A reminder that TFC stands for This Fucking City. I say that every time something goes haywire in New Orleans. It reflects the proper relationship between a New Orleanian and this city: love-hate like Robert Mitchum’s hand tattoos in Night of the Hunter.
I guess I watched too many old movies since my last column. I’ll try not to riff on them too much but you already knew I was a film buff from my Louisiana movie list.
In this column, I’ll take a look at The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of TFC as we start a new decade. Life in TFC often feels like a Sergio Leone Spaghetti Western. I know I promised to skip the movie references but sometimes I cannot help myself. Besides, this is one is in the title, so I’m entitled to use it…
Before I lose my audience completely, let’s start off with The Good.
Carnival Time: You may recall that I love Carnival. I didn’t hit the streets on Twelfth Night, but I was there in spirit. It used to be a relatively quiet evening with only the Phunny Phorty Phellows rolling but several other groups have joined in the festivities in the last decade. I like the fact that neither Joan of Arc nor Champs Elysse rumbles on the Uptown route. We need some calm before the parade storm.
Dr. A and I live not far off the Uptown parade route in a top-secret 13th Ward location. Parade proximity was one of the reasons we bought where we did. Our hood has gentrified since Katrina and the Federal Flood so there’s always some newbie who is shocked, shocked that we’re inside the parade box. Uh oh, I feel another classic film reference coming on:
One Twelfth Night event I missed this year was the grand re-opening of the King Cake Hub whose proprietors Will and Jennifer Samuels are good friends of mine. They sell King Cakes from a wide variety of bakeries all in one location.
The King Cake Hub has a cool location at The Mortuary on Canal Street, which serves as a haunted house in the fall and used to be a genuine mortuary. Perhaps these King Cake babies should be dressed as wee ghosts, beats the hell out of corpses. I hereby apologize for that tasteless joke about tasty King Cakes. The Pelicans mascot objects:
King Cake Hub honcho Will Samuels is something of a promotional genius. He’s the Bill Veeck of King Cake. Veeck was the flashy baseball mogul who operated the Cleveland Indians, St. Louis Browns, and Chicago White Sox back in the day. He was famous for promotiona linnovations such as exploding scoreboards, bat days, and, most outrageously, having little person Eddie Gaedel bat in a game. On a more serious note, Veeck’s Indians were the first American League team to integrate. Both Veeck and that player, Larry Doby, are members of the Baseball Hall of Fame. I’m not sure if Will is a Hall of Famer yet but he’s certainly a contender.
While we’re on the subject of sports ball, the next segment is a mixed bag of The Bad and The Ugly. I realize it’s out of the strict order dictated by the Sergio Leone title, but it flows. Never mess with the flow, yo.
The Sporting Scene: It’s a good thing that Twelfth Night was the day after the New Orleans Saints 26-20 playoff loss to the Minnesota Vikings. For much of the second half, it looked as if the Saints would win ugly but instead it was an ugly, sloppy loss. There was another missed call by the refs, but our guys played poorly. The Vikings were the better team on the eleventh day of Christmas.
Football savant Drew Brees looked his age during this game. He committed two crucial turnovers that helped seal the Saints fate. The most frustrating thing was that the Saints coulda woulda shoulda have won ugly but blew it in the same venue the Rolling Stones did not play this song last year:
Losing ugly resulted in Saints fans drowning their sorrows with King Cake. Can one drown anything with baked goods? They have both wet and dry ingredients, after all. That’s an existential question for the ages.
The LSU Tigers will play in the national championship game next Monday in New Orleans. I think this is our year and most of the country seems to be pulling for the Tigers because of gruffly lovable head coach Ed Orgeron. I’ve already written an Ode To Coach O, here’s a highlights video:
The Bad and Ugly in this instance is that the man I call the Impeached Insult Comedian, Donald Trump, has announced plans to attend the game. He reckons that he’ll get fewer boos in a game between two red state teams: LSU and Clemson. If anyone reading this is going to the game, don’t forget to boo President* Pennywise when his name is dropped, or his orange visage appears on the Jumbotron. Boo anything that resembles an Impeached Insult Comedian with a dead nutria pelt atop his head. Thanks in advance.
The championship game could also be called the Tussle of the Tigers since the two teams share a nickname. Perhaps Coach O should modify his stock phrase and say “Go Tigers. LSU. not Clemson.”
We conclude this out-of-Leone-order (disorderly?) post with The Bad, which is also The Ugly.Life is complicated in TFC: This Fucking City. One could even say life here is like a Spaghetti Western, it’s bloody, saucy, and never dull.
Never Trust A Real Estate Developer: One of many reasons I opposed Donald Trump’s election was that he’s a real estate developer. In many ways the Con-Man-in-Chief is the quintessential real estate developer. They exaggerate, lie, bamboozle, swindle, and do whatever it takes to get their way.
If you live in New Orleans, you know who I’m referring to: the developers of the Hard Rock Hotel. The names are omitted to protect the guilty. The building collapsed on October 12, 2019 and they recently submitted a slow-mo demolition plan to the city. If the developer’s whims are heeded, the building will not come down until December of this year. That’s right, some 13 months after the collapse. TFC: This Fucking City.
Adding insult to injury, the developers want to demolish 3 adjacent buildings that they also own. They claim that it’s for safety but when real estate developers are involved, cynicism and caution are in order. It will give the developers a bigger footprint on the collapse site, which appears to benefit them financially. They should be punished for this disaster, not rewarded. A reminder, 3 construction workers died in the collapse. The citizens of New Orleans should not help defray the developer’s legal costs.
Mayor Latoya Cantrell has indicated support for the developer’s demolition plans. I hope she will reconsider unless and until independent engineering analysis can prove that the other buildingsmust come down for reasons of public safety, not private profit.
The demolition timeline is absurd. It’s high time for the city to stop being played for suckers by real estate developers. There’s no good there, only the bad and the ugly. TFC: This Fucking City
Repeat after me: Never trust a real estate developer.
The last word goes to Ennio Morricone with the theme song for The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly:
When radio talk show host Jim Engster introduced the Louisiana Family Forum’s executive director Rev. Gene Mills as the featured speaker at the January 6th meeting of the Baton Rouge Press Club, he noted that “(Mills) is intricately involved in Louisiana political life.”
And certainly readers of this publication, as well as those who have followed its publisher Lamar White, Jr., in addition to this writer, in prior reporting venues, will be aware of Mills’ determination to dissolve the wall of separation between church and state, in order to impose a theocratic government.
On this most recent occasion, Bro. Gene shared his sentiments on the contest for Louisiana Speaker of the House: He prefers Rep. Sherman Mack (R-Albany) over Rep. Clay Schexnayder (R-Gonzales). Mack has established an overall record of voting in accordance with Louisiana Family Forum policy preferences 95% of the time, while Schexnayder is rated at a mere 75% on the LFF lifetime scoring.
“I predict Mack will have the votes,” Mills said. “I also predict Gov. John Bel Edwards will have to move to the center or center right over this term.”
Ponder
that second statement for a moment.
Mills also shared his disappointment that his “good friend” Eddie Rispone lost the governor election, saying he had taken the construction magnate to the Angola Prison Rodeo. Mills claimed he’d personally witnessed Rispone “with tears in his eyes when inmates shared their stories of how prison ministry programs had changed their hearts.”
On the other hand, Gov. Edwards has allegedly refused to go with Bro. Gene to the Angola Rodeo, “even though we offered to bring over the biggest, baddest bull from Texas and let Gov. Edwards ride it out at the start of the show,” he claimed, with an edgy laugh.
Asked
for a list of his organization’s policy “wants” for the
legislative session that begins March 9th, Mills was light on
specifics, saying he’s “going to be holding statewide townhall
meetings” over the next couple of months, in order to formalize
LFF’s agenda, and until that process is complete, “it’s
difficult to know.”
“I believe that principles need to prevail and can rule the day, and the best ideas can come from any number of sources. So we ought to be open in communication” he said. “Yet there are some issues that are non-negotiable. The issue of life is one of those.”
Rev. Mills did devote considerable time to the issue wherein his ostensibly nonprofit organization has seen considerable success in its lobbying of the legislature to restrict access to, and affordability of, abortions. He lauded the amicus brief LFF had filed last week in support of the state laws enacted in 2014, including the admitting privileges rule.
The U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments about the constitutionality of those laws, which narrow access to medically-safe abortions almost to the point of impossibility for the procedures to be done anywhere in Louisiana, on March 4th. The case is titled June Medical Services, LLC v. Gee, and Mills vowed to be in D.C. “to support Louisiana’s Attorney General in defense of our laws.”
Despite the fact that the Louisiana Family Forum’s amicus brief supports the side of the case named for her, Bro. Gene couldn’t resist delivering a bit of snark aimed at Louisiana Health Secretary Dr. Rebekah Gee, whose upcoming end-of-month resignation had been announced earlier that very day.
“Maybe she resigned because of this,” Mills said, noting that he had been troubled by her nomination to the post four years ago “because of her past involvement with Planned Parenthood.” But he also acknowledged that Gee was “brought in primarily to oversee the Medicaid expansion” and that it was a task she had “done successfully.”
Hearkening
back to Mills’ prior statement regarding “the issue of life,”
as the LFF director was queried about his stance on state Attorney
General Jeff Landry’s continuing hawkishness toward restarting
executions, especially as this week marks a full decade since
Louisiana last enacted the death penalty. (The problem has been
access to the specific drugs state law requires be used for lethal
injections.)
“I’m not a cheerleader for the death penalty, but I don’t support abolishing it,” he said. “I believe in what the Bible says in Genesis: ‘Whoever sheds man’s blood, by man his blood shall be shed’. I think we need to limit the appeals of those who have received that as a sentence.”
Reflect on that, please, compared with Rev. Mills’ assertion that “the issue of life” is “non-negotiable.”
Perhaps he feels that restricting appeals over a death sentence is tantamount to non-negotiation? Unfortunately, that still leaves the contradiction between believing in an absolute “right to life” for the unborn, and the rightness of sentencing someone to death, unresolved.
Gene mills, lower left, at October 2016 Criminal Justice Reinvestment Task Force meeting. Screenshot by Sue Lincoln.
Brother
Gene, who served on the Louisiana Criminal Justice Reinvestment Task
Force legislatively established in 2016, was also asked whether more
reforms toward reducing Louisiana’s incarceration rate were in the
offing in the 2020 legislative session.
“As
you know, we are back at number one for our incarceration rate, since
Oklahoma made changes in their laws,” he said, and then veered off
to laud the proliferation of chapels within the prison system.
“We
need to change their hearts,” he said, referring to those serving
time for their crimes.
Entrance to ICE detention center, Jena, Louisiana. Courtesy LaSalle Corrections, Inc.
Following
the luncheon presentation, I asked Rev. Mills for his thoughts on the
burgeoning population of immigrant detainees being held in
Louisiana’s privately-run prisons, and whether the various prison
ministries were endeavoring to monitor humane conditions, including
worship opportunities for the detainees.
“I
am unaware of that,” he said. ‘But I will ask Secretary LeBlanc
about it.”
I
endeavored to explain that, because these people were being held
under federal laws in what are essentially for-profit prisons, the
state’s Department of Corrections has no true jurisdiction.
“Again,
I am unaware, and will have to look into that,” Mills said.
It’s
not surprising that the Louisiana Family Forum director might not be
a regular reader of Mother
Jones,
and so may have missed that publication’s excellent continuing
coverage of the immigrant detainees issues. In particular, there is
the July
2019 report
that ICE was increasing the numbers of facilities and detainees,
particularly in Louisiana, from approximately 2000 in January 2017,
to in excess of 10,000 by mid-2019. And there’s also the December
2019 map
showing immigrant detainees are being held in at least 11 facilities
in Louisiana, nearly all owned or managed by for-profit companies.
But it’s entirely implausible that the head of the Louisiana Family Forum, which has a stated mission “to persuasively present biblical principles in the centers of influence on issues affecting the family through research, communication and networking,” would not not have read or been made aware of a December 6, 2019 opinion article, published in The Advocate, his local paper, which was headlined “Louisiana church leaders: Expanding immigrant detention in Louisiana a tragedy.”
That’s
disingenuous, Brother Gene.
Apart
from his organization’s self-designation as arbiter of the state’s
moral values, as an ordained minister within the Assembly of God
denomination, one might certainly expect Rev. Mills to find the
proliferation of news reports on the proliferation of and profit on
immigrant detainees within this state deeply concerning, and in
decided contradiction of “biblical principles.”
And now that he has been made aware of it, is it possible any part of this will be addressed within the Louisiana Family Forum agenda for the 2020 legislative session?
Susan Broussard, a former CLECO Human Relations Manager and the current Chief of Staff for the City of Alexandria, addresses a public relations class at Louisiana College in 2016. Illustration by the Bayou Brief. Source: Baptist Message
Late Sunday, following our report concerning Alexandria Police Chief Jerrod King’s suspension for posting a public message in support of his officers on his personal Facebook page, an anonymous source provided the Bayou Brief with copies of the City’s “social media policy,” which is actually a set of four different, confusingly-titled documents: Social Media Policy, Social Media Procedure, Employee Social Media Policy, and Media Relations Policy.
The Bayou Brief filed a public records request on late Friday, asking for these documents, among others.
Taken together, the city’s policy is a convoluted, woefully inept, legally problematic, and recklessly punitive series of directives that grossly misapprehends how social media functions and reflects the same kind of restrictive and patronizing approach that was implemented last year by Louisiana College. After the Bayou Brief published a leaked copy of LC’s social media policy, the small Southern Baptist school generated national criticism, even earning the ire of a conservative columnist at Christianity Today.
“Since I don’t intend on losing my job,” one Alexandria city employee told me, “my Facebook will now just be nothing but cat videos and pictures of my grandkids. I’m serious.”
All four of the new policy documents, at least two of which are publicly accessible through the city website, were written by Susan Broussard, a controversial former HR manager at CLECO, a privately-held electric utility behemoth, and current Chief of Staff for another CLECO alumnus, Alexandria Mayor Jeff Hall. Unlike Hall, who departed CLECO on good terms, Broussard’s final year at the company was marked by acrimony and contention with the incoming CEO Bill Fontenot, which had been widely-known among her former colleagues and among much of the local business community.
Incidentally, Broussard is a graduate of Louisiana College and a member of its Board of Visitors. Four years ago, she was profiled in the Baptist Message for teaching a class on public relations at the school.
“If you can’t execute an email without grammatical errors, or if you can’t express your thoughts and ideas, people will judge you on that. In many careers, if you can’t write you’re done for. You’ve go to be able to write,” she said at the time, accurately.
Although the Bayou Brief can now confirm that Mayor Hall’s office privately asserted Chief King was being suspended for violating Broussard’s policy by using his personal Facebook account to publicly share a message of support and camaraderie with his fellow officers, the policy does not contain any provision that specifically prohibited him from doing so. Instead, Mayor Hall appears to be relying on a couple of ambiguously-worded “guiding principles” contained in the document titled “Employee Social Media Policy.”
Since the advent of social media in 2004-2005, only one Alexandria city employee has been forced to resign for content she had posted under her personal Facebook account. I’m referring, of course, to my former colleague, Von Jennings, who called a downtown waitress a “racist piece of shit” after she had offered the simple observation that attendance during a city-run festival had declined since the previous year. Notably, according to at least three of Jennings’ colleagues, she had been provided the opportunity to remain in her job if she simply agreed to send a note of apology to those in the community she had offended.
No one can fault an employer for reprimanding a staffer whose online behavior was toxic or disruptive to their professional operations, as Jennings had been last May. The decision to create a citywide, written “social media policy” was a direct consequence of the experience City Hall had confronted with Jennings.
In the interest of ensuring an informed public, the Bayou Brief is sharing all four of the documents. (Note: The initial document includes a logo from the AEX4King campaign in order to differentiate it from the city’s versions.)
In addition to the provision prohibiting employees from making “personal, individualize (sic) workplace grievances on social media,” they are also instructed to only rely on private social media channels when expressing private complaints and warned that anything and everything they post on private social media accounts may be subject to discipline if it is found to be in violation of the policy. It’s not difficult to spot the fatal flaw.
Alexandria’s policy is nearly the precise opposite of municipal best practices, which encourages employees to share their work experiences online as a way of better informing and educating the public. Rather than policies that make public servants feel as if they should behave like nameless bureaucrats or that they cannot be trusted to share photographs of a project they were a part of putting together, for example, the country’s most successful cities don’t want to muzzle employees; rather, they want their employees to become brand ambassadors— and not just when they are on the clock.
Consider, on the other hand, what Broussard’s language communicates:
In another section, when she provides a list of discriminatory comments that are prohibited, she noticeably fails to include sexual orientation.
Broussard’s section pertaining to communications made by law enforcement is especially confusing, initially asserting that a different set of guidelines applied, then outlining how an APD Public Informations Officer should be appointed, and finally effectively turning all substantive decision-making authority to Cynthia Jardon, a former Town Talk columnist who serves as the City’s PIO and reports directly to Broussard.
For reasons that are not made clear, the policy requires that deference be given to the Fire Chief’s decision on when and whether to speak with the media during “fire and EMS situations,” but in “law enforcement situations,” the Police Chief is not expressly provided with similar authority.
Instead, all requests are directed to the department’s public information officer, who is required to “make every effort to notify the City PIO (Jardon) at the earliest possible time,” Susan Broussard writes.
There may be a perfectly reasonable explanation for the differences in protocol, but considering the recent controversy over Chief Jerrod King (the fire chief’s name is Larry King), it’s hard not to notice.
