Ever since her vote helped to pass President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act in 2010, Sen. Mary Landrieu’s Republican critics have used its unpopularity as a key weapon against her. Now, at the dawn of her re-election cycle, she looks to use the health care issue to her advantage, starting by strongly criticizing Gov. Bobby Jindal’s refusal to accept the expansion of Medicaid or to set up state insurance exchanges. “Simply refusing to engage in the process is not leadership,” she reproved the governor in a personal letter, released by her press team early this week. With Roll Call handicapping her re-election in 2014 as a “50-50 proposition” and without a declared opponent, she is not waiting to be attacked but rather is targeting Jindal for the first strike of the election cycle. She figures that even if he does not run against her—aiming for the presidential nomination instead—he will be campaigning hard for whoever does.
—It was expected that U.S. Attorney Jim Letten would be replaced soon, but with his office under investigation for prosecutorial misconduct and the clock ticking on a possible indictment of former New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, he picked the right time to leave on his own and resign on Thursday. Under an interim replacement from Virginia sent by Attorney General Eric Holder, the Eastern District Office can proceed, without the political cloud, with its investigation of Nagin. The office has accepted two guilty pleas from businessmen who admitted to bribing an unnamed public official widely thought to be the former mayor. The statute of limitations for the bribery charges runs out in January.
They said it: “I happen to be in a unique business where winning and losing is the basis of the entire business. … So I don’t cry when I lose.” —Las Vegas casino owner Sheldon Adelson, who gave millions to Republican presidential candidates and met with Gov. Bobby Jindal recently, in The Wall Street Journal.
(John Maginnis publishes LaPolitics Weekly, a newsletter on Louisiana politics, at LaPolitics.com.)
