stick in people’s minds and override within most voters’ cognitions any number of liberal votes she makes.

Even if liberals blame her for scuttling truly radical changes, they will be placated by her other liberal votes. And, where else can they turn? She’ll get their support because the nature of liberalism first and foremost emphasizes the acquisition and use of power, and they’ll therefore always place politics over principle.

Of course, if somehow radical Democrats in the White House and Congress get a more radical plan to a vote, then it will be tougher on her. But she’ll probably think six years will be enough time to try to make people forget about her vote for that and she’ll take that route. All in all, she has positioned herself well politically on this issue.

This is why Landrieu is willing to brave genuine public appearances while Melancon will not, and why now Melancon’s political career is becoming jeopardized while hers seems untroubled.

Too busy spending, traveling, Melancon dodges citizens

As he inches closer to a desperate U.S. Senate run, the belief that persists with Rep. Charlie Melancon that he can sidestep and fool the Louisiana electorate will not serve him well in that or any future contest.

The latest confirmation of this worldview of his comes from his comments on why he is refusing to meet with large groups of constituents whose presence and statements he can’t control. He claims it is because of a few isolated incidences at these occasions where liberal Democrats have been excoriated by plainspoken yet knowledgeable people motivated only by their genuine concerns about, in the main, a stealth federal government takeover and rationing of the sixth of the U.S. economy that comprises health care. Rather than listen to them, he asserts these actions don’t represent “honest questions.”

Instead, he says he will learn more by listening to presumed constituents handpicked by his organization who will tell him what he wants to hear. This is his version of the schoolyard tactic of shutting his eyes, covering his ears, and, to ensure he can’t hear anything that he doesn’t want to, by shouting loudly and repeatedly, “I don’t see you, I can’t hear you, you’re not here, go away!”

Particularly ironic about his lame rejoinder is that, by his own statements, he should have nothing to worry about since he voted against in committee a version of the Democrats’ health care plans which has the objectionable elements feared by a majority of the public. However, that’s because he fears they will ask him why he voted for a procedural move that allowed an amendment to the bill for taxpayer money potentially to fund elective abortions, in order to set things up so that later enough Democrats would be available to pass the whole thing despite his vote against.

And any meeting could allow the opportunity for questioners to publicize others of his brazen acts of misdirection as well. He foams at the mouth trying to get people to believe he is a rabid “Blue Dog,” i.e. Democrat who believes in fiscal constraint. Instead, he votes for the biggest increase in the federal budget deficit in history and then uses historical ignorance to try to defend himself. Also, he sticks taxpayers with hundreds of thousands of dollars in travelling expenses ostensibly to study “global warming” when he could have learned as much or more without gallivanting around and thereby not contributed to the production of greenhouse gases caused by his jet-setting.

This current excuse only represents yet another episode where Melancon says one thing that tries to distract the public from what he means which is another thing entirely, joining other recent demonstration of his constituents’ inability to trust him. Con Man Melancon doesn’t want to hear from you but he wants you to only hear what he’s trying to peddle – and it’s not the truth. Melancon doesn’t care about what you want, only what he wants, and that’s to get elected to some federal office somewhere so he can keep careening around the world on useless junkets and to lick lovingly the faces of liberal Democrats like the lap dog that he is. You’re just a thing to be used in this cosmology of his. As such, the silence he tries to impose surrounding the performance of his job in reality speaks volumes about his con game he employs in carrying it out.

Jindal budgeting plan may lack will to overcome politics

It’s old wine in new bottles. It’s been tried elsewhere with little results. But that doesn’t mean that Louisiana shouldn’t take a shot with it, as long as it maintains realistic expectations about what it can and cannot do.

Gov. Bobby Jindal apparently has turned to an old pal to help the state winnow away projected massive projected budget deficits over the next three years, using an old strategy. Rolfe McCollister, a backer of Jindal’s for years and publisher of the Baton Rouge Business Report, has been enlisted to raise money to support an effort to improve the state budgeting process. McCollister leads Believe In Louisiana, an interest group that typically has backed the Jindal public policy agenda.