Finally, on a personal note, nearly a decade ago, when I worked as an assistant for former Alexandria Mayor Jacques Roy, I continued publishing my locally-popular blog site, CenLamar, which received a statewide award in excellence during my final year at City Hall. Occasionally and, for the most part, intentionally, I waded into controversial topics; at the time, my fiercest critic was a viciously racist former klansman. One day, after I decided to remove a post about political corruption, which I had thinly-veiled as fictional, about three hours after it went online, the former klansman pounced, blasting me in the media and calling for me to lose my job.
Here’s how my boss responded:
It was an important learning experience for me, especially because, although the “fictional” post in question wasn’t all that clever- again, it was actually about the need to stand up against political corruption, I had been too cavalier and more than a little naive.
Fortunately, I worked for an elected official who championed our most sacred right in this country, the right to free speech, and alongside a team of people who didn’t believe the only way to prevent bad press was by creating a tyrannical workplace.
Update: 12:58PM CT 01/05/2020— Mayor Hall’s office confirmed that Officer Farrell Gaspard has, in fact, been named Acting Police Chief.
Less than 24 hours after a spokesman for Alexandria, Louisiana Mayor Jeff Hall revealed to KALB, the regional affiliate for both CBS and NBC, that Chief of Police Jerrod King had been placed on “administrative leave” for “personnel reasons,” a group of Alexandria residents quickly launched an aggressive and sophisticated campaign in support of the beleaguered chief. King has led the department for the past 21 months. The Mayor’s Office has not announced who is leading the department in King’s absence; however, there are unofficial reports that Officer Farrell Gaspard was selected.
Thus far, in a span of only six hours, more than 600 people have joined a Facebook page, AEX4King, which encourages members to “share with us your stories, concerns and information regarding the current situation” and to “show your support” for the chief by promoting the page and posting its branding online (AEX is the three-letter code for the city’s airport).
The administrator of the page is Courtney Fall, daughter of Kay Michiels, the former Chief of Staff for the City of Alexandria who finished second to Hall in the 2018 mayor’s race. “I was initially hesitant because I know some people may think I must have a political agenda,” said Fall, who works in the medical supply industry, “But this honestly has nothing to do with sour grapes over the 2018 campaign. This is because Chief King has done a phenomenal job.”
Based on the response, others clearly agree.
Brad and Sheranda Smith of Light It Up, a local billboard company that owns and maintains at least four of the area’s digital billboards, volunteered to use a design from the AEX4King page on one of the company’s most prominent signs near a highly-trafficked stretch of Jackson Street Extension.
Only hours after a spokesman for Alexandria Mayor Jeff Hall announced the city’s chief of police, Jerrod King, had been suspended, Courtney Michiels Fall and a group of other Alexandria residents launched a fairly sophisticated campaign in support of the beleaguered police chief, which includes a suite of branded digital images that they encourage people to share online.
A person familiar with the situation claimed that Chief King was required to turn over his vehicle, keys, and cell phone. Another person with direct knowledge told the Bayou Brief that King was also instructed in writing that he was prohibited from communicating with anyone currently working for the Alexandria Police Department.
During the past year, Mayor Hall has struggled to address a dramatic exodus of officers, many of whom left the department after qualifying for retirement. According to its most recent report, the APD has 26 vacancies, or, put another way, there are currently 140 officers in the 166 officer police force. In 2018 and 2019, a total of 40 officers either retired, took another job, or were terminated, and all told, when you do not include officers who retired or were fired, since 2012, a total of 43 officers left voluntarily; 23 (or 58%) of whom took another job in law enforcement.
To be sure, law enforcement agencies across the country are facing similar challenges. According to a 2019 survey conducted by the Police Executive Research Forum, 63% of police departments have experienced a decline in recruitment, a problem that threatens to only worsen in the next two years as 15.5% of officers are expected to retire.
According to police union representatives, there is a straightforward reason the APD has had difficulty filling job vacancies: Low pay. The starting salary for an officer in Alexandria is $34,000 a year. By comparison, Lafayette recently approved increasing the base salary it offers to rookie officers from $34,000 to $40,000 a year. In early November, the Lafayette police union called attention to the situation in Alexandria by posting a link to their recruitment website on the APD’s Facebook page, later issuing a statement urging Alexandria officials to increase police pay.
After finishing in a distant second place in 2014, Alexandria Mayor Jeff Hall was elected in 2018 following former three-term Mayor Jacques Roy’s decision not to seek another four years in office. Prior to to his election as mayor, Hall served two terms as a state representative. Photo by the Bayou Brief.
Shortly after taking office, Mayor Hall announced a sweeping, across-the-board 2% pay raise for all city employees, but because police compensation is negotiated and contracted through its union, any changes to their pay structure need to be included in their contract with the city, which is set to expire in 2021. Notably, Mayor Hall expressed his willingness to amend the current contract in order to provide for the pay raise, but union leadership is concerned that it may weaken their bargaining position next year, when the entire contract is set to be renegotiated.
Despite these challenges, King has enjoyed widespread approval for his leadership of the embattled department and, until his suspension was announced on Friday, had an unblemished record in his 23 years with the APD.
Prior to joining the Alexandria Police Department in 1997, Jerrod King spent six years working as a military policeman and investigator for the United States Army. Four years ago, he received a Master in Criminal Justice from the University of Cincinnati, finishing at the top of his class. Today, in addition to his job with the APD, King also serves as an adjunct professor of criminal justice at Louisiana College and Upper Iowa University.
In 2003, King received national attention and praise for heroism after 25-year-old Anthony Molette ambushed police officers who were attempting to serve him with a warrant at his home on Wise Street in an area of Alexandria known as the Sonia Quarters.
Molette had planned the attack, fatally wounding two APD officers, David Ezernack and Jay Carruth, only seconds after they arrived. King, who was 29 at the time, was one of six officers on the assignment. Immediately after Ezernack was shot, King left his position of cover and ran directly into active fire, in an attempt to move his fellow officer out of danger.
Jerrod King in 1999. Photo credit: Jules Miller, the Town Talk. Source: the Town Talk Archives.
“I laid down next to David (Ezernack) because I could hear the rounds cracking by me,” King recalled to a reporter with Police Magazine nine months later. “I could feel the dirt hit me. He was targeting me and David because I think we were the only ones he could clearly see. I laid down next to David, and the firing stopped for a second.” At that point, King and another officer, Joey Simms, were able to move Ezernack into safety. Five hours later, Ezernack, who had been shot in the throat, passed away at a local hospital. Molette was killed during an ensuing 45-minute long shootout with the police.
Although Mayor Hall’s office has refused to provide any details about why Chief King was suspended, multiple sources with direct knowledge of the decision tell the Bayou Brief that it was ostensibly related to a lengthy, largely positive, and publicly available message King had posted on his personal Facebook page on New Years Eve, which was alleged to be in violation of a newly-enacted social media policy.
Alexandria, Louisiana Chief of Police Jerrod King’s message to members of the Alexandria Police Department. Source: Facebook.
According to a series of online posts by Celeta McCall and her 36-year-old son Tavares Swafford, both long-time residents of Deville, Louisiana, a small community about 20 minutes outside of Alexandria, the criticism of Hall is driven by members of a “shadow government” who are angry with the new mayor for terminating lucrative contracts. The mother-son duo aggressively campaigned in support of Hall on a short-lived radio show.
Aside from vague generalities about the city’s budget, neither McCall nor Swafford have provided any documentation or details to back up their assertions, which amount to a conspiracy theory. Swafford falsely claimed that “a lot of money” was behind the campaign in support of King (in fact, no money has been spent at all) and that King was confirmed as police chief months earlier than he should have been in order to prevent Hall from having the opportunity to hire someone else (in fact, King was officially confirmed in accordance with the timeframe that had been established six months prior).
In his December “State of the Community” address, Hall specifically praised staffers who had been hired under the Roy administration and agreed to remain in their positions after he took office. “We were blessed to inherit an operation that was really doing good all the time,” Hall said. “We wanted to make sure that we continued to provide the basic services of water, electricity, fire and police protection, licensing and permitting, and (to ensure) all those things went on without any interruption. And I’m grateful for that. I’m pleased many veteran staff members stayed on board and helped us with the transition and with the new administration moving forward. Their experiences and leadership have been critical and a critical part of our success in being able to have a smooth transition. I believe this mix of new and veteran city leaders has worked well for the City of Alexandria.”
While Mayor Hall, along with Chief of Staff Susan Broussard, may have justified King’s suspension by asserting a violation of the mayor’s policy on social media, there seems to be a widespread belief among King’s supporters that both Hall and Broussard have been looking for any reason, however flimsy it may be, to remove King.
Some believe that King’s suspension may be related to rumors that he refused to hire a candidate Mayor Hall apparently had recommended or over Hall’s decision to reject the promotion of a veteran officer to Deputy Chief.
During a televised city council committee meeting in late November, King spoke directly about ensuring the APD hires only those who meet the department’s qualification standards. “We will not lower our standards,” King said. “The cost to the city, the liability, (and) the cost to the citizens (are) too great to lower our standards and hire anybody that doesn’t meet the stringent requirements to be an officer today. The job is too important.” Mayor Hall, who was seated only a few feet away, was visibly uncomfortable and avoided making eye contact or even acknowledging the police chief once during King’s nearly 20 minute-long presentation (beginning at the 31-minute mark). The two men were seen briefly speaking with one another after the meeting concluded.
Alexandria, Louisiana Chief of Police Jerrod King (left) addresses the City Council on Nov. 26, 2019 as Mayor Jeff Hall (right) appears visibly uncomfortable. Source: CityofAlexandriaLA.com
Late Friday, the Bayou Brief filed a public records request with the City of Alexandria, asking for, among other things, a copy of the social media policy, which another person described as containing an ambiguous and broadly-worded provision that could be used to discipline any city employee who posts work-related content online.
In the 2006 case Garcetti v. Ceballos, the United States Supreme Court, in a split decision, ruled that public employees are not provided First Amendment protections if their speech is related to the exercise of their job duties. Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the majority, ruled that “the First Amendment does not prohibit managerial discipline based on an employee’s expressions made pursuant to official responsibilities.” However, discipline is only warranted, Kennedy writes, when the speech at issue interferes with the ability to do what is “necessary for their employers to operate efficiently and effectively.”
Importantly, at the time Garcetti was decided, social media was still in its infancy, and the Court’s opinion therefore didn’t provide any guidance for how government bodies should distinguish between public and private speech on social media or whether a personal Facebook page should be considered private, protected speech under the law, nor did it differentiate between employees who are considered public figures or those whose job necessitates they be provided wide latitude in their communications.
King was first hired by former Mayor Jacques Roy to replace outgoing Police Chief Loren Lampert, who now leads the Louisiana District Attorneys Association, in May of 2018, following a lengthy selection process. Six months later, at the conclusion of a routine “working test period,” King was officially confirmed.
Alexandria Mayor Jeff Hall and Police Chief Jerrod King in May 2019. Source: Alexandria Police Department.
“I have seen not one scintilla of evidence that doesn’t confirm to me that Chief Jerrod King is the guy for this job, without question,” Mayor Roy said at the time. Mayor-elect Jeff Hall, who had met with Chief King privately and was included, along with members of his transition team, in discussions with city officials and the selection committee that had recommended King.
Only days before taking office, when Hall was specifically asked if he approved of the proceeding with King’s confirmation, he voiced no objection.
“Chief King is everywhere,” said Courtney Fall. “He’s at every neighborhood meeting, school functions, late night call-outs. He deserves our support.”
All told, in 2019, the Bayou Brief welcomed more than 1.2 million unique visitors to our online home. Some of you showed up to get the scoop on the gubernatorial race. Others arrived to learn about Louisiana’s remarkable history, inimitable culture, and the men and women whose contributions were invaluable but whose stories had been largely forgotten. And many of you came here to read about a storm named Barry.
Lamar White, Jr.
On behalf of our entire team, thank you to all of our readers and to everyone of you who liked, shared, commented, or retweeted our work on social media. Of course, none of our work would be possible without our extraordinary benefactors and supporters. Their generosity allows us the ability to provide all of our content free of charge to readers, without the need for a paywall or a subscription, and free from advertisements and spam mail. Our supporters are all people who share our passion about Louisiana and recognize the enormous value of fact-based, independent journalism and commentary, which is especially critical at a time in which corporate consolidation has decimated local newsrooms across the state and disinformation has become rampant online.
In 2019, the Bayou Brief‘s reporting made headlines on the Drudge Report and was mentioned in the pages of the Washington Post, Slate, the New Republic, Raw Story, the Advocate, the Times-Picayune, and Christianity Today. Students at Georgetown University, the University of Minnesota, Southeastern Louisiana University, Xavier University, George Washington University, and at least one of the sixteen campuses of Kentucky’s Community and Technical College System visited the Bayou Brief to read their homework assignments. Our election coverage inspired mailers and radio ads and more than a couple of television commercials about Eddie Rispone.
GumboPAC’s commercial debuting the nickname “Phony Rispone” aired statewide and has been seen nearly 500,000 times online. The commercial was based on a Bayou Brief report about Eddie Rispone’s company using the controversial H-1B visa program to hire foreign workers for skilled jobs in the United States.
GumboPAC referenced the Bayou Brief’s reporting about how Eddie Rispone lobbied for a change in state law that allowed him to avoid state income taxes by making donations to a private voucher school. We first reported on Rispone’s role in creating a tax loophole for himself in April of 2018.
Someone even bought a billboard on I-10 that referenced our reporting on car insurance premiums.
Photo credit: Rob Anderson
Last year, our reporting made a difference, and as we settle into 2020, another hugely consequential election year, I can guarantee one thing for certain: The Bayou Brief will only get better.
The cover of Gambit’s 2019 40 Under 40 edition. (I’m at the top right).
On a personal note, during 2019, as we wrapped up the decade, I was honored and enormously grateful to receive two awards for my work here on the Bayou Brief. Gambit, one of the nation’s very best weekly publications and a New Orleans institution for nearly forty years, put me on their Top 40 Under 40 list. It was a tremendous privilege to be included in a roster of vastly more impressive artists, entrepreneurs, educators, and civic leaders, and it was especially meaningful to have been chosen by a group of writers whose work I’ve always admired. I even brought along my mama, who flew in from Texas, to the awards banquet.
Incidentally, one of the other honorees was the 19-year-old filmmaker Phillip Youmans, whose debut feature film “Burning Cane” won the top prize at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival. I was recently able to catch his movie on Netflix, and it’s a beautiful and profound meditation on spirituality and suffering in a forgotten corner of South Louisiana. It’s made even more astonishing when you consider the film was written and directed by a teenager. He also brought his mama to the awards banquet.
I am equally thankful to the hosts of the Millennial Awards, who selected me as 2019’s Outstanding Millennial Journalist. I didn’t expect to win, so I stupidly neglected to write an acceptance speech. Instead, I just told the audience, “It’s www.BayouBrief.com.” But as I later mentioned on social media, although I was born and raised in Louisiana, I moved to New Orleans only a couple of years ago, and I will always be grateful for how this city has given me a home and allowed me the ability to share my voice alongside the most diverse and most unique community in the entire country.
Speaking of awards, we have a few more to hand out here before we completely close the book on 2019. But first, we look back on our own coverage during the 21st century’s final year as a teenager.
In gratitude,
Lamar
The Best of the Bayou Brief in 2019
January
A little more than a year ago, at the strike of midnight on Dec. 22, 2018, the federal government officially began the longest shutdown in American history, 35 days, after President Donald Trump refused to sign any appropriations bill that didn’t include billions of dollars to construct a wall on the border between Mexico and the United States.
As a candidate, Trump had put the proposed border wall at the center of his campaign and had famously told voters that Mexico would foot the bill. But two years later, with Nancy Pelosi set to take the Speaker’s gavel back from John Boehner, some of the president’s most influential advisors- that is, the rotating roster of right-wing pundits who appeared every night on Fox News- ramped up pressure for border wall funding.
Ultimately, the impasse was resolved, though not without significant controversy, when Trump declared an emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border, allowing him the ability to move money that had already been appropriated for other projects to his wall.
Two months before the shutdown, in October of 2018, U.S. Rep. Ralph Abraham, a Republican from Louisiana’s Fifth District, quietly removed Terry Finley’s 2014 letter to the editor of The News Star from his campaign website. Finley’s letter praised the congressman for a promise he had made during his first election. Abraham had vowed to give every dime he earned to a hospital that treats children with cancer, St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital, and the Independence Fund, an organization that helps double-amputee combat veterans. In his first term, that amounted to $348,000. In total, Abraham should have contributed at least $696,000 to the two charities.
But as it turned out, he didn’t make good on that promise, and if the federal government hadn’t shut down, it’s likely we would have never known the congressman had broken his word. That’s because a reporter surveyed members of Louisiana’s federal delegation to ask whether they would continue to collect their paychecks during the shutdown. Abraham’s office confirmed that yes, in fact, the congressman would take his salary, thank you very much. In doing so, they unwittingly revealed that meant Abraham had abandoned the pledge he made on the campaign trail. In many ways, it was his promise to donate a taxpayer-provided fortune to charity that distinguished him from the two other Republican candidates, the incumbent Vance McAllister and Zach Dasher, a cousin of the Duck Dynasty clan.
It was also the first major story of the 2019 gubernatorial election, because even before Abraham had been sworn in for another term in Congress, he announced his candidacy for governor. Here on the Bayou Brief, we called it the “Abrascam.”
Protests were held. Lawsuits were filed. The Rams player who had committed the penalty was fined. Saints fans refused to tune into Super Bowl LIII, which- fittingly- was only one letter off of the word “lie.”
In New Orleans, there was even a “Boycott Bowl,” a day-long, completely sold-out concert featuring Big Freedia, Dash Rip Rock, and Kermit Ruffins, among others.
