Sunday, February 05, 2012
   
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  • Louisiana Voters Divided Among 217 Political Parties

    Louisiana Voters Divided Among 217 Political Parties The Louisiana Secretary of State carefully records the political party voters choose when they register to vote, which is how Louisiana's voter roll came to include 217 political parties, 86 which have only one member.  Included in that list is the Bull Moose Party, with its five members, 12 Jedis, 20  members of the Banana Party, one Monarchist, 16 Whigs, two Cajuns and a list of equally amusing party choices.  Read Gannett's Mike Hasten's hilarious account of those who list their party registration as "other" at the link below.

    Written on Monday, 16 January 2012
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The Purple Veil

The Purple Veil

When Lindy Boggs went to Washington with her husband the young Congressman from Louisiana, she was 24-years-old and FDR was President.  Turned away at the door of a Congressional hearing where Congressman Hale Boggs was delivering a speech for appearing to be too young to belong there, she remembered a New Orleans woman telling her the most sophisticated thing a woman could wear was a purple veil.  After a quick trip home to pin a purple veil on her hat, she returned to be ushered to the front of the hearing without question or hesitation, taking her place among Washington's power circles  for the next 70 years.  Look through the Purple Veil for a collection of political observations, stories, rumors,  anecdotes and insight  presented for your reading pleasure. 

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Sunday, 13 March 2011

Who Killed the LA Democratic Party?

The Louisiana Democratic Party is dead. Let’s don’t waste time arguing that point. Let’s just admit it and talk about the mystery of how it happened. After all, everyone loves a good whodunit story. With Democratic officials across the state defecting to the Republican Party on an almost weekly basis, the talk on the street among rank and file Democrats is who is responsible for the mass exodus, and there seems to be plenty of blame to go around. Here are the suspects I'm most often hearing. 
Let’s start with President Barack Obama and this southern state’s difficulty with race relations. While publicly state politicians focus on differences with his health care and offshore drilling policies, the more racist criticism is left to those who quietly email jokes around about his everything from his religion to his place of birth to his wife. But the end result is that many Louisiana elected officials are just not comfortable being associated with Obama and relate more to the white male conservatives on the national Republican scene.
Next up would be Democratic State Party Chairman Buddy Leach, a likeable man but still a product of a bygone era of good old boy politics. Leach is serving his party for the right reason – he is a populist with a sincere care for helping working people and believes in the Democratic principles. But he also enjoyed the advantage of starting his own elections off with personal funding, so he is not as well versed in how to build support for the state party and a professional, energetic staff to run it, and this is one of the key areas where the state Republicans excel.   He also has the unfortunate timing of taking over the chairmanship when much of the damage had been done and there were few Democrats willing to step up with him.
Did former Governor Kathleen Blanco start the slow death of the state party? Possibly. She and husband Raymond “Coach” Blanco never played party politics, building a coalition that included Republican support in her native Acadiana, and she never took any steps to lead the party during her four years as Governor.
What about current Governor Bobby Jindal? He is by far the most partisan Governor we have had in recent history, and he and his staff play politics with appointments, funding and just about everything else. Legislators who want to move up don’t necessarily need his endorsement, which has proved ineffective, but they do need the access and support from the Fourth Floor of the Capital, and it's easier with that "R" behind their names. 
Senator Mary Landrieu and her brother, former Lieutenant Governor and current New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu, are two of the last standing Democrats to be elected statewide, but neither has ever been able to turn a personal ability to get elected into general support for the state party. Both are traditional Democrats and white voters who like them overlook that, while those who do not use them to further polarize the electorate. The Landrieus support the party to keep themselves close to Democratic African American voters who are much needed for them to be elected, but have never been able to help build a coalition of white Democrats within the party or to effectively lead the party from their positions as the top elected Democrats in the state.  
Ironically, that is primarily because of a feud which did as much to derail the party as any of the above, and that was former Democratic State Party Chairman Chris Whittington’s ongoing fight to hold onto the chairmanship against the efforts of both Landrieus, who tried to bring new leadership in who they felt they could work with when they recognized that Whittington was quite possibly driving the bus off a cliff.  For Whittington, moving the party forward ran second to him holding onto the chairmanship, so his focus was on appointing committee members loyal to him to fill vacancies, assuring he had the votes to hold on. It took Leach to negotiate a very public coup d'état which resulted in Whittington finally stepping down to hand the chairmanship over to him, but unfortunately by then, the Landrieus had moved on to focus on their own viability and left Leach holding a bag that contained a fractured state party, the result of that aforementioned bus wreck.    
If you have some thoughts on who you think is guilty in this caper, we’re interested in hearing from you. And as always, just whisper in my ear and we’ll keep this between you and me….behind the purple veil.
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Wednesday, 10 March 2010

Family Forum Takes on Reapportionment

The mission of the Louisiana Family Forum is “to persuasively present biblical principles in the centers of influence on issues affecting the family…”
 
So where, may I ask, does it say in the Bible that you shall scatter the majority black legislative districts in New Orleans throughout the state in order to form a more conservative state? Where does it say that our state legislature should redraw our representative districts, not based on an official population count, but by asking themselves, what would Jesus do?
 
Because that is what, in its divine wisdom (no pun intended) the Louisiana Family Forum has proposed. Having teamed with African American State Senator Elbert Guillory, they have developed their own reapportionment plan for Louisiana, getting a little ahead of this year’s census, and are actively promoting it around the state. 
 
They call it “demographic equity”, but it’s really a plan to shift African American representation to rural areas and merge black districts in New Orleans to reduce that city’s voting clout. New Orleans officials see it as an assault on the state’s more liberal voting region with a plan to dilute voting power by anyone who does not subscribe to the conservative agenda of the Family Forum. 
 
Guillory pitches it as a plan that recognizes that African Americans left New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and settled in other areas of Southwest Louisiana. 
 
Let’s lift the purple veil from “demographic equity”. The reapportionment districts they have proposed were drawn by their political consultant, Dan Richey, who served as the state’s first Abstinence Czar under Governor Mike Foster, urging high school students not to have sex. 
 
Everyone has a right to an opinion, but if this group wasn’t the powerful religious lobby, but some liberal leaning organization out to manipulate our representative government, we would have an American jihad on our hands. Fortunately, Senator Guillory and the Family Forum have not found much support down at the Capitol. But they’re out there pushing their plan a full year before the legislature is set to reapportion the state based on census data…so you can’t count them out before the count is in. 
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The Pelican Republic debuts as a compilation of diverse viewpoints from different places and ideologies.  You may find that The Boiling Frog frets over societal values while The Purple Veil delves into personalities; Politique Deux Centimes digs around Acadiana while Anonymous Rex keeps Louisiana in the DC picture and The Lively Pelican weighs in with more blabber from the Crescent City region. 

For those aspiring scribes out there with something to say, send your guest  blog to pelicanrepublic@politicsla.com.
  
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