The strategy to be employed they call “outcome-based budgeting,” although it goes by many other names. Its idea is to create an overall budgetary benchmark. This establishes a pot of money for distribution to government. Then, all functions of government are broken down into discrete units and the activities related to them calculated with their cost figures. Each function then is rank ordered from most to least important. Finally, activities are funded starting at the top and moving down the list until the available money is exhausted, after which those activities are not funded and thereby not pursued by government. Another variant would set for different service levels using different amounts of money. Still another determines what will be considered the priorities, and then finds the money to fulfill as many as possible.

To facilitate this, the state has spent a (relatively) small amount of money to hire David Osborne, a leading proponent of the technique who gained fame for his “reinventing government” rubric in the 1990s, borrowing from ideas that had been around for a quarter-century previously. These plans are all well and good, but the reality of the situation is this is a very hard row to hoe with the threat of overinflated expectations.

The single biggest mistake made in these kinds of campaigns is failure to understand that, at a fundamental level, you cannot “reinvent” government. This idea is that procedures in government’s operation can be implemented to increase its efficiency and to save substantially. In a word, that is unattainable because of the very nature of government. It is attuned to achieving not greater “efficiency,” or increasing output with the same or reduced input, but with “effectiveness,” or completing judged satisfactorily a task regardless of the amount of resources used. Efficiency can be achieved at the margins, but never in great quantity because, by definition without a profit motive to provide incentives needed for efficient behavior, government inherently is wasteful.

Additionally, the budgeting strategy requires a strong will on the part of implementers to put aside politics in decision-making. Right now in Louisiana there are many programs that either deliver little to the state and/or because of the mix of payers and beneficiaries needlessly cost much more than they should. (Perhaps the most expensive example is the case mix methodology for reimbursements to nursing homes regarding Medicaid payments that forces into them many people who don’t need such an intense level of care that could be done much more cheaply in home or community settings, and allows the industry to charge the taxpayers $20 million a year for empty beds.) Political decisions where certain interests have legislative allies who funnel them the money with little regard to efficiency or priority prop up this wasteful spending. It won’t be enough for Jindal to have a steely resolve to deal with these kinds of situations; also, a number of legislators will have to join him to tamp down political influences that would interfere with the use of this strategy.

Given the state’s history, one should be leery that the political will exists here to see this strategy through to its end. Louisiana is not alone in this regard: many states have talked about this, but few have gone so far as to try it and actually in the form in which it was intended (usually succeeding precisely because extreme budgetary difficulties were at hand). Still, given the magnitude of the impending crisis, it’s worth taking a shot. And if Jindal actually could pull it off in a meaningful way, given the obstacles it would rank as one of the greatest, if not the single greatest, policy achievement of any governor in the state’s history.

LA media outlet abrogates duty on health deabte coverage

Pres. Barack Obama’s fading radical shift to universal, government provided health care coverage hit the beachhead of Louisiana in an effort to revive its flagging fortunes, courtesy of an eager front group and a lazy newspaper.

The Times-Picayune published a story of a study released by a group known as Families USA. The study argued that in Louisiana for almost a decade health care premiums rose more quickly than family incomes, and said how to change that was by more emphasis on preventative care, better management of chronic conditions, increased coordination, not enough regulation of health insurance, reversal of too little competition in the insurance market requiring more regulation and through creation of a publicly-funded insurance option, and reduced cost shifting from the uninsured to the insured by forcibly increasing coverage.

If this sounds familiar, it is because it mimics the socialist agenda of Obama on health care. This should be no surprise, because Families USA since its founding has been an outspoken advocate for the liberal public policy agenda when it comes to health care – something not noted by the newspaper. It receives the vast majority of its funding from the labor movement, has relentlessly criticized market-based solutions to improvement of coverage, and it’s no accident that when then-Sen. Obama famously proclaimed America would see (presumably by his hand) universal coverage by 2012, it was at this organization’s conference.