Abrascam wasn’t the only featured series we debuted last January. During the very first week of 2019, the Bayou Brief’s Sue Lincoln introduced readers to the “Erector Set,” a small cabal of Baton Rouge-based construction magnates who had spent decades amassing their own fortunes and quietly accumulating enormous political influence and were now hoping to install one of their own, Eddie Rispone, as the state’s next governor.
Over the course of 2019, we published 30 different reports about the Erector Set, but throughout the year, we would continually return back to Sue’s initial four stories from January.
Not everything last January was either politics or football. We also published the first three chapters of a five-part series about the legendary Louisiana artist Clementine Hunter, none of which would have been possible without the insight and the contributions of the writer Ruth Laney and the foremost authority on Hunter’s life and career, long-time Northwestern State University professor Tom Whitehead.
In February, we kicked off the first season of our podcast “Briefly Speaking” by interviewing three of the most well-known political podcasters in the nation: Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett, and Tommy Vietor of Pod Save America.
Although his corner of the Bayou Brief would later become known as the 13th Ward Rambler, Peter Athas published a pair of columns in February about one of his favorite subjects, Mardi Gras in New Orleans.
With much of the state in the throes of Mardi Gras, another grand Louisiana tradition- campaign season- was slightly interrupted, which provided the Bayou Brief with the perfect opportunity to tell the stories of two men from Louisiana’s past who were once again in the headlines.
On a forgotten patch of land in the outskirts of Pineville, a group of local historic preservationists commemorated the installation of a new landmark sign, and if you weren’t otherwise familiar with the unlikely backstory, then you’d be forgiven if you thought that it seems like the last place to expect to find a sign honoring Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman.
While the folks in CenLa were honoring “Cump,” those gathered inside of a federal courtroom in New Orleans witnessed another blast from Louisiana’s past, as Kenny Knight, David Duke’s former campaign manager, pleaded guilty to three felony counts related to his operation of a pill mill.
We wrapped up February in North Louisiana, with a report from Sue Lincoln about the ongoing saga involving orphan wells, natural gas, and an environmental emergency that had been declared but never publicly announced.
At the beginning of March, we published the kind of story that seems to occur once every three or four years in Louisiana: A politico with ties to a prostitution scandal. In this case, however, the scandal wasn’t about the politician himself; it centered around an aide to U.S. Rep. Clay Higgins. And it didn’t involve prostitution; the allegations were about something much more serious and troubling: A human trafficking ring.
A few days later, another Louisianian made headlines for being involved in a different kind of scandal. Cynthia Fierro Harvey, the Bishop of Louisiana’s United Methodist Church, had the unenviable assignment of presiding over a vote at the church’s global conference in which hard-line, conservative delegates- a plurality of whom were from Africa- succeeded in adopting an anti-LGBTQ plan. As a result, the church now seems all but certain to permanently break apart.
After a drunk driver barreled into a group of bicyclists leaving the Endymion Parade, injuring several and killing two, Elizabeth Freudmann attended the funeral services for one of the victims, Sharree Walls, and shared with readers why Walls’ contributions to New Orleans were so remarkable and why so many were left devastated by her death.
Sue Lincoln returned with another installment in the Erector Set series, and although this particular report wouldn’t receive much attention until the waning days of the runoff election, it is perhaps the most critical in understanding the close friendship between Eddie Rispone and Lane Grigsby.
There are three other stories from last March that are worth particular attention.
After Jeff Landry attempted to force the governor to appoint Carolyn Prator, a conservative political operative and the wife of Caddo Parish’s Republican Sheriff, to the Red River Waterway Commission by issuing a laughable advisory opinion that asserted procedural ambiguity negated the governor’s appointing authority, a judge ruled in favor of the governor, effectively telling Landry to stay in his own lane.
We were kept busy in April, as legislators descended back to the state Capitol for another session and we debuted “Wrecked,” a major investigative series on the high price of car insurance in Louisiana. But the month kicked off with another installment in ongoing series “Abrascam.”
Dr. Barbara Forrest contributed a fascinating report about Bro. Gene Mills of the Louisiana Family Forum and the ways in which an obscure set of beliefs known as Seven Mountain Dominionism has informed the powerful religious-right organization’s agenda.
Bro. Gene later referred Dr. Forrest’s report in a letter to his mailing list, urging recipients to send his organization money. Unfortunately, his fundraising pitch provided an incorrect link to Dr. Forrest’s report and grossly distorted her findings, brazenly inventing statements he then misattributed to her in order to bolster the ludicrous claim that he was somehow the victim of a vast conspiracy.
Casey Parks explored the ways in which LSU’s now-outgoing President F. King Alexander had prioritized diversity not only as a moral imperative but also as a financial necessity.
As we mentioned earlier, April was also when we debuted the series “Wrecked,” and if you didn’t catch it the first time, you should consider taking the time to read the entire series soon, as it appears the legislature will once again consider the same bogus solutions it rejected last year.
At the beginning of May, the media landscape in Louisiana changed forever when the Advocate’s owner, John Georges, a mega-wealthy entrepreneur and erstwhile political candidate who had turned his family-owned grocery distribution company into a multi-billion dollar video poker empire, announced he had purchased the Times-Picayune.
We kicked off the month of June with a pair of opinion columns about an issue that continues to divide the nation and had threatened to fracture the Louisiana Democratic Party.
Later that month, Sue Lincoln opened up to readers about the devastating loss of her husband Don, who had passed away in early May from a bacterial infection while awaiting a heart transplant, publishing this poignant tribute to his remarkable life and career.
We made a number of changes to the website in June, debuting a new template, a new masthead, and a series of new logos.
June was also National Pride Month, and Dylan Waguespack, a friend to our entire team and Louisiana’s most prominent trans advocate, wrote this extraordinary opinion column about why LGBTQ people and their allies “must name and claim Louisiana for the future of all.”
When we launched the Bayou Brief, we vowed to do as much as we possibly could to amplify the important stories that are too often overlooked by a state media largely centered around Baton Rouge and New Orleans. In July, Sue Lincoln brought readers the saga of a power struggle between the Chief of Police and the Mayor of the small but mighty town of Many (Man-e) in Sabine Parish, located about thirty miles west of Natchitoches (if you can’t pronounce Natchitoches, chances are you don’t know where it is on a map either).
And speaking of Barry, our criticism of the parachute press and its demonstrably over-hyped coverage of the looming storm became our most-read story of all-time.
Finally, after a months-long investigation, Lamar shared his findings about the ways in which Alexandria had turned an award-winning city festival into an embarrassing debacle.
In August, we lost two extraordinary Louisianians, the New Orleans-based “superconnector” Ray Nichols and the beloved trailblazing Queen Bee, former Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco.
Sue camped out at the Secretary of State’s office and provided us with dispatches about what was happening behind-the-scenes as candidates lined up for qualifying.
Lamar shared the timeless classic about the Louisiana mayor who hoped to get his city into the catfish farming business by transforming an old city swimming pool into a fully-stocked catfish pond but whose bold vision had one tragic blind spot: The pool-turned-pond’s razor-sharp fan blades.
Troy Gilbert also dove deeply into Louisiana’s past and retold a story that had once fascinated the entire world but had since been all but forgotten for nearly 150 years.
Lamar’s friends at Louisiana College would make another round of headlines in August after he revealed the school’s new draconian policy on social media use.
But without question, the most consequential report in August was about two small pharmacies in rural Louisiana, a massive quantity of opioids, and a congressman who was running for governor.
Also in September, the Bayou Brief’s Cayman Clevenger decided to take a trip to Lafayette to learn about the story and the artist behind the year’s iconic “I Voted” sticker.
With the jungle primary finally within sight, we kicked off the month of October with- what else?- a biographical essay about the life of LSU’s “founder,” George Mason Graham, and a fascinating story by Troy Gilbert about the “negro captains” that had helped rebuild Louisiana in the aftermath of the Civil War.
There was one critical race that we had neglected until only a week before Election Day: Acadia Parish Clerk of Court. But in all seriousness, the race between the incumbent Robby Barousse and challenger Emily Stoma provided us with the opportunity to tell the story of how the Barousse family has dominated Acadia Parish since before the place even had a proper name and how three consecutive generations of Barousse men have controlled the clerk’s office in Crowley like the Crawley family control Downton Abbey in Yorkshire.
And speaking of aristocracy and Crowley, in October, we also published a series of colorized photographs of John and Jackie Kennedy’s epic 1959 visit to the 23rd annual Rice Festival. With an estimated attendance of anywhere between 97,000 and 125,000 people, it wasn’t just the single-largest campaign event of the entire 1960 presidential election season; since then, with the exception of presidential inaugurations, no other American political candidate has drawn more people to a single event. (This will be the subject of an upcoming story).
And afterward, with the gubernatorial field now winnowed down to John Bel Edwards and Eddie Rispone, we published a pair of stories unpacking some of the most interesting details contained within Rispone’s campaign finance reports.
But October’s most-read story wasn’t about any of the candidates running for office; it was about a man who described himself as a “kingmaker,” Lane Grigsby.
Although the runoff election was imminent, we weren’t quite finished with the “Erector Set” series. In early November, after discovering a document that listed Rispone as a member of a company headquartered in Nevada, we reported on how he had established a shell company in the tax haven sometimes referred to as the Silver State in order to hold his Louisiana-based business’s retirement fund.
But the governor’s race wasn’t the only thing on our radar. We were also the first to report on how Louisiana Sec. of State Kyle Ardoin violated state law when he participated in a rally hosted by Donald Trump.
In our final report about candidate Eddie Rispone, we revealed secretly-recorded audio of Rispone at a high-dollar, closed-door fundraiser explaining why he decided to dodge all but one debate during the runoff election.
And on the eve of the election, we reported on how early voting numbers presaged the emergence of a new electorate than the one that had shown up during the jungle primary. .
Although the election was now in the rear view mirror, there were a couple of more critical takeaways that demanded our attention. In “The Winning Message,” Lamar explored how John Bel Edwards benefitted from a well-disciplined messaging strategy and effectively neutralized Donald Trump’s effort to turn the race toward Rispone by simply never taking the bait.
And Stephen Handwerk, the veteran executive director of the Louisiana Democratic Party, explained how Edwards’ campaign brilliantly utilized the party’s sophisticated data management tools.
Last month, we also debuted the first episode of our new limited podcast series “Combat in the Courtroom,” which is about the remarkable sixty year career of Louisiana criminal defense attorney Mike Fawer. In Episode One, Mike recalls his successful defense of Aaron Mintz, a well-known New Orleans furniture store owner who had been accused of murdering his wife Palma and whose 1984 trial became the city’s first TV show trial (despite the fact that cameras were not allowed in the courtroom).
2019 was a great year for Louisiana journalism and for journalism about Louisiana. The Advocate won the Pulitzer Prize for Best Local News Reporting and was named as a finalist for Best Editorial Writing. There were riveting stories about corrupt judges and corrupt district attorneys, about high school football in the tiny town of Erath, and about how petrochemical plants have polluted a part of the state now known as Cancer Alley.
There was also some truly terrible journalism about Louisiana, but truth be told, the worst reporting wasn’t published by a Louisiana outlet or written by a Louisiana reporter.
In Part One of our Year-End Brief, we revived a series of awards- the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly- that Bob Mann once handed out every year in the pages of the Times-Picayune. In the second and final installation, we are launching a new annual series of prizes, the Briefcase Awards, which recognizes the very best of Louisiana journalism.
That’s right. We’re not interested in lampooning our fellow Louisiana reporters and columnists, even if they definitely deserve a little good-natured ribbing (see: Dan Fagan’s column in the Advocate about Conrad Appel; see also: Dan Fagan’s other columns in the Advocate). Instead, we want to share some love and appreciation for the people and publications here in Louisiana and across the country that have enriched our knowledge and commanded our respect.
Best Headline
KTBS
Its last two call letters may be “BS,” but there’s nothing inaccurate about the headline that one obviously bemused web editor at Shreveport’s ABC affiliate, KTBS, used to update their online followers about a legal challenge over outgoing state Rep. Barbara Norton’s residency.
Unable to seek another term in the state House due to term limits, Norton qualified to run for a seat in the state Senate. There was just one problem: Norton didn’t actually live in the district. And when her would-be opponent challenged her qualifications, Norton, who became somewhat of an internet sensation after a video of her introducing the state House to a performance of the song “Halle Berry” by her nephew Hurricane Chris went viral, concocted an elaborate and ludicrous plan to convince a judge otherwise.
As KTBS’s headline indicates, Norton claimed to reside in the same small home as a registered sex offender, and unfortunately for Norton, the sex offender had a parole officer who regularly checked in on the man and knew that his roommate was not a three-term state representative. The man actually lived alone, and Norton, as it turns out, didn’t even know his name.
But that’s not the only hilariously absurd part of the story. Barbara Norton, anticipating a visit from an officer of the court, arrived at the man’s home (presumably he was sub-letting it from her tenant), made herself a sleeping palette on the living room sofa and when the officer arrived in the morning, she greeted him at the door in a nightgown. She’d thought of everything except for one critical detail: She forgot her wigs.
The court ruled against Norton, disqualifying her as a candidate.
But the truly unfortunate thing about this whole story is that KTBS changed its epic headline within only a few hours of publication.
Most Fearless
Big Easy Magazine
When Scott Ploof founded the digital publication Big Easy Magazine in 2018, he didn’t exactly attempt to conceal its political perspective. “Unapologetically progressive,” Ploof announced. It became the online magazine’s calling card; they even sell t-shirts of the slogan.
But in New Orleans, there’s nothing necessarily controversial about being “unapologetically progressive.” There is, however, one inviolable, albeit unwritten commandment in The City That Care Forgot: Thou shalt not bear false witness against Saint Drew Brees.
Last year, Ploof’s publication made national headlines after its editor and contributing writer, Kentucky-transplant Jenn Bentley, helpfully pointed out to Brees that he had a years-long history of promoting the virulently anti-LGBTQ organization Focus on the Family, led by Madame Tussaud’s James Dobson. To be sure, the initial iteration of Bentley’s article, which quickly went viral, was considerably more skeptical about Brees’ mens rea (that’s Latin for “guilty mind”), and presumably after being made aware of Brees’ not-so-great record of off-the-field gullibility (believe it or not, a word that doesn’t appear in the dictionary), she decided to retool the report and provide him with enough room to avoid the sack and throw a strike downfield. (Incidentally, all of this was set into motion because of a tweet from the Bayou Brief’s own Ed Branley).
Instead, Brees scrambled, sharing a video on social media of him reading an over-workshopped word salad that managed to take every side of the issue while presenting himself as an earnest do-gooder and Big Easy Magazine as big ol’ meanies who traffic in “click bait.” It was a clueless sport agent’s idea of crisis communication.
Suffice it to say, it was not his finest performance. In fact, he managed to only make things worse. Ploof and Bentley were both bombarded with hate mail from sycophantic Brees fans who apparently never paid attention during Sunday School, and instead of serving as his final word on the kerfuffle, the ham-handed video opened Brees up to a second and third round of questions: How could he not be aware of Focus on the Family’s track record? How could he square his claim that he’d never support an organization that promoted intolerance against LGBTQ Americans with his promotion of Focus on the Family? Brees attempted to suggest that the criticism had solely concerned his most recent video on behalf of the organization’s Bring Your Bible to School Day, which, incidentally, is a right that has never been infringed- on any day- in any public school in America, but Big Easy Magazine’s report wasn’t just about the most recent video; it was about his years-long advocacy on behalf of Focus on the Family.
Ultimately, Brees acknowledged that he hadn’t been previously aware of the controversial and divisive positions the organization has taken on LGBTQ rights, and undoubtedly, he won’t ever cut a commercial for Focus on the Family again. Regrettably, he didn’t retract his criticism of Big Easy Magazine, the locally-owned independent publication that brought the issue to his attention, but considering he is the greatest quarterback of all-time and led the Saints to victory in their first-ever Super Bowl, we’re okay with cutting the guy some slack.
Best Sports Reporting
“When My Louisiana School and Its Football Team Finally Desegregated” by Jeré Longman, New York Times
Photo by William Widmer, New York Times.
At its very best, sports reporting can be a sublime and profound meditation on the vicissitudes of life, human triumphs and tragedies, and the lingering and sometimes oppressive residue of history. At its very best, sports reporting can transcend its genre so much that the label “sports reporting” seems to cheapen or trivialize what the story is really about. At its very best, sports reporting doesn’t require the reader to know a damn thing about sports.
In order to tell this story, which is about football but also about the lifelong friendship between an Asian American coach and an African American player, Longman, who is himself white, first has to return to his hometown of Eunice, Louisiana, a small city cradled in between St. Landry and Acadia Parishes— 30 miles northwest of Lafayette as the crow flies, 44 miles as the road winds.
There’s no need to spoil anything about Longman’s story, except to say that by the time you reach its ending, many of you will undoubtedly disagree with notion of characterizing it as sports reporting. We agree. It’s much more than that.
Best Education Reporting
“From prison to dean’s list: How Danielle Metz got an education after incarceration” by Casey Parks, The Hechinger Report
Danielle Metz studies from home, the house she grew up in, in New Orleans, Feb. 15, 2019.
Casey tells the remarkable true story of Danielle Metz, a New Orleans native who was able to turn her life around following a stint behind bars and graduate from college near the top of her class, all thanks to a pair of massively consequential actions, one undertaken by former President Barack Obama and the other by Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards.
During Obama’s final year in the White House, he commuted the life sentence Metz had been given in 1993 for her involvement in a cocaine ring operated by her then-husband, a man she described as physically and psychologically abusive. A year later, John Bel Edwards signed into a law a bill that prohibited public colleges from asking about an applicant’s prior criminal history, making Louisiana the very first state in the country to successfully “ban the box” from college applications.
