After having a front row seat to the theater of Louisiana politics over the past 12 months, columnist Jeremy Alford says he’s been asking himself more than ever why someone would run for public office.
“Our politicians talk their way into and out of the stickiest situations, sometimes dragging their wives and friends into the fray. Many are constantly ankle-deep in foot-in-mouth disease,” Alford writes in his latest column. “Yet through it all, in their speeches and remarks during the past year, our elected officials still managed to offer up wisdom, humor and folly, even if they had no idea what they were talking about.”
As for why someone would run for public office in the first place, House Ways and Means Chairman Joel Robideaux told Alford that his wife reminds him all the time of a midlife crisis avoided, or rather embraced.
”I turned 40 and instead of saying, ‘I’m going to go buy a motorcycle,’ I said, ‘I’m going to go do it, bite the bullet,’ and 10 years later here I am,” Robideaux said.
Alford says 2014 taught us all that lawmakers’ better halves play a very big role in their decision-making. As Sen. Robert Adley put it earlier this year: “My wife says I have two choices: I can be right or I can be happy.” And when Congressman Vance McAllister was caught on video kissing a woman who was not his wife, Treasurer John Kennedy offered this advice: “I would resign, if my wife let me live that long.”
“Kennedy, who has flirted with running for governor and attorney general over the past year, finally lost patience not long ago with my persistent questions about when he’ll announce,” Alford writes. “‘I’ll be announcing that I’m running for my life,’ he snapped.” Read the full column.
Jeremy Alford publishes LaPolitics Weekly, a newsletter on Louisiana politics, at LaPolitics.com. Follow him on Twitter, or on Facebook. He can be reached at JJA@LaPolitics.com.