Adley urging may cause more waste of taxpayer funds

State Sen. Robert Adley has gone on another fishing expedition, and if history is any guide it will end up being a waste of taxpayer dollars.

Adley became perturbed a couple of months ago over the content of a blog associated with the governor’s Division of Administration that he claimed broke state law by having content favoring issues supported by Gov. Bobby Jindal being financed by state money. The office has presented a detailed defense showing how the relevant statute is not being violated, but Adley has persisted and appears to have gotten the matter to be taken up by the state’s Ethics Board at its next meeting nest week.

The problem is, Adley has a history of making spurious ethics violations charges. In 2007, in a bizarre incident Shreveport demographer and for-hire political consultant Elliot Stonecipher twice on radio said a former state representative, that official’s daughter, a former state senate candidate, and another area political consultant violated ethics laws. Stonecipher had only hearsay evidence. Despite this flimsiness, Adley said he would bring a complaint against the former state Rep. Mike Powell to the Board. And nothing happened, nor has Adley ever issued an apology for publicizing his unfounded suspicions of Powell.

Melancon's hot air worse than emissions from his junket

As if he’s not gotten a number of his constituents riled over his tacit, if not actual, support for the liberal Democrat agenda, now Rep. Charlie Melancon has found he had to explain why he participated in a Congressional junket – records of which were buried by his majority party – that cost the taxpayers in the neighborhood of $500,000. And in doing so he managed to sound silly and hypocritical simultaneously.

Because of the designed obscurity of the information, the Wall Street Journal got the story out about the semi-working vacation around the beginning of 2008 only in early August of this year. Melancon and several other Members made a grand tour of the South Pacific and Antarctica, which included opportunities to surf, snorkel, scuba, and frolic with penguins, among other things. The ostensible purpose of the trip, which included spouses (Melancon’s being one of them) and staffers, was to gain a better understanding of global warming and to review use of federal dollars, such as by peering through a $271 million telescope at the South Pole.

Melancon apparently hoped the story would blow over but found last week that he had to make some sort of defense of this profligacy on other people’s money. On the incident he spoke, “Louisiana is losing a football field of land every half-hour due to coastal erosion and rising sea levels. Our very survival depends on reversing this trend.”

Given that Melancon made a Louisiana reference in his excuse, one must wonder just how thick is his skull. After all, it would have been a whole lot cheaper to him to drive, maybe even take a helicopter, to any of innumerable places where he could have sat for a half hour to watch a 100x40 yard patch of his district disappear due to global warming. He didn’t have to stick working people with tens of thousands of dollars in costs to travel halfway around the world just to get that point through his head.

And if he truly was concerned about global warming, then with this trip why did he allegedly stimulate more of it? After all, the greenhouse gas emissions spewed as a result of this jaunt that he believes cause the very global warming he claimed he was worried about and wanted to study about would have been far fewer if he had just confined himself to a drive to the coast.

The information revolution is a wonderful thing and perhaps Melancon should take advantage of it to reduce his production of those gases. Instead of having to see the telescope at the bottom of the Earth, for example, he might have chosen to read a report about it or, if he wanted to get really fancy, maybe some video conferencing with the scientists there. And if he had such a hankering to get postmarks from the station, he could have asked the scientists to mail him the information from there.

Still, the greenhouse gases Melancon’s trip emitted pale in comparison to the hot air coming out of his mouth about it. In reality, Melancon took it because he could, his constituents would pay for it, and thought it wouldn’t cost him politically. (It should be noted many in Congress from both parties exhibit Melancon’s arrogance on this matter.) This sojourn was not cost effective for taxpayers in any imaginable sense, and his opposing claim of that further demonstrates just how out of touch Melancon is with the citizenry of his district.