There’s a fantastic coda to this: Casey’s story about Danielle Metz eventually made its way onto the pages of USA Today, which is how it caught the attention of former President Obama, who graciously sent an encouraging handwritten note of congratulations to Metz.
Best Political Commentary
“The Louisiana Governor’s Debate Was an Absolute Car Wreck” by Charles Pierce, Esquire
Illustration by the Bayou Brief.
Although he was born and raised in Massachusetts, where he still lives full-time, and despite the fact that he even wrote an entire book about the New England Patriots, there are very few- if any- national political columnists who possess the kind of command about Louisiana politics, both past and present, like Esquire’s Charles P. Pierce. “There absolutely is not enough gild in the world for this lily,” Pierce wrote about the 2015 story, first broken by the Bayou Brief’s Lamar White, Jr., of how David Vitter’s paid spy was caught eavesdropping on Jefferson Parish Sheriff Newell Normand by Newell’s friend, who also happened to be a paid spy. “God love Louisiana.”
Throughout Bobby Jindal’s eight tumultuous years as governor, Pierce paid close attention, and every now and then, whenever he felt inspired, he’d turn his pen against Jindal with devastating, laser-like precision. “There is no bottom to the barrel that is ‘Bobby’ Jindal, wandering governor of Louisiana and walking asterisk in the presidential contest,” he once wrote. “There is no national tragedy that this charlatan cannot make worse.” Jindal was like “the battered bit of old presidential timber presently warping out behind the bait shoppe.”
Charles P. Pierce. Illustration by Esquire.
During the 2016 Democratic National Convention, Pierce stood with our delegation during President Obama’s speech. “On the crowded convention floor on Wednesday night, as the President of the United States gave his heart and his soul to the campaign of Hillary Rodham Clinton to succeed him, I found a spot to stand with the delegation from Louisiana, which has been the center of so much heartbreak and redemption over the past 10 years, and which also is the place where the American concept of cool was born, the one that captured the world through a million silver trumpets,” Pierce wrote.
But Pierce isn’t getting our Lifetime Achievement Award (that belongs to someone else). This year, after watching the one and only runoff debate between Eddie Rispone and John Bel Edwards, Pierce said what most political writers in Louisiana had been either too polite or too muzzled to admit openly: Eddie Rispone knows nothing about government. Zero.
“On Wednesday night, while Game Seven was in commercial, I switched over to Louisiana Public Broadcasting to catch some of the debate between Edwards and Rispone. I thereupon missed most of the middle innings because I couldn’t look away. Some debates are car wrecks. This was Figure-8 racing from Islip, Long Island. Every candidate cranks up the old fog machine in the latter stages of a campaign, but Rispone’s is a threat to commercial aviation.
“The man knows nothing about government. Not in the sense of ‘unfamiliar with the nuances of how political institutions operate,’ but in the sense of ‘ab-so-fcking-lute-ly nothing.’ His entire campaign seems to be based on the phrase, ‘I’m a businessman and I know how to get things done.’ (Huey Long would be appalled.) On occasion, Edwards had to use up half his allotted time to answer for the purposes of explaining to Rispone that, no, votes in the state legislature are not decided by rock-paper-scissors. For his part, Edwards, who was handed a dead fish by outgoing governor Bobby Jindal, defended his record and tried to get Rispone to respond to a question without sounding like he’d beamed in from Alpha Centauri.
“‘I am a person,’ Rispone replied on one occasion, ‘of myself.’”
Best Environmental Reporting
“Polluter’s Paradise” by Tristan Baurick, the Times-Picayune; Lylla Younes, ProPublica, and Joan Meiners, the Times-Picayune
Photo Credit: Lamar White, Jr. | Bayou Brief
In their absolutely essential multi-part series “Polluter’s Paradise,” reporters with ProPublica, the Times-Picayune, and the Advocate* reveal the frightening truths about Cancer Alley, the carcinogenic corridor between Baton Rouge and New Orleans home to the nation’s largest concentration of oil and gas and petrochemical plants.
Throughout the series, a team of investigative reporters use the harrowing accounts of people living in a part of the country that has produced unimaginable wealth for a handful of multinational conglomerates to tell a larger story about government and corporate negligence, greed, and multigenerational poverty. Some of these stories may be familiar. For example, they spend time in St. Rosalie, Louisiana, the community that Sue Lincoln chronicled earlier in the year for the Bayou Brief. But much of their reporting is new and urgent.
*As a general rule, when a reporter’s byline includes the Times-Picayune and the Advocate, publications that are under the same ownership and feature the same content, the Bayou Brief lists only the Times-Picayune in order to avoid the confusion created by its publisher’s frivolous attempt at co-branding.
Best Crime Reporting
“Cain and Abel and Oil” by Ian Frisch, New York Magazine
The wild and sordid saga of the Knight brothers- Bryan and Mark- is already well-known to the people of Acadiana, largely thanks to the diligent and exhaustive reporting of the local media. Still, it’s somewhat surprising that it wasn’t until this year that the Brothers Knight earned national attention.
“There is so much we didn’t know outside of the narrative investigators painted: In a fit of desperation to keep control of the lucrative family business, a filthy rich oilfield CEO allegedly hires a bumbling fool and two dirty cops to set his younger brother up in a June 2014 drug bust.
“Red flags everywhere, prosecutors opt not to pursue the charges the following January.
“A few months later, after being threatened by said bumbling fool, a frightened company employee tips off (legit) law enforcement, and the perps are arrested and charged in the conspiracy.
“The story dropped like a bombshell, rocking the community. It was the beginning of the end of Knight Oil Tools.
“Now comes a detailed story of what led to the sibling rivalry that left a mother and sister caught in the middle and ultimately stripped each sibling of tens of millions of dollars of net worth.”
When Jim Beam was 10 years old, Old Tub Distillery of Clermont, Kentucky decided rebrand itself in honor of Col. James Beauregard Beam, the great-great-grandson of the distillery’s founder Jacob Beam and the man who saved the family-owned company from the brink of ruin during Prohibition. Henceforth, the distillery and its signature bourbon would be known simply as Jim Beam, which has either been an occasional source of amusement or a constant annoyance for the younger Beam.
The rebranded distillery slapped the slogan “None genuine without my signature” on every bottle of bourbon that made its way out of Clermont, Kentucky, which, in another context, may have proven to be a huge problem for a writer who signed the same name on everything he wrote as well.
Around 20 years ago, in the Alexandria Daily Town Talk, you could occasionally find a syndicated column by Jim Beam published alongside a letter to editor by the prolific local epistolarian, Jack Daniels. No doubt, Daniels’ chances of finding his letter in the paper were directly correlated to Beams’ decision to find something worth writing about.
At 86, the long-serving columnist for the Lake Charles American Press is more than a familiar name; he is a Louisiana institution. Six years ago, he was inducted into the state’s political hall of fame. Last September, outgoing state Senate President John Alario donated $15,000 to McNeese State University Jim Beam Scholarship in Journalism. And last year, Beam was prodigious, relentless, informed, and razor-sharp in his analysis of the issues and the cast of characters that comprised the governor’s race.
He is the dean of the Louisiana media, a hard-working columnist- perhaps the hardest-working columnist in the state- and someone who is always ready with an opinion but never unnecessarily cruel or hasty.
We could think of no one better to honor than the legendary Jim Beam, a voice that those in the news business in Louisiana recognize as wise, decent, and, yes, genuine.
The Saints were robbed, but the state’s budget was saved. The parachute press panicked over a pitiful hurricane, but the Advocate won the Pulitzer for exemplifying the very best about local news reporting. Louisiana lost one of its champions, Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, but not before she received the long overdue gratitude of a state that was enriched by her lifetime of trailblazing leadership and selfless service. Trump came to town, but as for the President, God bless his heart.
Here on the Bayou Brief, we told the true stories of an Erector Set and an Abrascam, but we began the year with an ode to Clementine. When we weren’t covering the election, we shared the tales of a long-lost ship wreck and the forgotten but remarkable lives of the black captains and watermen who built Louisiana back from the ruin of the Civil War. We reintroduced the state to a mayor named Tilly who hoped to bring his city into the catfish farming business and tried to turn a swimming pool into a fishing pond, but ended up leading the bottom-feeders into a massacre.
We traced back the beginning of the Old War Skule to a Union general and a Confederate planter who carried the name of a Founding Father. There were lyrical stories about listening to the river and about a small town named after a saint and ravaged by sinners. And there were stories about the movies and the music that have defined and inspired us.
Before we enter 2020, some hindsight is important. In Part One of this two-part series, we take inventory of the good, the bad, and the ugly of Louisiana politics in 2019.
Le Bon, la Brute, et le Truand de 2019
(The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of 2019)
A few years ago, Bob Mann, the popular LSU political communications professor, biographer, and erstwhile opinion columnist at the Times-Picayune, created his own annual awards, which he would dole out at the end of the year in the pages of the newspaper and on his blog site “Something Like the Truth.” He named the competition after Sergio Leone’s classic spaghetti western “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.”
With his permission, we are reviving this annual tradition with many of the same categories that he created years ago.
Biggest Winner
Gov. John Bel Edwards
In 2015, after he trounced the most powerful Republican in the state, the far-right pilloried John Bel Edwards as the “accidental governor,” serving up a giant dish of revisionist history to console themselves once voters finally had enough of David Vitter.
On the day he took office, Edwards inherited a $2.1 billion budget shortfall and a legislature still under the spell of their most vituperative and mendacious members. Indeed, the very people most responsible for negligently squandering the money that the public had entrusted to their care would spend the entirety of John Bel Edwards’ first term as governor obstinately refusing to help fix what they had broken and repeatedly misrepresenting what was at stake.
While the state’s budgetary woes were the consequence of former Gov. Jindal and this small cadre of the state’s most virulent right-wing partisans, Louisianians could have been spared much of the gridlock and dysfunction four years ago had it not been for a Democratic state representative from New Orleans, Neil Abramson, lining up against the election of a fellow New Orleans Democrat, Walt Leger III, for Speaker of the House. Abramson may have not been the deciding vote, but by turning his back on the newly-elected Democratic governor and his colleague from New Orleans, he nonetheless played a pivotal role in guaranteeing Leger’s defeat and in justifying support for the feckless Taylor Barras. In exchange for his defection, Abramson was given a plum assignment as Chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, a role that proved to be entirely inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. (Incidentally, Abramson’s Wikipedia page was altered to include the laughable claim that his constituents and his district were better-served as a result of his support for Barras. Although those edits have not yet been removed, the user who made them was banned from Wikipedia).
“(Barras) empowered a caucus-led House where party became more important than process,” the Advocate’s Lanny Keller succinctly explained, noting that Barras was also, arguably, the “nicest guy in the state Capitol.” “Politics — above all, not agreeing with Edwards — was even more pernicious in the House. The rules became obstructions to the legislative process.”
Shortly after Barras was elected Speaker, breaking from decades of tradition in which the legislature deferred to the governor for guidance on selecting leadership, House Republican Caucus Chairman Lance Harris touted the importance of an “independent” legislature, but as the past four years definitively proved, Barras’ tenure as Speaker did not usher in a new era of principled independence; instead, the legislature, particularly the House, were dominated by obstructionists.
Nonetheless, despite the inability of some in the House to operate in good faith, Gov. Edwards managed to rack up a remarkable list of accomplishments and resuscitate state government from the disastrous and negligent decisions made during Jindal’s two terms. The $2.1 billion shortfall with which Jindal had saddled the state on his way out is now a $500 million surplus, and as a result of Edwards reversing course and accepting federal funding for Medicaid expansion, nearly 500,000 Louisianians now have health insurance for the first time. Edwards has repeatedly characterized Medicaid expansion as “the easiest big decision” he has ever made in his life.
In a rare bipartisan victory, Edwards and the legislature worked together to usher in a sweeping set of criminal justice reforms that ensured Louisiana was no longer the world’s leader in incarcerating its own citizens.
Although he had preferred to address the state’s budgetary woes by enacting a series of structural tax reforms and avoiding the hike in sales taxes favored by Republicans, his decision to provide local governments more control over who is awarded ITEP (Industrial Tax Exemption Program) incentives helps provide an additional layer of accountability and scrutiny to a program that has proven to be ripe for abuse.
Similarly, Edwards’ support for the ongoing environmental litigation against oil and gas companies who illegally dredged canals and destroyed much of the state’s already-vulnerable coast, in direct violation of the permits they were issued, ensures that the wealthiest industry in the history of human civilization cannot bribe their way out of their responsibility to pay to fix what they broke. The oil and gas and petrochemical companies that dominate the landscape of coastal Louisiana and transformed the corridor between Baton Rouge and New Orleans from River Road into Cancer Alley have- for far too long- been allowed to operate with impunity, and the residents who live in those communities deserve and demand justice.
As the White House reminded Louisiana voters prior to the bizarre campaign rallies that Donald Trump hosted in support of Eddie Rispone, the state’s economy is performing better than ever. Unemployment is the lowest it’s ever been, and over the course of the past four years, Edwards and his team at LED have landed a series of major economic development “wins,” including a 2,000-job tech facility in New Orleans, the biggest of its kind in the nation.
Although his list of accomplishments is impressive, particularly considering the obstructionism he has faced in the legislature, his decision to affirmatively sign into law the most draconian and punitive abortion law in the country, which sought to prohibit the procedure after five weeks and provided no exceptions in the cases of rape or incest, was rightfully criticized as cruel and brazenly unconstitutional. Indeed, because of a recent decision by the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals that involved a similar but less restrictive law that had recently passed in Mississippi, Louisiana’s law was rendered unenforceable. While it is true that Edwards had made his anti-choice position clear during his first election and that the bill that was sent to his desk had the support of a veto-proof majority in both chambers of the legislature, citizens have a justifiable concern whenever their elected leaders attempt to codify and impose their own religious beliefs on others, especially when they do so with the full knowledge that their actions are in direct violation of well-settled law and nearly 50 years of Supreme Court precedent.
Still, fortunately, most voters recognized the law’s futility, absent a complete reversal by the Supreme Court (which is certainly possible, but probably not plausible, even in the Court’s current composition), and they also recognized that Eddie Rispone represented a far more significant and much more immediate existential threat to healthcare in Louisiana. Among other things, Rispone pledged to enact an enrollment “freeze” for Medicaid applicants, which experts believe would have resulted in more than 300,000 Louisianians losing their health insurance coverage.
Although it may not make any difference to hard-liners in the legislature, this year, John Bel Edwards proved, once and for all, that his election in 2015 was not an accident. He squared off against two formidable Republican opponents, a well-liked conservative congressman and a wealthy political insider who spent $13.5 million of his own money on a campaign that hinged on ingratiating himself to supporters of the president. Indeed, Edwards didn’t just have to beat Ralph Abraham and Eddie Rispone; he also had to contend the hate machine of the Trump campaign, which invested an enormous amount of political capital in a state he had carried, only three years prior, by nearly twenty points.
In the end, voters rewarded Edwards for his steady, competent leadership and rejected the brand of toxic, vapid, and insult-driven partisanship that swept Donald Trump into a 77,000-vote Electoral College victory over the candidate who had received nearly three million more votes nationwide, Hillary Clinton.
Edwards’ victory proved that his support is much deeper than his opponents had believed and that Donald Trump’s support, even in Louisiana, is far more shallow than they had imagined.
Biggest Loser
Tie: Donald J. Trump and John Neely Kennedy
Since our debut in 2017, we have made a conscientious decision to avoid publishing anything about the 45th President of the United States unless it specifically involves Louisiana. Donald Trump‘s tenure has been characterized by an abandonment of moral leadership and dominated by an erratic, cruel, and profoundly ignorant series of decisions that embolden racists, weaken the rule of law, and undermine the foundational aspirations of this nation of immigrants.
He has appealed to and mimicked the leadership style of authoritarians and despots. He has regularly diminished the dignity of his office (his Twitter account is a never-ending stream of self-aggrandizing baseless braggadocio and unhinged jejune drivel), and although the economy has continued to perform well for some, there is nothing “great” about the America that has been made under his presidency.
But because our focus is on Louisiana, we haven’t had much reason to write about him. Despite the fact that we are led by a Democratic governor, Trump has never been outwardly or singularly antagonistic toward the Bayou State, and during the past three years, somewhat astonishingly, he has enjoyed a cordial working relationship with Gov. Edwards. In fact, John Bel Edwards was the only Democratic elected official invited to the White House for Trump’s very first State Dinner, which honored French President Emanuel Macron. Ironically, the Trump Tax Plan, enacted into law in December of 2017, helped open up an additional source of revenue for the state, triggering a Louisiana law that requires any decrease in federal income tax be offset with a corresponding increase in state income tax (and visa-versa).
That said, whatever marginal benefits Louisiana has gained by having a working relationship with the White House are a credit to our governor’s decency, not to Trump’s leadership, and they pale in comparison to the damage Trump has inflicted on the nation’s most marginalized communities.
That was underscored most prominently during the last month and a half of this year’s campaign season, when the president held three separate rallies in Louisiana to campaign against Edwards. And it was especially obvious in the two rallies he held during the runoff in support of Eddie Rispone, a man whose sycophancy toward the president was so over-the-top it seemed to make even Trump uncomfortable. Indeed, the White House struggled so much to justify his opposition to Edwards that it ended up inadvertently making the case for his re-election, blanketing its social media accounts with talking points about how well the state’s economy has performed during the past three years even though Rispone had been attempting to convince voters exactly the opposite.
In Trump’s final rally in Bossier City, he only stuck to the script once, reading from the teleprompter a series of prepared attack lines against Edwards that were so absurd that Trump, at one point, interrupted himself to let the audience know Edwards had always been good to him in person but others told him the governor “talked bad” about him behind his back. If you were paying close enough attention and recognized that the bluster had been written by a Rispone campaign operative, the subtext was clear: He didn’t believe a damn thing he was saying.
