When or if the candidates for lieutenant governor get around to facing each other in debate, the key points of discussion, judging from their TV commercials, will not be culture, recreation or tourism. Those are the chief operational duties of the No. 2 office, but were only added in the 1974 constitution in order to give that official something to do while waiting around for something to happen to No. 1. With no governor’s race to speak of this year, the contest between Lt. Gov. Jay Dardenne and Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser becomes the big one, all the more so because of the career trajectory of the current governor. Then add in the political intrigue of Sen. David Vitter’s all-out drive for Nungesser, in part seen as payback for Dardenne’s not endorsing Vitter for re-election last year, after entertaining talk of running himself. What’s more, Nungesser claims Gov. Bobby Jindal encouraged him to oppose Dardenne. Jindal lamely distanced himself from the remark, saying he always encourages good people to run for office because it’s good for democracy, but he denied recruiting Nungesser for the challenge. Nungesser seems hardly to need recruitment to seize the political opportunity of a lifetime by taking timely advantage of the lavish media attention he commanded during the BP oil spill. According to political chatter, Jindal may have been concerned that Nungesser was angling to run against him this year, and perhaps Vitter got the same vibe last year. If so, it could explain why Vitter and Jindal, who have so little to do with each other, would agree that it would be a swell idea for Nungesser to run against Dardenne. Read the full column here.
(John Maginnis publishes LaPolitics Weekly, a newsletter on Louisiana politics, at lapolitics.com.)
