As if John Breaux’s citizenship wasn’t hard enough to figure out, the latest campaign puzzler centers around who are the real Democrats in the race for governor.
In Louisiana, party labels have long been matters more of style and convenience than of philosophy or loyalty. So few voters seemed to notice or care when state Sen. Walter Boasso, a Republican from Chalmette who is running for governor, joined the Democratic Party last week.
What little curiosity his move piqued was that it was the reverse of the usual Louisiana pattern of Democrats changing into Republicans. Yet Boasso has been there, done that. He started his political life as a Democrat, even serving on the party’s parish executive committee, before seeing the light, or opportunity, and switching to the GOP in the 1990s and running for the Senate.
He might have been happily re-elected as such until he felt called by some inner voice to be the next governor. Trouble was, Congressman Bobby Jindal stood in his way, backed by most of the party’s elected officials and, according to polls, voters.
To sort out competing ambitions, most states have party primaries or nominating conventions, but not Louisiana. When resourceful Republican leaders gathered enough signatures from state central committee members to declare an endorsement for Jindal, Boasso cried foul but knew his days in the party of Lincoln were numbered.
When he announced his conversion last month, he spared us the usual I’m-not-leaving-the-party-the-party-left-me twaddle, instead dismissing partisan labels as irrelevant to the larger question of how to get elected.
Certainly, Boasso has a larger opening as a Democrat, if only because its first candidate, Public Service Commissioner Foster Campbell, espouses traditional populist values from which many moderate-to-conservative party politicians have distanced themselves.
Campbell was quick to charge that Boasso was no friend of working people and won’t get their votes. The new Democrat may have left behind his old party but not his big-businessman sensibilities, Campbell said, recalling the senator’s impassioned opposition to raising the state minimum wage last year.
Boasso’s voting record could pose a problem, but to help overcome it he has brought with him his big businessman’s checkbook to ensure his message is heard.
Also crowding Boasso in the Republican Party was another big check-writer, businessman John Georges, who has lent his campaign $5.5 million to top the $5.3 million that Jindal has raised. Georges has never sought elected office but has helped many Republicans get there, including President Bush, through his generous campaign contributions. Like a lot of Republican contributors playing at his level, Georges has covered the other side of the table some by giving to Democrats, too.
He was called on that last week when a Republican operative sent out an e-mail enumerating Georges’ Democratic contributions, both to out-of-state and in-state candidates, including Congressman William Jefferson of New Orleans.
Other major GOP players whose businesses are affected by government practice similar ecumenism, but they aren’t running for governor.
Meanwhile, the Republican most being treated like a big-time Democratic politician is Jindal, following endorsements he received last week from the Louisiana Sheriffs’ Association and the parish assessors voting as a group. For these ringleaders of the traditional “courthouse gangs,” to get onboard so early with the Republican frontrunner shows their innate sense of timing for knowing when the train is about to leave the station.
The sheriffs and assessors might bring few Democratic votes with them, but almost as important are the ones who will stay home on Election Day if the sheriffs aren’t running the state Democratic Party’s get-out-the-vote operations.
Amidst all this partisan confusion comes the recent hint dropped by Gov. Kathleen Blanco that she might reconsider her decision not to run. More likely, it was a politician’s hard-wired reflex to never say never. Or perhaps it was just her recognition, upon surveying the field of Democratic contenders and pretenders, that she would do as well as any of them. And all she would have to change is her mind.
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