So, why was he even there in the first place?
Louisiana’s junior Senator, John Neely Kennedy, is a highly-educated lawyer with degrees from Vanderbilt, the University of Virginia, and Oxford, but since arriving in D.C. in 2017, Kennedy has spent the bulk of his time honing his acting skills. He is the real-world version of Sophie Lennon, the character played by Jane Lynch in the Amazon series “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.” Lennon, a Yale-educated actress, betrays her education and intelligence and becomes famous by performing the role of a gimmicky, frumpy, and crass comedienne from Queens. Everything about the “persona” that made her popular is fake: The accent, the jokes, the fat suit, even the connection to New York.
Kennedy, similarly, has made a name for himself in the Senate by recycling the same formulaic one-liners he used during his audition here as state Treasurer, all delivered with an accent that sounds more like East Texas than South Louisiana. Peter Athas refers to these as “Neelyisms.” The Beltway media has lapped it up, even if, back home, most of us already know the routine. (In fact, most of us remember when our junior Senator was an outspoken Democrat. It wasn’t that long ago). And Kennedy, for his part, has proven himself to be skilled at locating a spotlight and a microphone whenever he can.
It’d be a mistake to confuse his huckster persona with a lack of intelligence, as was made evident during his absolute evisceration of judicial nominee Matthew Petersen. But there is a difference between being an intellectual and being intellectually honest, and as hard as he tries to lampoon liberals as snobbish elites, the truth is that John Neely Kennedy is just as much of a “goats-milk-latte-drinking” elitist as the people he ridicules. Magna cum laude at Vanderbilt. Order of the Coif at UVA Law. First class honors at Oxford’s Magdalen College. He’s the author of an entire casebook on Louisiana Constitutional Law, and, among other things, a law review article titled “The Dimension of Time in the Louisiana Products Liability Act.”
During his eighteen-year stint as Louisiana state Treasurer, he ran for the United States Senate three times. In 2004, as a Democrat, he finished in third in the jungle primary behind fellow Democrat Chris John and Republican David Vitter, who won outright. Four years later, he ran again, this time as a Republican against incumbent Mary Landrieu, and Landrieu very effectively diminished his candidacy by branding his campaign as “Kennedy for Whatever.” She also won outright. But the third time was a charm in 2016, when, in a 24-person field that included two Republican congressmen, two well-funded Democrats, and former KKK grand wizard David Duke, Kennedy squeaked out a 25% first-place finish in the jungle primary and then trounced the second-place finisher, Democratic Public Service Commissioner Foster Campbell, in the runoff.
Initially, he didn’t seem to enjoy his new gig all that much, and almost as soon as he was sworn in, he signaled that he was entertaining a way out. He began testing the waters on a potential run for Louisiana governor, but very quickly, it became obvious that it’d be an uphill battle. Most polls had Edwards ahead of Kennedy in a head-to-head match, and perhaps most importantly, the deep-pocketed donors who had supported his run for Senate weren’t exactly thrilled with the idea of funding yet another Kennedy for Whatever campaign. So, eventually, he made it clear that he had cooled to the idea and would be staying put. However, that didn’t mean he had any intention of staying out. Throughout the campaign season, Kennedy took an unusually active interest in the affairs of state government, trolling Edwards whenever the opportunity presented itself, even if the facts weren’t on his side.
According to the New York Times, at least one member of Louisiana’s federal delegation with knowledge of the president’s decision to involve himself in this year’s gubernatorial campaign (almost certainly not its lone Democratic member, U.S. Rep. Cedric Richmond), Kennedy shoulders much of the blame for convincing Trump to campaign against Edwards, despite the objections of White House political aides. This account matches what others have said on background to the Bayou Brief. Kennedy, allegedly, had misrepresented or cherry-picked polling data and voter surveys to make the case to Trump that Edwards was far more vulnerable than he appeared to be.
The gambit backfired: Even though Trump had essentially gone “all-in,” appearing in those three campaign rallies in Louisiana and dispatching both his son and Vice President Mike Pence, he barely made a dint in turning out voters for Rispone, and whatever positive effect he may have had was offset by the negative. Trump not only couldn’t claim a victory; he had actually helped increase Democratic enthusiasm for Edwards.
Most Competent
State Sen. W. Jay Luneau
Even before this year’s legislative session was gaveled in, the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry (LABI), the trade association that has devolved into a powerful right-wing lobbying organization, had made it clear their top legislative priority was the passage of a bill that claimed to be about reducing the price of auto insurance premiums, something that nearly all Louisianians would enthusiastically support. But there was one small problem: The bill they were promoting, state Rep. Kirk Talbots’s HB 372, the so-called Auto Insurance Premium Reduction Act of 2019, had almost nothing to do with reducing the cost of car insurance and nearly everything to do with protecting the profits of the insurance industry through a series of so-called “tort reforms.”
In recent years, LABI has showered campaign cash on lawmakers with the best grades on its annual “scorecard,” funneling the contributions through one or more of its four political action committees, a questionable arrangement that may implicate the state’s ethics laws, according to two legal experts familiar with the practice. For its part, LABI claims that legislators who support its agenda are not automatically rewarded with financial support; in other words, correlation does not equal causation. But one thing is for certain: Because of its network of ancillary PACs, LABI is capable of single-handedly funding candidates to run against lawmakers who stand in their way. That creates an enormous disincentive for legislators who represent competitive districts to avoid outwardly antagonizing the organization.
Put simply, “tort reform” refers to any changes in the law that minimizes or eliminates a person’s ability to hold a wrongdoer accountable in the civil justice system. Although there is no evidence whatsoever that demonstrates any direct connection between the premiums individuals pay for car insurance in Louisiana and the amount of money the insurance industry as a whole spent on litigation in the state, the business lobby- specifically LABI and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce- have spent a veritable fortune attempting to convince the public that they are the victims of this stubborn little thing known as the law. No doubt, their case has been made easier by a small handful of personal injury attorneys who spend their own fortunes advertising how much money previous clients have received after being injured in a car wreck, often in misleading and sensational terms. (For example, instead of reporting the actual amount that an injured party received, they instead advertise the total damages awarded, conveniently leaving out the massive contingency fees their law firms typically collect).
LABI had, for years, attempted to find a legitimate public policy justification to implement an array of tort reforms, and with car insurance, they believed they finally had something they could sneak through the legislature, provided, of course, that no one asked too many questions about the bill itself.
Perhaps not too surprisingly, Talbot’s HB 372 breezed through the House, but when it arrived in the state Senate, there was one member, in particular, who had read the bill thoroughly and done his homework, state Sen. Jay Luneau, a Democrat from Alexandria. Luneau is a lawyer by trade, but he isn’t the kind who advertises on billboards or day-time court TV shows. He simply wanted to know- mechanically- how Talbot’s bill would work, how it would change existing law, and the answer to a question no one had bothered to ask: What it would cost?
Up until that point, LABI had avoided labeling the bill as a “tort reform” measure, focusing exclusively on the too-good-to-be-true promise of reducing the cost of car insurance. But when Luneau began asking questions, it soon became readily apparent that the bill’s central premise- its primary public policy justification- was a ruse. As it turns out, none of the proposed changes had ever been proven to have any correlation with the price of insurance premiums. No one doubted that Louisiana drivers pay too much; the question was why. The Senate Judiciary A Committee, on which Luneau served as a member, heard testimony from a national insurance expert, Douglas Heller, who outlined a number of sleazy ways the industry inflated prices for customers that had nothing whatsoever to do with a person’s driving record. Separately, the Senate Insurace Committee heard from one of the state’s top insurance lobbyists, Kevin Cunningham, who was ostensibly there in support of the bill but then unwittingly revealed that the proposed legislation was entirely based on a false premise. “I think it’s a misnomer to ever really believe that your (car insurance) rates are ever going to go down,” Cunningham said.
Luneau had offered a separate bill that he then amended to include making a series of regulatory changes outlined by Heller, including ending the practice of discriminating against widows and widowers. That bill failed to make it out of committee.
But most importantly, Jay Luneau was successful at convincing his colleagues on the Judiciary A Committee to request a “fiscal note” from the state Legislative Auditor, in order to get an informed estimate of the financial costs and benefits of the proposed legislation. When the auditor’s office provided the report, it estimated that the savings were entirely speculative and, in any event, likely to be only very minimal at best, but the costs to taxpayers would total in the millions of dollars every year. The legislation would have resulted in a surge in the number of jury trials, inundating an already-overwhelmed civil justice system.
That proved to be the fatal blow for LABI’s “most important bill of the year;” HB 372 died in the Senate Judiciary A Committee.
However, LABI had hoped to have the last laugh against state Sen. Jay Luneau, directly funneling $10,000 to the campaign of his opponent, former one-term state Rep. Randy Wiggins, a State Farm Insurance agent. All told, Wiggins received nearly $27,000 from political action committees, and he personally loaned his campaign another $23,000. The vast majority of his individual donors were fellow insurance agents and brokers; though, altogether, they barely covered his personal loans.
On the night of the jungle primary, Luneau won reelection in a landslide, beating Wiggins 61% – 39% and by more than 6,000 votes.
Already, far-right legislators have signaled their intention to revive LABI’s half-baked auto insurance bill during next year’s session. This time, hopefully, lawmakers will spend more energy working toward an actual solution, instead of reflexively kowtowing to the demands of the insurance lobby. Either way, they should expect at least one state Senator to ask the tough questions.
Most Incompetent
The Campaign to Create St. George, Louisiana
If at first you don’t succeed, lie, lie again.
What had started as an effort to form a new school system turned into a years-long campaign to create a brand-new, affluent, and predominately white municipality in East Baton Rouge Parish. This year, a slight majority of voters in the proposed city approved a ballot initiative enabling the establishment of what could become the fifth largest city in the state of Louisiana, despite its organizers knowing full and well that they were asking voters to saddle those who lived across the street and within the city limits of Baton Rouge with an enormous financial burden. If the courts allow the city’s creation to proceed, then those who will suffer the most are already among the parish’s most vulnerable.
Let’s not waltz around the obvious: The initiative was animated by a series of thinly-veiled racist and classist tropes that have persisted in Louisiana since well before Thomas Jefferson struck a deal with Napoleon Bonaparte, though the notion of using public education as a raison d’etre is from the residue over school integration, something that Louisiana had stubbornly attempted to resist in the decades that followed the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education.
Baton Rouge was actually the first city in the country in which leaders of the civil right-shirt movement staged a bus boycott, and the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow have continued to perpetuate de-facto segregation and created ample space for two very different versions of law enforcement, as the entire nation was reminded by the harrowing video footage of Alton Sterling’s final moments alive.
A meme posted on Facebook by the organizers of the St. George campaign, comparing their effort to create the fifth-largest city in Louisiana by carving out a massive portion of East Baton Rouge Parish to the American Revolution. St. George, it is worth noting, is the patron saint of England.
Predictably, those who led the fight for St. George insist that the effort has nothing to do with race and everything to do with ensuring “local control,” but the historical truth cannot be altered to account for a contemporary (and convenient) blind spot. Indeed, the taxpayers of Baton Rouge financed the infrastructure upon which the would-be city is built, something that- again- has been conveniently ignored.
But willful ignorance and myopia are not the only reasons we selected the organizers of the campaign to create St. George as the winners of the Most Incompetent Award, because, no doubt, many of those who voted in favor of the new municipality were not motivated by the kind of racial antipathy that had initially informed the proposal. Many were instead led to believe that the new city would be financially self-sustaining and would have almost no negative impact on the region. Moreover, they were also told that the proposal was in compliance with existing law. All of these things are untrue.
Rather than confront the stark reality that their numbers simply did not add up, campaign organizers continually insisted otherwise, even if it meant rejecting the findings of multiple comprehensive analyses and reports. Because so many of the existing retail and commercial developments upon which they had relied to ensure the new city’s financial solvency decided instead to request annexation into Baton Rouge, it’s unclear how exactly St. George would provide for even the most basic services. They may be able to form a breakaway public school district, but they apparently won’t have enough money to fund their own police department.
Additionally, as was clear from the very beginning, the proposal is in direct violation of the approved city-parish plan of government, which expressly prohibits the formation of any new municipalities.
Organizers may have fashioned themselves as patriotic revolutionaries, but there is nothing virtuous or patriotic about capriciously harming your neighbors and misrepresenting the truth about the costs of breaking away.
Most Improved
Col. Rob Maness
In 2017, following two failed bids for the United States Senate, Rob Maness, a retired Air Force colonel from St. Tammany Parish, found himself in the middle of a surprisingly competitive race for state Representative- a seat he should have been able to easily win- when he lost his cool. Maness had decided to openly criticize his fellow Republicans for abandoning Alabama Judge Roy Moore after several women alleged Moore had sexually assaulted them years ago, including two women who claimed the abuse occurred when they were teenagers and Moore was in his thirties.
There was nothing righteous about Manesss’ position. The allegations were credible and lurid, and ultimately, even voters in ruby-red Alabama couldn’t stomach the prospect of being represented by an alleged child molester. But when David Bellinger, a liberal commentator who frequently calls into Jim Engster’s radio show, confronted Maness on air and labeled him an “extremist,” the retired military veteran erupted. “Blow me and get out of here,” he said to Bellinger.
Bellinger, it is worth noting, has made headlines before for crawling under the skin of Republican candidates and elected officials. In the book “Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party,” writer Max Blumenthal recounts a memorable exchange that Bellinger, who often uses the nom de plume “Flaming Liberal,” had in 2003 with then-Congressman David Vitter:
For Maness, the exchange with Bellinger marked a low point in his public career, and he would go onto lose the race for state Representative to another Republican, Covington City Councilman Mark Wright.
But this year, Maness did something unusual, particularly in the current era of toxic partisanship: He decided to take a principled stance against the very political party he had once reflexively championed, and in speaking about his decision, he shared details about the pain that he and his family had endured as a direct consequence of the actions taken by Louisiana GOP mega-donor and would-be “kingmaker” Lane Grigsby.
Maness decided he’d had enough after Grigsby attempted to bribe a Republican candidate to drop out of a race for the legislature that had appeared to be headed toward a rare three-person runoff and subsequently boasted about the imperial control he had over the state GOP. Two years prior, Grigsby had helped to finance a series of especially nasty attack ads against Maness, and as a result, Maness’ autistic son was abandoned by his only two friends.
Initially, even though he’d announced that he had left the Republican Party and would be “voting for divided government,” Maness couldn’t bring himself to expressly endorsing the Democratic incumbent, John Bel Edwards. But that changed after Eddie Rispone appeared on a morning radio show on Alexandria’s KSYL and told host Jim Leggett that West Point should be ashamed that Gov. Edwards was a graduate.
Maness may not share the same politics as those of us at the Bayou Brief, but his decision to publicly repudiate the endemic corruption and defend the integrity of a leader on the other side of the aisle is commendable and a complete reversal from his cynical defense of Judge Moore only two years prior, which, as David Bellinger accurately pointed out, was “extremist.” It’s unfortunately uncommon for a politician to admit his mistakes and to put principle above party, and it’s especially rare for conservatives in the age of the most mendacious president in American history.
Shameless Ambition
Gary Landrieu
Shortly after Gary Landrieu showed up to qualify as a candidate for governor, he was told by an official with the Louisiana Secretary of State that he wouldn’t be allowed to use the nickname “Go Gary” on the ballot.
Of course, Louisiana has had its fair share of candidates who prefer to be known by a nickname, including former governors Bobby Jindal and Mike Foster, and we’ve had an ample supply of candidates whose nicknames are far less common and much more absurd. Who can forgot Chicken Commander or Live Wire or Cowboy Phil? If they were around today, does anyone doubt that Earl K. Long wouldn’t ask to appear on the ballot as “Uncle Earl” or that his brother Huey wouldn’t be tempted to have “Kingfish” appear next to his name?
The problem with “Go Gary” was that it, very clearly, wasn’t actually his real nickname; it was his campaign slogan. Gary, the first cousin of Mary and Mitch and the nephew of Moon, seems to enjoy capitalizing off of the surname that was made famous in Louisiana by his more accomplished, adult relatives.
This wasn’t his first attempt at elected office. In 2012 and in 2014, he challenged Cedric Richmond for Congress, and in between those two bids, he campaigned for a seat as Councilman-at-large in New Orleans. In 2016, he qualified as a candidate for the U.S. Senate, but by then, it had become obvious that he was more of a professional troll than a serious candidate.
This year, though, he deserves the Shameless Ambition Award not merely because of the ways in which he has acted out his own issues with family jealousy, but because of how he behaved after being told he couldn’t use “Go Gary” as his nickname. Instead of accepting the decision in stride, Gary summoned his elderly mother to the Secretary of State’s office in Baton Rouge to have her repeat the ridiculous lie that “Go Gary” was a nickname that dated back to his childhood. That was shameful of him, and the only convincing part of the whole spectacle was that his disrespect.
The Secretary of State’s office didn’t budge on its decision, and as it turns out, “Go Gary” couldn’t even get his own nickname right. For several days, his campaign Facebook page directed people to the web domain “GoGayGovernor.com.”
Most Authentic
LaToya Cantrell
From left to right: Louisiana First Lady Donna Edwards, Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards, New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell, and James Carville at a fundraiser hosted by Carville during the gubernatorial runoff election.
She was a still a teenager when she arrived in the city she would one day become the first woman ever to lead, an incoming freshman at the one and only Catholic HBCU in the nation, Xavier University, located in the heart of Gert Town. Back in those days, the litmus test question that established a person’s New Orleans bonafides—“Where’d you go to high school?”— carried with it implications about a person’s “pedigree,” their class, their race, their religion, and even their place in the city’s history.
But LaToya Cantrell went to Palmdale High School, nearly 2,000 miles away from the Big Easy, on the other side of the San Gabriel Mountains from Los Angeles. That meant a few things. Yes, she was an outsider, but she was also more free to define herself- on her own terms- than most of her New Orleans-born classmates. The downside, of course, was it’d be difficult- if not impossible- for her to ever be accepted as authentically New Orleanian.
Before Cantrell’s election in 2018, the last person to be elected mayor of New Orleans who wasn’t actually a native of the city was Vic Schiro in 1961. Schiro was born in Chicago, but, unlike Cantrell, he moved to New Orleans with his family when he was still a small child; he could have answered the question about where he went to high school. Before Schiro, there was deLesseps Story “Chep” Morrison, one of the most consequential mayors of the last century. Morrison was born in tiny New Roads, Louisiana, the seat of Pointe Coupee Parish. But through his mother, Mayor Morrison was a descendant of three iconic New Orleans families, the deLesseps, the Storys, and the Tremés. The city’s former red-light district, Storyville, was named after one of his cousins, and his third great-grandfather was Claude Tremé, whose surname also appears prominently on the city map. The point is: For most of its history, despite the fact that it has always been a cosmopolitan city of immigrants, New Orleans has nonetheless been known to be wary of “outsiders.”
LaToya Cantrell didn’t inherit a famous name, and although father-in-law, Magistrate Judge Harry Cantrell, is also an elected official, she didn’t marry into a well-known political family either. Judge Cantrell won his first election in 2013, a year after LaToya Cantrell had won her first, defeating Dana Kaplan for the District B seat on the New Orleans City Council despite being outspent nearly six-to-one. Indeed, her first election would serve as a blueprint for how she approached the race for mayor, relying on an aggressive and relentless field operation that allowed her to build personal relationships with hundreds- if not thousands- of residents all throughout the city.
As a Councilwoman and, before that, as a neighborhood leader, Cantrell made a name for herself as an outspoken advocate for affordable housing and equitable redevelopment. She didn’t get everything right all of the time; her ambivalence about the removal of four white supremacist and Lost Cause monuments, for example, wasn’t exactly a profile in courage. And although she ultimately voted in favor of their removal, the concerns she had expressed about procedural trivialities were unconvincing.
During her year-and-a-half as New Orleans Mayor, however, Cantrell has consistently proven herself to be a born leader, particularly when the stakes are high and the spotlight is on. She has repeatedly stood up against the Trump administration’s egregious and inhumane treatment of undocumented immigrants, and when it looked possible that Eddie Rispone- a man who had denounced New Orleans for being a “sanctuary city” (it’s not) and promised to dispatch Gestapo-like raids in order to arrest and deport those found to be residing in the city without the requisite documentation- could be elected governor, Cantrell turned Action New Orleans, the organization that was born from her campaign operation, into high gear, earning the attention and the admiration of several national Democratic leaders, including Sec. Clinton.
To be sure, there have been slip-ups and mistakes, most notably her decision to quietly approve lowering the speed threshold on traffic cameras located in school zones, which quickly generated more than $1 million in anticipated revenue from tickets sent to unsuspecting drivers. (In April, the Times-Picayune’s James Gill excoriated Cantrell for “hornswoggling” New Orleans voters over the traffic camera issue). As a result of the public backlash against the way in which the new policy had been rolled out, the city decided to refund drivers who were ticketed before the changes were announced. Others have criticized the Cantrell administration for its lackadaisical approach toward enacting or enforcing a coherent set of regulations that could stem the unfettered proliferation of short-term rentals, which have already priced many people out of the city’s increasingly expensive housing market.
But when faced with the biggest and most important test that she has encountered thus far- the looming threat of a potential hurricane aiming its sights on the Louisiana coast, LaToya Cantrell was at her absolute best, looking less like a rookie mayor and more like a seasoned veteran who knew how to speak with authority and calm the nerves of a city that the national media had shamelessly attempted to stir into a panicked frenzy. Without question, her steady, even-keeled approach, along with the city’s near-perfect deployment of its emergency preparedness protocols, prevented the kind of nightmare scenario similar to the one that unfolded in Houston in 2005, when more than 100 people died in the process of evacuating in advance of Hurricane Rita. Rita pummeled the Lake Charles area, but Houston was spared completely.
Cantrell deserves immense credit for refusing to contribute to the sensational and entirely baseless doom-and-gloom that was being sold by the national media; at one point, her team even called out the Washington Post directly for its irresponsible coverage.
And since this is about her authenticity, it’s also worth mentioning that her enthusiasm for the Saints isn’t something you can fake.
In a state dominated by the far-right and represented in Washington by seven white Republicans, all of whom have tethered themselves to a president that, with only one exception (Clay Higgins), they had privately opposed as a candidate, and only one African American Democrat, LaToya Cantrell offers a refreshing reminder that, in Louisiana, our very best leaders have always known how to inspire people by simply being honest with themselves.
Biggest Blunder
Eddie Rispone’s First Commercial
This year, Eddie Rispone accomplished something extraordinarily rare in American politics: He somehow managed to lose support from the commercial that introduced him as a candidate for governor. It’s difficult to overstate how disastrous his debut was. Over the next five months, he would end up spending $13.5 million of his own money attempting to repair the damage. It’s important to note that, prior to declaring his candidacy, Rispone had been almost completely unknown.
Even today, with the benefit of hindsight, he still seems to believe that the problem with the commercial was the pitch of his voice and not the pitch he was selling, cluelessly claiming to the Advocate that the team he had hired didn’t realize he normally didn’t sound as nasally (notwithstanding the fact that, presumably, he still approved and paid for the ad to blanket the airwaves).
No, the most glaring problem with the ad had nothing to do with his Ross Perot impression; the problem was its basic premise: It wasn’t about Eddie Rispone, the self-made millionaire with a vision for how to lead Louisiana (perhaps because he didn’t really have much of a vision other than changing a few things that would financially benefit his business). The commercial was about Eddie Rispone: Trump Supporter, and right out of the gate, Eddie Rispone: Trump Supporter made himself immediately unlikable to nearly half of the state’s electorate and antagonized the entire city of New Orleans.
Trump may remain slightly above water in Louisiana, with 53% of voters approving of his job performance, but according to Morning Consult, since taking office, Donald Trump’s net approval in the state has decreased by 21 points. By putting Trump, who wasn’t even on the ballot, front and center, literally towering over Rispone and his wife, Rispone had effectively introduced himself not as a leader but as a follower.
But the decision to frame his introductory commercial around his obsequious support of the president isn’t the only reason the ad was such a spectacular failure. Rispone outlined three things he would do if elected governor: Work with the president on protecting Constitutional rights (i.e. the Second Amendment, not the First or the Fourteenth Amendments); ban sanctuary cities (and to ensure everyone understood he was talking about New Orleans, he included aerial footage of the French Quarter), and end taxpayer benefits for illegal immigrants (a nonsensical and vague pledge he would make repeatedly and that apparently referred to an estimate that 0.05% of Medicaid spending went toward physicians and hospitals for treating undocumented patients).
Put another way, Rispone’s message was Trump, guns, and illegal immigration, all issues that may have poll-tested well with conservative voters but have almost nothing to do with the job responsibilities of the governor.
But the line that was most memorable- and that ended up defining Rispone for the rest of the election was his reference to the Trump bumper sticker he put on his pick-up truck. He may have been telling the truth, but because of the way the commercial was staged, it came across as frivolous and scripted. Soon thereafter, GumboPAC responded with an ad that would end up defining him for the rest of the election season and would be replicated later by John Bel Edwards’ campaign: A still-frame image from Rispone’s debut commercial of the Republican candidate sitting on the flatbed of his truck, with his Trump bumper sticker visible on the back windshield, along with a caption that succinctly expressed what most people were thinking: Phony Rispone.
Most Innovative Idea
Douglas Heller
During the discussion that occurred in the state Capitol this year over how to best address the state’s high price of auto insurance, most lawmakers (and even a few members of the media) seemed more than happy to accept at face value the specious arguments made by the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry (LABI). As we mentioned earlier, the right-wing business lobbying organization was nearly successful in ramming through a series of changes to existing law that purported to be designed to lower car insurance premiums but actually amounted to a costly giveaway to the insurance industry, all intended to rig the civil justice system against drivers and in favor of insurance companies.
It’s always a good idea to be skeptical whenever politicians begin preaching about “tort reform,” because most of the time, the real aim is to make it more difficult for ordinary Americans to hold the powerful accountable.
There is no question that car insurance is too expensive in Louisiana. Depending on who you ask, we pay either the second or fourth highest prices in the nation on insurance premiums. However, there is significant disagreement about what is driving up those costs. The insurance industry blames trial lawyers, suggesting that people like Gordon McKernan and Morris Bart- whose billboards and commercials are ubiquitous across the state- are the symptom of a legal climate that makes it vastly more expensive to do business. They latch onto isolated and often inaccurate stories about frivolous lawsuits and staged car wrecks to illustrate their point, and in so doing, they’ve been able to convince a great number of otherwise reasonable people that the insurance companies are the real victims, not the people who seek remedy through the justice system.
It should be obvious, but considering the way in which the debate has been framed in Louisiana, it bears emphasis: If you’re in a dispute with an insurance company, you’re inherently at a disadvantage. They hold nearly all of the cards. It also should be noted: Despite their pollyannish outrage over lawyers who advertise their services, the insurance industry spends more every year on advertising than almost anyone else in the state of Louisiana, easily five times the amount the legal industry spends.
This year, the Bayou Brief teamed up with Douglas Heller, a nationally-renowned expert on auto insurance and how public policy affects the industry’s profits and the premiums they charge drivers. Heller spent nearly three months studying Louisiana’s auto insurance market and the laws and regulations that govern it, and his findings, which he presented on two separate occasions to the legislature, suggest there are several ways the state could act to lower the costs of car insurance premiums. Unlike the proposal pushed by LABI, the solutions outlined by Heller have all been empirically proven to work.
Despite their claims to the contrary, the truth is that the insurance industry continually hits their profit targets in Louisiana, year after year. They’re not hurting, far from it, in fact. Indeed, the proposal that LABI outlined, which was carried by state Rep. Kirk Talbot’s HB 372, would’ve resulted in only one thing for certain: Millions more in taxpayer spending every year.
Heller’s “innovative idea” is actually quite simple: Enforce existing regulations that are designed to protect consumers and enact laws that prohibit insurance companies from discriminating against drivers on the basis of their credit score and gender and prevent companies from penalizing widows, widowers, and those reentering the marketplace, like returning military veterans.
If the legislature is seriously concerned about lowering premiums and not lining the pockets and rigging the system in favor of the insurance industry, then the conversation should begin with insurance- and not tort- reform.
Most Embarrassing Quote
Lane Grigsby
Alexandria native Lane Grigsby made his fortune and a name for himself 125 miles away from his childhood home on Thornton Court, arriving in Baton Rouge for good after his new bride and their new baby made it impossible for him to remain at West Point. Aside from a profile in the Town Talk several years ago, Grigsby had been largely forgotten in Alexandria. His construction company, Cajun Industries, didn’t do much work in Central Louisiana, and even though he emerged as a prominent Republican megadonor more than two decades ago, he largely stayed out of the area’s politics as well.
This year, however, Lane Grigsby became known across the state, and in the city of his birth, he finally made a name for himself, not as Boo’s son or as the hometown boy who struck it rich, but as a smug, conniving, and brazenly unethical partisan radical who attempted to bribe, lie, and buy his way to the top of state government, not as a kingfish but as a kingmaker.
Four years ago, recognizing before many others in the Louisiana GOP that David Vitter’s gubernatorial campaign was doomed, Grigsby asked for and received a refund of the $100,000 donation he’d made to Vitter’s PAC, and along with his close friend and fellow construction magnate Eddie Rispone, he poured a fortune into electing a slate of like-minded candidates to the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE). No one had ever before spent as much on BESE elections, and with the state’s attention squarely focused on the top of the ticket, nearly all of the candidates supported by Grigsby and Rispone won their races. They had effectively ensured that they would both possess disproportionate influence over state education policy- or, at the very least, the ability to force a stalemate over changing education policy. Both Grigsby and Rispone were outspoken supporters of school privatization initiatives and funneling taxpayer dollars to vocational training tailor-made to fit the workforce needs of their construction companies.
A couple of years later, the two men decided to embark on another electoral project: They began actively attempting to recruit a candidate willing to run against incumbent Gov. John Bel Edwards. This, as it turned out, was easier said than done. No one of their shortlist was interested in the gig. Steve Scalise, their top choice, was adamant about staying put in Congress, where he currently serves as House Minority Whip. And the interview they had with U.S. Rep. Ralph Abraham had left them unimpressed; afterward, Grigsby couldn’t even remember Abraham’s name, referring to him as Abramson. That’s around the time that a sleep-deprived Rispone decided that God Himself wanted him to run for governor;
Eddie Rispone would spend millions of his own fortune directly on the campaign, and his friend Lane Grigsby would spend his millions through a shadowy constellation of PACs and nonprofits he’d created to support Rispone through negative advertising against Edwards.
Grigsby’s primary beneficiary was a 501(c)(4) he founded called, ironically, Truth in Politics. Truth in Politics had intermittently published a website that was designed to resemble a news organization, but their real debut was a commercial that aired stateside that featured Juanita Bates-Washington, a former aide to gubernatorial assistant Johnny Anderson. In the commercial, Washington, who goes by several different aliases and had collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in tax liens and a string of disgruntled former colleagues, inaccurately implied that she was fired from her job by the governor after credibly accusing Anderson of sexual harassment. Notably, Washington’s attorney, Jill Craft, who negotiated a settlement on her behalf, subsequently issued a public endorsement of John Bel Edwards, and after making a splash with the commercial, a public records lawsuit, and a press conference during the jungle primary, Truth in Politics lost interest in Washington in the runoff campaign. Their next ad, which inaccurately claimed that one of Edwards’ college classmates had been given a lucrative, multi-million dollar state contract, was ordered to be taken off the air.
But Grigsby’s award-winning quote- “I’m a kingmaker. I talk from the throne.”- actually had nothing to do with the governor’s race, at least directly. When it looked as if there could be a rare three-way runoff election for a state Senate seat in Baton Rouge, which included two Republican candidates and one Democrat, Grigsby attempted to convince one of the two Republican candidates to drop out in exchange for a promise of future financial support. When Grigsby’s offer made headlines, it was met with bipartisan outrage. And in a moment of candor, Grigsby lashed out, proving himself to be even more of megalomaniac than he appeared and reinforcing the belief among many that Eddie Rispone, if elected governor, would merely be a proxy for his buddy, the self-anointed kingmaker.
(Dis)HonorableMention for Most Embarrassing Statement: “I am a person of myself.” – Eddie Rispone.
Biggest Liar
Jeff Landry
It took nearly two weeks before General Landry, as he calls himself, realized that the campaign commercial he had been airing statewide contained one glaring error: The word Louisiana was misspelled.
It’s a fitting metaphor for how he had led the state Department of Justice during the past four years. Landry has certainly provided us with plenty of material: His creation of a phony police force to arrest people in the French Quarter for smoking pot, the official-looking badges he handed out to his friends and campaign donors, his apparent contravention of state policy on travel reimbursements, his clearly politicized and ultimately fruitless investigation into LaToya Cantrell’s city credit card, and his use of federal HUD fair housing funds to purchase thousands of pens and plastic go-cups with his name on them, among other things.
But the reason Landry deserves this year’s Biggest Liar Award is because of another glaring inaccuracy that appears in his campaign commercial. To be sure, it’s something said about him, not something said by him directly, though that’s a distinction without much of a difference given that it was still his commercial.
Last year, Jeff Landry joined Ken Paxton, the disgraced Texas attorney general who is still awaiting trial after being indicted in 2015 with two securities fraud felonies, in a suit over the constitutionality of Obamacare’s individual mandate. The U.S. Supreme Court, in a majority opinion written by Chief Justice John Roberts, had previously ruled that the individual mandate was constitutional under the Tax and Spending Clause, even though most legal scholars had believed the more compelling constitutional rationale was located in the Commerce Clause. Eventually, a Republican-led Congress effectively eliminated the penalties imposed against people who do not comply with the law’s individual mandate, which provided Landry, Paxton, and other far-right Republican attorneys general to challenge the law again. The central premise of their argument is that because the penalty has been reduced to nothing, the individual mandate should no longer be considered constitutional under the Tax and Spending Clause.
Hoping for a favorable ruling, Landry and Paxton filed the suit in the Northern District of Texas (it’s a tactic known as forum-shopping), and as predicted, the judge agreed, sending the case to the conservative Fifth Circuit Court of Appeal. Recently, a divided, three judge panel in the Fifth Circuit agreed with the district court’s ruling but sent the case back to Texas for a clarification on whether or not the individual mandate is severable (or removable) from the Affordable Care Act or if the entire law should be held unconstitutional.
It’s important to emphasize: Landry’s objective isn’t just to have an unenforced penalty be declared unconstitutional. He hopes to convince the court to throw out the entire Affordable Care Act, and importantly, that’d also mean ending legal protections for people with pre-existing conditions.
Landry didn’t bother to worry himself or the legislature about how to ensure Louisiana kept the widely popular provisions that guarantee insurance companies cannot discriminate against people with pre-existing conditions. That means if Jeff Landry is ultimately successful, his efforts could be devastating for hundreds of thousands of people in Louisiana.
So, what did Landry’s commercial claim? Why did he think he deserved to be reelected?
According to a teenager named Bella, who suffers from cystic fibrosis, and her mother, apparently, Jeff Landry somehow guaranteed protections for people with pre-existing conditions, the precise opposite of what his lawsuit intends to do.
At the time, to people unfamiliar with the circus of Louisiana politics, it seemed like a staggering amount of money to spend in a gubernatorial election, especially in a state with only two million registered voters, but in 1983, more than $20 million changed hands during the race between former two-term Gov. Edwin Edwards and incumbent Gov. Dave Treen. “In fact, in 1983,” LSU political science professor Wayne Parent writes in his book Inside the Carnival, ”when the state was still enjoying the fruits of the oil boom, more money was spent on a governor’s race in Louisiana than in any nonpresidential election in American history up until that time.”
While the spending may have surprised the uninitiated, it was arguably the least interesting part of a campaign season that culminated the following January, when 618 Louisianians forked over $10,000 each to join Edwards in Paris on a week-long “extravaganza.” His campaign, which collected $8,000 from each guest (the other $2,000 covered travel expenses) to repay some of the $14 million it had spent during the election, boasted that the trip was “the largest single political fund-raiser ever held any place in the world.” 22 of the Louisiana’s 39 state senators made the trip, including state Senate President Sammy Nunez, who told the New York Times that there was “a quorum.” He wasn’t kidding.
Of course, big money has been inundating Louisiana politics since the era of the Kingfish. Prior to the 1983 election, the record for the most money ever spent in a nonpresidential election was set in 1979, when then-Congressman Dave Treen replaced the term-limited Edwin Edwards as Louisiana governor, beating Public Service Commissioner Louis Lambert by a razor-thin 9,557 votes. But outsized spending wasn’t just limited to statewide elections. Years ago, there was more money spent in a race for Kenner, Louisiana, a suburb of New Orleans, than in the race for governor of Connecticut.
Today, nearly 37 years after the record-setting race between Edwards and Treen, which is brilliantly chronicled by the late John Maginnis in his book The Last Hayride and only a decade after the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United opened the floodgates nationwide, $20 million now seems quaint. But adjusting for inflation, the $20 million spent in 1983 amounts to $51.7 million today, making it (still) the most expensive race in Louisiana history, though we should probably add an enormous asterisk mark.
The $100 million year
This year, all told, campaign spending in Louisiana likely topped $100 million, according to a review of available campaign finance reports and discussions with people familiar with the total amount spent by outside groups.
The National Institute on Money in Politics, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization headquartered in Helena, Montana, has collected approximately 78.8% of all campaign finance reports filed this year in Louisiana, including 98.4% of the reports filed by the six gubernatorial candidates and the two candidates for lieutenant governor. Their analysis reveals that, thus far, total contributions received by campaigns and committees total $80,818,956. It is worth emphasizing again that approximately 21.2% of reports have not yet been collected, nearly all of which pertain to down-ballot legislative races and party committees.
Notably, their reporting only includes contributions and expenditures by candidates and committees. When accounting for the millions of dollars spent by outside PACs and 501(c)(4) nonprofits, the total would easily surpass $100 million.
Source: FollowtheMoney.org
Top of the Ticket
The six gubernatorial candidates raised a combined total of $39,743,215, a figure that is all but certain to remain essentially the same and well below the $40 million mark once the final report- which is from Gary Landrieu- is included.
Source: FollowtheMoney.org
There are a three things worth mentioning: First, John Bel Edwards received vastly more individual contributions than either of his two main opponents, Eddie Rispone and U.S. Rep. Ralph Abraham. Edwards’ reports list 37,013 separate contributions, whereas Rispone lists 5,303 and Abraham 4,951 (Note: All three candidates received contributions from individuals who donated more than once).
Secondly, although Eddie Rispone personally loaned his campaign $13.5 million, Edwards still out-raised him by approximately $2.9 million. Moreover, when one accounts for the loans that both Abraham and Rispone gave their campaigns, the two men raised nearly the same amount, roughly $3 million each.
How does this compare to other recent gubernatorial elections?
As the chart above illustrates, the 2019 election only brought in $3.6 million more than the one held four years prior, which is surprising when one considers that contest featured four major candidates. And while the 2015 election generated nearly double the money raised in 2011, there is a simple explanation for the wide discrepancy: In 2011, Bobby Jindal was re-elected without any real opposition.
Regardless, all three elections raised less than the 2003 battle between Kathleen Blanco and Jindal, which hauled in more than $41 million, and none have yet matched the $51.7 million (adjusted for inflation) that was raised in 1983.
Paging Dr. Dantzler
Oscar “Omar” Dantzler, Jr.
The third and final thing worth mentioning: The money allegedly raised by Oscar “Omar” Dantzler, Jr., a school bus driver from Tangipahoa Parish and a man who shamelessly refers to himself as “Dr. Dantzler,” presumably because he reportedly graduated from Cornerstone Christian College, an online academy that doles out high school diplomas, not college degrees.
Grigsby was brazen about his intentions. He hoped to move enough African American Democrats away from John Bel Edwards in order to prevent him from an outright win in the jungle primary, and in Dantzler, he found a perennial candidate who would happily go along. Indeed, a few days before qualifying began, Dantzler’s candidacy, suspiciously, was first floated by a right-wing blog.
In a transparently cynical attempt at justifying his chicanery, Grigsby claimed he was simply motivated by the desire to empower the voices of African Americans. “The white Democrats don’t really listen to the black community except for every four years,” Grigsby told the Advocate about his support for Dantzler. “I think the black community should pay close attention to what leads to the betterment of the community.”
One should keep Grigsby’s words in mind when considering what had already been readily known about the candidate he decided to promote.
Oscar “Omar” Dantzler had run twice for Mayor of Hammond and two other times against John Bel Edwards’ brother, Daniel Edwards, for Sheriff of Tangipahoa Parish. Following his most recent campaign for Sheriff, he filed suit against former FBI Director James Comey, former Attorney General Eric Holder, former Louisiana Secretary of State Tom Schedler, Sheriff Edwards and several others, alleging a wide-ranging and bizarre criminal conspiracy that resulted in him losing at the ballot box. Among other things, he claimed that turnout must have been dramatically higher than reported, because he personally saw more 30,000 voters show up to the polls on Election Day.
Notably, this wasn’t the first time he had filed a federal suit alleging a criminal conspiracy; a few years earlier, he filed an even stranger lawsuit against his ex-wife and a string of elected officials, including Sheriff Edwards, over a custody battle involving his young daughter. Both cases were ultimately terminated, but it’s worth mentioning because some on the far-right purposely distorted the facts and neglected to mention that both cases were ultimately dropped in an attempt to smear Sheriff Edwards and, by extension, the governor as well.
In addition to his work as a bus driver, Dantzler is the registered agent for Dantzler Affordable Bail, Dantzler’s Global Police and Investigation Enforcement Corporation, the National Injustice Organization for All People, and the Tangipahoa Islamic Center, according to documents filed with the Louisiana Secretary of State. His association with the Tangipahoa Islamic Center is interesting because, as a candidate, he claimed to have received a degree in Biblical Studies. Dantzler also registered the trade name “Dantzler’s Global Security College,” which does not appear to have ever offered any coursework.
Naturally, given Lane Grigsby’s interest in boosting Dantzler and Dantzler’s own history, one might be curious how exactly his campaign was able to raise nearly $34,000, apparently from more than 150 individual contributions.
After all, he didn’t appear to be running a serious operation. His campaign Facebook page, for example, redirects visitors to the wrong website, OscarOmarDantzler44Gov.com- a broken link- instead of the correct domain, OscarOmarDantzler4Gov.com.
If, unlike the candidate, you did notice the typo, then you were able to find a pitiful, poorly-designed page featuring a donate button and three homemade campaign commercials: One about the horrific killing of Alton Sterling, another that included an interview with the musician Lil’ Boosie, and a third in which Dantzler unintentionally appears as an apparition, the result of comically shoddy editing.
A still image from one of Oscar Omar Dantzler’s three digital ads.
Upon close inspection, the reports that Dantzler filed with the Louisiana Ethics Administration reveal that he was the sole contributor to his gubernatorial campaign. The reason why it appears he received more than 150 contributions is simple: Dantzler itemized all of his expenditures as contributions.
Curiously, unlike most candidates, Dantzler didn’t loan his campaign the $33,595 it received; he presumably just gave it to the campaign. While his donations are only a fraction of the personal fortune that Eddie Rispone spent on his campaign, $33,595 is roughly equivalent to the total annual salary of an average school bus driver in Tangipahoa Parish. To be sure, according to Dantzler’s reporting (albeit reporting that is fraught with major errors), he contributed a total of $22,990 to the campaign, and it is possible that, given the way in which he had listed his expenditures as contributions, the aggregate total is less than it may appear to be.
Gubernatorial candidate Oscar Omar Dantzler listed hotel rooms booked with Sai Hospitality as contributions and provided a misspelled name, street address, and city. His campaign finance reports are littered with similar entries, making the task of determining his campaign’s activities nearly impossible.
The majority of itemized expenditures were for office equipment and furniture, meals, and hotel rooms; his campaign spent thousands of dollars at Home Depot and Office Depot despite the fact that it never advertised a campaign headquarters and appeared to have had all of its advertisements, mailers, signs, and push cards designed by third-party vendors.
Dantzler’s obviously bogus reports demand immediate action from the state Ethics Administration, because currently, they consistently misrepresent the political activities of dozens of privately-owned businesses. As a result, every single restaurant, hotel, and retail store that Dantzler paid during the course of his campaign will now find themselves listed in the state’s database of campaign contributors, which is not exactly an insignificant issue for many of these businesses.
Stephen Handwerk is the Executive Director of the Louisiana Democratic Party.
Eight years ago, almost immediately after I began as Executive Director of the Louisiana Democratic Party, our newly-elected Chair Karen Carter Peterson and Executive Committee recognized that unless we made a series of strategic investments, Republican candidates, particularly those running in statewide elections, would continue to enjoy a significant structural advantage.
Louisiana Democrats have the numbers. Despite the gains made by the GOP during the aftermath of party realignment, in which the so-called “Dixiecrats,” resentful of the progress made during the Civil Rights movement, coalesced behind a new Louisiana Republican Party, the majority of the state’s electorate share our values.
Our first task was to ensure we would have a more sophisticated and reliable way to reach out to those voters, which has become increasingly more challenging in an era dominated by toxic partisanship, widespread disinformation, and persistent voter suppression.
The early investments that came from that process allowed us to use highly targeted data in the coordinated campaign, Victory for Louisiana, that we created to assist Gov. Edwards’ re-election, offering a template for how we should approach future elections.
This year, the party focused on streamlining operations, augmenting regional offices, and investing in GOTV (Get Out The Vote) efforts. In addition, we also played a supporting role in communications and research.
Without question, the infrastructure we built over the past eight years allowed us to manage these tasks efficiently. I frequently tell people that one significant part of my job is keeping a fully stocked and up-to-date toolbox and to provide the training that campaigns need to be able to use all parts of it.
I want to share how we fill that toolbox.
This story really begins with Gov. Howard Dean. Many will remember him from that shout— “Yaaaarggh!”— that ultimately led to the end of his presidential aspirations in 2004. But Democrats, and indeed the entire progressive community, owe Gov. Dean a huge debt of gratitude. After ending his campaign, which had been built on a 50-state strategy, he served a term as Chair of the Democratic National Committee.
Under his leadership, forward-thinking state party leaders realized the need for a national voter database, but that was easier said than done. Up until this point, each state had their own vendors, contracts, and consultants who were invested in keeping the status quo. At that point, our state party used a system called “Astro,” which really wasn’t much more than an Avery label generator for mailers. The powerful and complex data infrastructure most of our state parties use today was born out of Howard Dean’s visionary leadership of the DNC.
Illustrating the benefits offered by this improved voter file is really simple: When a voter tells you that the issue they care about most is Medicare, that seems like something we should remember. Shouldn’t we follow up with that voter when Medicare is on the ballot? Wouldn’t it be helpful to be able to track if a voter works the night shift, and prefers you to not call during the day when they are sleeping? Couldn’t we decrease the number of contacts we have to make if we had some knowledge not just of the party recorded in a voter’s registration, but their likelihood of actually voting for that party?
By being able to collect and use data in the voter file, we could put an end to stories like those told by one of my colleagues, New Hampshire Democratic Party Chair Raymond Buckley. In the days when they used to keep basic voter information on index cards, they had to hope that nobody had misplaced or spilled coffee on the voter card they needed on any given day.
State parties previously had a patchwork of individual systems, but folding them into a program with a national standard allowed them to acquire more data, facilitating more meaningful conversations with voters. The long-term goal here is more success at the ballot box. Over the years we have been able to take that base voter file and build on it, dramatically expanding our capacity to protect the vote by tracking voter purges.
We can now offer presidential campaign level tools to candidates in school board and city council races. Local groups, like our Democratic Parish Executive Committees, can now access the data needed to organize precinct by precinct.
Nationally, Democrats have partnered with a company called NGP-VAN to deliver an amazing set of tools which, when combined with accurate state party data, helps create an environment where candidates can win. NGP-VAN’s Votebuilder system seamlessly integrates virtual phone banks, hub dialers, distributed canvassing, and even old school robo-calls with the entire campaign.
The voter contact programs used by volunteers remain constant from campaign to campaign, cutting down on training time. And allowing volunteers to enter voter contact results as they make calls and knock doors radically decreases the amount of time that campaign staff must expend on data entry. New add-ons such as Digital Ad Placement and Peer-to-Peer Texting put real scalable tools into the hands of local leaders. This provides a space to house the data that can flip school board seats, win city council races, and build a base for a future run for governor.
Whereas the Votebuilder software has improved the old methods of data storage and ensuring the information on file is no longer static. Updates occur regularly – indeed, during Early Voting, it’s updated daily – with data preservation, maintenance, and protection taking top priority.
Another national partner, TargetSmart, has helped NGP-VAN and the state parties enhance the reliability and performance of our data. With their scoring and modeling systems, we’ve been able to identify language preferences, match more phone numbers to actual voters, and generally clean up our lists. This boosts the effectiveness of our voter contacts.
All the data in the world is meaningless if you cannot analyze it and make predictions from it. This is where our national committees complement these partnerships. The Democratic National Committee (DNC) has a sharp and innovative technology department that continues to improve and evolve. State parties get assists as well from the data scientists at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC), and, certainly this year for Louisiana, the Democratic Governor’s Association (DGA).
Indeed, the DGA deserves tremendous credit for being a vital partner in our data operations, helping us build the modeling that allowed us to focus on the voters most likely to be receptive to our message. These organizations can take our base voter file, combine it with polling information, and come up with models to better determine who needs to hear from us, as well as when and how.
These tools are so powerful that we recommend when candidates build their teams, they make sure to bring on someone who is highly experienced in dealing with Votebuilder.
While the state party certainly offers basic trainings and offers a support system for candidates, it is imperative that candidates invest in a dedicated voter file administrator who can pull targets and use our scoring system, then take those universes and send them to Mini-VAN for canvasing and to Virtual Phone Banks for calling. This level of knowledge is essential to training additional team members and vital to winning campaigns. Your administrator then needs to know how to commit data and pull reports, so that you can manage your operations effectively and adjust your plans when necessary. Analyzing your voter contacts so allows you to layer your methods of communication, improving your odds of victory. (More detailed information is always available for candidates through the Louisiana Democratic Party. The cost to a campaign for the database and its included tools is based on district size.)
We’ve had a couple of success stories that exemplify how this system works.
A historic mayor-president election took place in East Baton Rouge Parish in the winter of 2016. It was an open seat, and the competition was fierce. Then-Senator Sharon Weston Broome made the decision to hire a team that invested heavily in a field program, which was tasked with communicating with high-value voters by mail, phone and door knocks. Using this system early in the Jungle Primary allowed the Broome campaign to quickly pivot in the General Election, armed with a measurable base of already-identified support. And because they also knew, in turn, where they lacked support, they were able to build a sophisticated plan in those last thirty days that was responsive to and informed by real data. Mayor-President Sharon Weston Broome won her race on that chilly December day by, among other things, allowing the data infrastructure (which was built and maintained by the state party) to guide her strategy.
Fast-forward to the following year and New Orleans’ open mayoral race, which would be equally competitive. Very early on, then-Councilmember LaToya Cantrell focused a lean campaign budget on community outreach and field efforts, preparing for a marathon rather than a sprint.
Her team understood that talking directly with voters would be the pathway forward, and she brought on an experienced staff who knew how to use Votebuilder for walk lists, phone banks, and texting. The conversations centered around making sure voters were invited to join the team. Cantrell and her campaign manager, Maggie Carroll, knew from their years of organizing together in the Broadmoor neighborhood that person-to-person conversations would be a winning strategy, but this was only made possible with early investments in a dedicated and well-trained team. Cantrell won with 60% of the vote, and a substantial share of her voters were people the campaign had already identified as supporters and contacted multiple times.
If field wins elections (and we’ve repeatedly seen that it does), it’s only as successful as the data and tools available to implement the plan.
In our 2019 efforts, we combined our eight years of data investment with a rockstar Data Director, Calahan Riley (who has since moved on to work for the DNC). This gave us the flexibility to work with our national partners to develop the models we would need to be successful.
Our first need was a turnout model to predict who would vote in the October and November elections. Then we needed a personalized John Bel Edwards model that would allow us to find out who the governor’s supporters would likely be. Once we had those two sets of modeling, we were able to start pulling “universes” for the campaign to use. Creating mailing lists early was important so we could get facts into voters’ hands and remind them an important election was coming. Models also allowed us to be more efficient in creating our regional and statewide phone banks, in addition to building a targeted digital program.
While the lion’s share of direct voter contact work has been rightly credited to nonpartisan groups with whom we are legally prohibited from coordinating, our team focused on selected universes to produce a layering effect. By the time we reached Early Voting, models and targeting gave us the tools we needed to pull huge lists for the texting program, so we could remind our voters when and where they needed to vote.
*** John Bel Edwards addresses supporters after winning re-election. Photo credit: Bayou Brief.
Of course, more than anything else, elections hinge on the candidates themselves, and fortunately, this year, our gubernatorial candidate was a widely-admired incumbent with a proven record of moving Louisiana forward and a reputation for integrity that went beyond party labels. Yet he still faced the odds any Democrat running for statewide office would encounter.
His campaign manager, Richard Carbo, a communications guru in his own right, led a team of outstanding professionals through message discipline and creative branding that highlighted the positives of our governor. He also took full advantage of this data backbone we’ve spent years building.
Being able to connect with the right voters- when and how they want to be contacted and about things they want to talk about- is vital for campaigns and party-building. Whether you’re on the phones or knocking on doors, voters have less time to talk today than they did just five years ago. Figuring out how voters want to engage and giving them that opportunity is the future of organizing. To do that, you have to have the data, the tools, and the experience to use them.
Across all races this year, our Democratic candidates were able to attempt 1,823,017 phone calls, send over 3,942,136 text messages, knock on over 416,721 doors, distribute over 2,814,566 pieces of direct mail, and serve an estimated 75 million digital ads/impressions. None of that would have been possible if the Democratic Party had not made the decision to prioritize data so many years ago.
Coda
I want to make mention of the small, but mighty Team LDP Staff who worked their butts off this year. I am very grateful to our team members including Michelle, Edward, Pat, Allyson, Kaleb,Tari, Morenike, Deion, Eric, Alice, Calahan, Lynda and all of our regionals –Alvin, Mack, Cozette, Jarvis, Linda, Cathy, Donna, Eliria, Spencena, Lila – and all of our amazing interns and fellows. I can’t thank you all enough.
*** Featured image: Oya (India Mack) and Ogun Size (Rodney Graham) in Lauren E. Turner’s adaptation of the Tarell McCraney play “In the Red and Brown Water.” Photo credit: Brittany Smith.
In the beginning, there was water.
And the winds of change blew the multiethnic ancestors of a new people across its surface, into Blackness, a place of chaos and endless generative possibility.
Enter, some centuries later, Tarell Alvin McCraney’s poetic play “In the Red and Brown Water,” which closed a nine-show run with an encore performance at the Pythian in New Orleans’ Central Business District.
Produced by No Dream Deferred, a non-profit theater company founded by India Mack and Lauren E. Turner, “In the Red and Brown Water” is the first show of their inaugural season.
If their debut is any indication, No Dream Deferred stands to become a leader in local theater and a formidable force in the region’s arts landscape, not only for the quality of the work they produce but for the way the narratives they choose speak to a mid-gentrification, climate crisis-facing New Orleans in a way that no other theater company is.
After her mother’s death, the lead character Oya (Mack) navigates the winding road of young womanhood from her porch, where she sits atop a turned-over washbasin, gazing simultaneously into and past the courtyard of the public housing development in which she lives.
She has traded running – her ticket out of the ‘hood – for daydreaming, mobility for the world of ideas, a longing for something beyond what the projects can offer for a longing for what the projects seem to offer everyone but her – parenthood.
A love triangle emerges between Oya, the passionate and unpredictable Shango (Martin “Bats” Bradford), and the industrious and gentlehearted Ogun Size (Rodney Graham). With unresolved sorrow for the death of her mother, mounting frustration at her inability to conceive, and the revelation that Shango has impregnated Shun (Ariel Lucious), Oya spirals.
“In the Red and Brown Water” offers blood, death, sex, confusion – the four things that, when in our possession, Black critics least like the white gaze to land upon. But as in McCraney’s Oscar-winning film Moonlight, “In the Red and Brown Water” artfully avoids pity or self-congratulation.
There are no moralist overtures, no condemnation or exemplary conduct – only what is: People making choices and parsing through their consequences. The responsibility of onlookers is to get out of their way.
*** The audience at the Pythian during a performance of Lauren E. Turner’s adaptation of the Tarell McCraney play “In the Red and Brown Water.” Photo credit: Brittany Smith.
Turner adapted the play, originally set in a fictional Louisiana town, to a New Orleans public housing development at the turn of the 21st century. The characters are named after orisha, historical figures of pre-colonial West Africa who, believed to be sent as guides to humanity, were deified as personifications of the forces of nature – the rash justice of lightning, the nurturing fury of the ocean, the sweet luxury of the river.
Bradford performs Shango to excess (which the bold, strategic warrior orisha of lightning and fire would have no other way), bolting onto stage in army fatigues and outfits of red and white, Shango’s preferred colors. He rattles Oya with his sudden entries and departures and the audience with his colorism (he repeatedly notes a preference for “light skinned girls”) and sexually explicit comments.
Glaspy’s playful and exacting Elegba, the childlike and wise messenger god, demands laughs from the audience just as he demands candy from Oya’s mother Mama Moja (Stacye Mackey).
Mack’s gentle and fearless Oya, the goddess of the wind, orients our attention with an untraceable power.
As they did with Shango, costume designers Janese Galathe and Dana Leon dressed each character in the colors traditionally associated with the orisha whose name they bear – Oya wears purple, Elegba red, Mama Moja blue and white, Ogun Size green.
Together, all the elements, all the characters, create perfect balance in spite or perhaps because of the good and bad of their behavior.
The island stage, surrounded on all sides by audience and flush to the ground, intensifies a sense of intimacy between the audience and the characters. The audience shares the same floor with Oya and her neighbors, these gods in the flesh, feeling the reverberations of their movements beneath our feet.
*** From L to R: Shango (Martin “Bats” Bradford) Ogun Size (Rodney Graham), and Oya (India Mack) in Lauren E. Turner’s adaptation of the Tarell McCraney play “In the Red and Brown Water.” Photo credit: Brittany Smith.
The minimalist set design (Kevin Griffith) invites the audience to conjure the image of New Orleans’ bygone brick, two-story housing developments – which were replaced by pastel-painted mixed-income housing and given culturally incomprehensible names like Harmony Oaks and Columbia Parc.
Setting the play in a public housing development that we’ve watched be disappeared, Turner’s adaptation of “In the Red and Brown Water” is haunted by the question: What if god were one of us who is no longer? Or perhaps more directly, how would we feel about displacement and gentrification if we saw god in a black woman receiving public assistance, the most vulnerable to the tides of gentrification?
In 2007, City Council voted to demolish the remaining public housing developments, following a national trend that, theoretically, would deconcentrate poverty and result in the upward economic mobility of the projects’ former inhabitants.
The St. Thomas development, in the Tenth Ward, had already been demolished and reconfigured in 2000 – permanently displacing four in five former residents. Nonetheless, it was touted as an example of what was possible.
Proponents of the demolition, mostly non-residents, threw around stereotypes of hardened criminals and the welfare queens who harbored them in City Council chambers. Public housing residents, they said, had become too comfortable, neglecting opportunities to purchase homes so that they could, instead, continue to live off of the public good will.
City Council assured the public that an equal number of affordable housing units would be built, though scattered.
The Housing Authority of New Orleans’ waitlist is currently 30,000-plus names long. According to HousingNOLA’s 2019 report, public and private developers not only failed to meet the affordable housing development goal in 2018 and 2019 but took 129 and 191 units off the affordable market each respective year.
That same report states that, in order to afford a modest two-bedroom at market rate, a renter who earns Louisiana’s minimum wage would have to work 107 hours per week.
The demolition of public housing is often placed along a “post-Katrina” timeline, a decision only made possible in the wake of the wind and water, a decision made possible by natural disaster.
It’s consistent with a larger historical imaginary that casts Black people’s relationship with nature as adversarial. Our ancestors were, after all, trekked through the forests of the African interior to an ocean some had never seen before, before being carried by that ocean to a geographically, socially, and culturally unrecognizable place where they were forced to work the land until their deaths.
In the process, their relationships with those forces of nature that they’d deified expanded. It wasn’t a matter of good and bad – the tradition teaches that there’s value to be gleaned even from that which is meant to harm, but now they knew something about the saltwater and the sweetwater, the wind, the fire, the forest, the iron that they couldn’t have known before. A new religion is formed.
By placing these forces of nature incarnate into pre-Katrina public housing developments and before a post-Post-Katrina audience, Turner exposes this relationship between environmental racism and gentrification. Displacement and gentrification exist along a continuum of ecological violence that shapes Black people’s access to and mobility within the outdoors.
“In the Red and Brown Water” left me wondering: How might the forthcoming rupture of these characters’ community, which we’re living in the aftermath of, impact them? When his auto shop becomes an “art garage,” might Ogun’s hard work that propels progress give way to predation (as does happen in the patakis, the traditional stories of the orisha)? When Shango is unable to find a living wage to care for his growing family in a tourism-driven city that is not hospitable to historic Black residents, might his fiery sense of justice lead to acts of “senseless violence”?
*** Oya (India Mack) surrounded by the chorus in a performance of Lauren E. Turner’s adaptation of the Tarell McCraney play “In the Red and Brown Water.” Photo credit: Brittany Smith.
Gods don’t need saving, sure. But our choices, even those that seemingly have nothing to do with them, impact the way that they flow, strike, settle, blow. Oya spirals because economic marginalization leaves her with no options, the mobility that is her birthright has been made impossible.
No, gods need not our pity, but as New Orleanians, wedged between bodies of water as we are, it’s hard to ignore that spiraling wind begets mass destruction. The longer it’s staid, the more fierce its display of power.
In old Europe, particularly parts of Germany, the Feast of St. Nicholas on December 6 would be preceded by the appearance of a devilish creature known as Krampus, on the night before. His task, in contrast to the gift-giving St. Nicholas, was to punish misbehaving children. In the modern day Louisiana Legislature, the annual lawmakers’ Christmas celebration is preceded by a day filled with committee meetings, including a constitutionally-required gathering of the Revenue Estimating Conference. And now, for the second year in a row, the REC has hosted its own Krampus – a stand-in for the House Speaker – portrayed by a lawmaker who is fond of the phrase, “the devil is in the details.”
The
Revenue Estimating Conference meeting of Thursday, December 12, 2019,
started cheerfully enough, with the introduction of the panel’s new
member economist, Dr. Stephen Barnes from U-L Lafayette. The other
members of the quartet are Commissioner of Administration Jay
Dardenne, Senate President John Alario, and – substituting for
House Speaker Taylor Barras – House Appropriations chairman Cameron
Henry. Their task? To adopt the official forecast for FY’21, so the
Governor could begin preparing his budget proposal.
Both
the Legislative Fiscal Office and the Division of Administration
developed
forecasts recognizing more state revenue than what was last projected
in April. The LFO’s Greg Albrecht suggested an increase of
$235-million over the previously projected $9.56-billion, while the
DOA’s Manfred Dix recommended a more conservative addition to the
state income figure, an increase of $168-million.
Is that a “Bah, Humbug!” I hear?
Before
the panel members began their usual detailed questioning of the
various factors prompting the numbers that were being proposed,
Albrecht told them his forecast contained a known error.
“It’s
in the number for unclaimed property,” Albrecht explained. “The
statute allows the Treasury Department to retain seven percent of
collections, and traditionally the Treasury annually gives a portion
of the overage to the State General Fund. Treasurer John Schroder
says he will not do so any longer. That will take about $20-million
out of the General Fund that’s normally been there.”
“The
Treasurer’s transfer of the revenue excess goes back more than 35
years,“ Alario interjected.
“That’s
right,” Dardenne said. “But now we’ve received a letter from
John (Schroder) that says, basically, ‘I’m keeping the money. I’m
nt transferring it to you, and I’m not going to transfer it to you
as long as I’m Treasurer.’ However the law requires, and we have
an expectation that, the Treasurer would transfer 20 to 25 million
dollars, making it available for the legislature to appropriate in
supplemental budget bill. It is the Legislature that appropriates
money and decides how it is spent, not the Treasurer.”
“Is
the money the individual’s or the state’s?” Rep. Henry asked
Albrecht.
“It’s
the property of the individual,” the fiscal analyst replied.
“So
this is not our money in the first place, and we should not count on
the individual not coming forward to claim it. It is a state
liability, and therefore not our money to spend,” Henry stated. “I
see the discrepancy.”
“Nobody’s
suggesting the Treasurer not give back the money, but he is not
entitled to hold onto it,” Alario remonstrated. “We do not intend
to curtail the Treasurer’s job, but he is not to curtail the
legislature’s job, either.”
“The
state Constitution tells us that all money shall be deposited in
state Treasury, and the process is set out in law for the Unclaimed
Property funds. The Treasurer does not have the authority to hold
onto the money!” Dardenne insisted. “So stay tuned: this isn’t
over, because he is not following the law.”
In
the afternoon, the Treasurer sent out a press release, stating he had
officially
notified
the REC he
is “ending the practice” of transferring Unclaimed Property money
to the State General Fund annually.
“It
infuriates me that big government takes it upon itself to decide what
does and doesn’t belong to Louisiana citizens,” Treasurer
Schroder says in the press release. “Clearly this money belongs
to the rightful owners, and it’s my job to return it.”
And now, some Grinchery
Courtesy: Cat In The Hat Productions
The
panel, returning to consideration of the forecast, had questions for
the fiscal analysts regarding national predictions of a coming
recession, and if – or how – that factored into their revenue
projections.
There
is much talk of a recession in 2020,” Dix replied. “Some say
there’s a 50% chance in 6 months. Moody’s says 11%, so it’s all
over the map. I think there will be a slowdown in 2020, so my
prediction leaves a bit less revenue overall than what was received
than 2019.”
“So
do you expect the slowdown in this fiscal year, before the end of
June, or after, into the next fiscal year?” Alario asked
“I
expect it in the last quarter of current fiscal year,” Dix
answered.
“There’s
your Grinch story,” Alario quipped.
“Krampusing” the REC’s style
“What
factors do you think will be driving recession in Louisiana?” the
House Appropriations chair
inquired.
“Energy
prices, the trade war, and tariffs,” Dix, the
DOA’s analyst,
responded.
“Thank you,” Henry replied. “The devil is in the details, and I’m just trying to get people educated on what’s coming.”
The
group’s new economist, Dr. Barnes, asked if there was anything on
the near horizon that promised growth potential for state revenues,
and how much. Maybe two percent, was Dix’s response.
“And
that’s all inflation,” the
LFO’s Albrecht
added. “Most of our forecast modeling goes down compared to last
year’s actual revenues. It’s going up, relative to a baseline,
but going down compared to the actual collections. Both Manfred and I
have some caution built
in for a slowdown in the economy.”
“That’s
good, the more conservative we are,” Alario commented. “But we
still have to have some numbers so the Governor can present a budget
in March.”
“You
both acknowledge there’s national discussion of a coming
recession,” Dardenne said, “But traditionally, any recession hits
Louisiana months – even a couple of years — later than the rest of
the country. This is your best guess, and both of you believe the
forecast should be adjusted, and adjusted upward?”
“Yes,
sir,” Dix and Albrecht answered in unison.
“Then
it appears it is time for a motion” Dardenne said. “We are guided
by the state Constitution, with words that say ‘the responsibility
of the Revenue Estimating Conference is to establish an official
forecast for the coming fiscal year.’ As we sit here today, we do
not have an official forecast for FY 21. The law also says we are to
meet before the end of the calendar year, to allow the Governor
sufficient time to prepare a budget. We are a Revenue ESTIMATING
Conference, we ESTIMATE
what we think the revenue will be. In the spirit of compromise, I
move that we adopt Manfred’s, because it is more conservative, and
the less optimistic forecast.”
“I
object,” Henry said.
“Chairman
Henry, it is fruitless to require new legislators, who already face a
steep learning curve, to have to take up this discussion in a couple
of months, in addition to everything else,” Dardenne said. “Is it
really appropriate to thumb your
nose at the state Constitution, driven solely by a desire to fight
with the Governor? With all due respect, Senator-elect, if you don’t
like the process, file a bill to change the law and amend that
process. We tried this whole exercise last year and ultimately ended
up agreeing that yes, things really were a little better. All the
mess could be avoided. We have a responsibility to establish a
forecast. By refusing to do so, we are shirking our constitutional
responsibility.”
“Yeah,
we did do this last year, but we were
more accurate,” Henry responded to Dardenne. “Mr. Manfred says
there’s the possibility to come back in March. We do know now we
have an issue with unclaimed property, so we know the estimate is
inaccurate. And I think it’s important to leave it to the new
people coming in. It’s time we start doing things differently.”
Understand each other, but don’t agree.
“Without
this, there cannot be an executive budget presented at the designated
time,” Dardenne insisted. “There are several things the Joint
Budget Committee won’t be able to do this afternoon because of
this., including important marsh creation and storm protection
projects through the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority.”
“I
know that’s an important project, but not as important as the
overall state of the budget process going forward,” Henry fired
back. “We understand each other, but we don’t agree. I’m trying
to prevent us from having a non-workable budget.”
“In
the end, we still have to educate children, build and repair
highways,” Alario said. “We are in neglect of doing our
job if we don’t take care of this today. Please call the roll:”
“President
Alario?”
“Yes.”
“Doctor
Barnes?”
“Yes.”
“Commissioner
Dardenne?”
“Yes.”
“Chairman
Henry for Speaker Barras?”
“No.”
“Then
I move we adopt Greg’s forecast,” Dardenne said, and again Alario
asked for the roll call.
Yes,
came the first three responses, with another no from Rep. Henry.
With
a sad sigh, Alario announced, “The motion fails to carry, as it
requires a unanimous vote.”