Time to run for governor again

John Bel Edwards. Is he a "winna" or a "looza"?  The third and therefore specialest of this year's legislative special sessions ended last month. Unfortunately, for those of us always interested in reading the post-game box score, it seems as if the year's governance marathon left Clancy DuBos too tired to declare the results in his accustomed affected colloquial style. Last week's brief column half-heartedly takes us through the motions of declaring winners and losers without going into too much detail and, sadly, without even bothering to arrange them in a listicle under those adorable "winna" and "looza" headings. It wasn't like this when the regular session ended  back in May.  Clancy was so excited then that he proudly announced the "35th annual edition" of his breakdown on Twitter. I guess he's saying we're only supposed to get one of these per year.  But, really, aren't we also only supposed to have one session?  It's a dynamic political environment.  Our media should probably be more agile.

On the other hand, it's been a busy couple of weeks for Clancy's outfit. I had a few hiccups trying to even locate the winner/loser column after Gambit broke its website by merging it to the crap-pile of broken URLs and impenetrable archives the Advocate publishes. This is a new era where the "Alternative Weekly" lives as a division of the major local daily. We still aren't sure what the Georges Media Concern's plans are for the new brand they've acquired.

It was interesting, though, that days after State Senator (and possible gubernatorial candidate) Sharon Hewitt was given space in the Advocate to push out a pile of nonsense about "wasted, fraudulent or questionable" Medicaid spending, the Gambit side of the website published a refutation of that nonsense.  This is just one example and it's early in the merger but it's concerning to think that Georges Media is adopting a CNN Crossfire style format where we get a Gambit  "on the left" (but not too left) take on the same item The Advocate covers "from the right."

If this really is the strategy then, now doubt, they're hailing it in the office as a triumph of "balanced" reporting. But, in reality, the full effect of such a point-counterpoint where one side is purposefully lying and the other is not necessarily writing in good faith either is just to legitimize the lies.  Is anyone served by this? Who cares as long as we get the eyeballs of market segments on #bothsides. I wonder if this means we're in for a Dan Fagan version of "winnas and loozas" in the future.   We'll keep an eye on this as they "work out the kinks."

Anyway, if we're looking for a more fleshed out winners/losers recap of the special session, we are in luck.  T-P reporter Julia O'Donoghue put together her own assessment  for that other bad news website.  It's more thorough than Clancy's effort and she got just enough things wrong to fill in perfectly for him so let's take a look at that first.

Don't misunderstand me. The reporting here is good. I just don't get where she's coming from with these scores. The most baffling contradiction comes where she manages to name the Governor a "winner" even though the comprehensive tax reform agenda his supporters have been pushing for three years is a "loser." About that, O'Donoghue writes, 

Edwards and Louisiana lawmakers have been promising since 2016 to create a more diverse and comprehensive tax base -- one that wouldn't rely so heavily on sales taxes that are harder on poor people.

Several legislators also promised to look carefully at the business tax breaks Louisiana gives to see if any were worth eliminating.

In the end, Edwards and the Legislature didn't end up making any major changes to the tax system. They simply resolved the state's financial instability by passing a slightly lower sales tax rate on a temporary basis again.

Business tax breaks are also still in place, though some are slightly less generous than they used to be. 

In other words, John Bel Edwards failed. After three years of contentious legislative brinksmanship, a task force report that came to basically nothing, an out-of-left-field Commercial Activity Tax proposal, and countless backroom negotiations with "stakeholders," we've ended up exactly where we started; inadequately funding government services on the backs of the state's poorest residents.

So, what did the Governor win, exactly? "Compromise," presumably for its own sake.

The Democratic governor was able to strike a deal with the Republican-controlled Legislature that hopefully pulls the state out of the financial turmoil it has experienced for several years.

"The encouraging things is we have demonstrated it can be done. That we are not Washington, D.C., where they are still paralyzed by dysfunction on every major decision they have to make," Edwards said Sunday.

So John Bel wins because the "financial turmoil" is swept under the rug?  Just taking the fiscal cliff off the agenda for a few more year, while averting a total disaster, doesn't deliver results for the poor and working class constituents we ostensibly elect Democrats to represent. Maybe the Governor doesn't care about that. (He doesn't.)  He still doesn't really win any political advantage. Does the Governor think the budget deal takes tax policy off the table for next year's elections? Try telling that to Sharon Hewitt.

Regardless of his failure to win a fairer, more progressive tax system for Louisiana, conservatives are going to continue to hammer away at the Governor as though he had confiscated 90 percent of Tom Benson's estate and used the money to buy every man, woman and child in the state a shiny new jetpack. That would be great, of course. But it's not happening. And the fact that nothing even remotely like it is happening is a sure sign that radical right activists should be counted among the "winners" here.  Naturally, that isn't what O'Donoghue's column says.

LOSER: Anti-tax advocates Anti-tax advocates -- particularly the local branch of the conservative group Americans for Prosperity -- have been bombarding legislators with direct mail and advertising campaigns, encouraging them to not vote for taxes at all. They even had volunteers knock on doors in some legislators' districts.

In the end, the Republican-controlled Legislature voted not to cut government programs despite these campaigns. Instead, they renewed a portion of the sales tax  in order to keep programs such as the TOPS college scholarship whole.

But, again, all that's happened is a continuance of the status quo. AFP, and right wing policy groups like it, successfully defended corporate and upper income privileges while ensuring the budget gap is filled by taxing poor people. 

Similarly, O'Donaghue names as "losers" Lance Harris, Cameron Henry, and Alan Seabaugh. But this score relies on a distortive analysis of these conservatives' goals. For example she asks us to take at face value Harris's own 4.33 percent sales tax proposal rather than the 4.45 that eventually passed. But the actual rate was never the point of the exercise.  It was always about loudly arguing and voting against whatever the Governor asked for.  Harris didn't give a shit if a tax bill got passed at all.  He said so himself. O'Donaghue reported it here.

Harris said he is attempting to compromise. He doesn't like taxes and he never thought he would sponsor legislation to retain a higher sales tax rate. Neither did his spouse. "My wife told me not to come home last night," said Harris.

Harris said he would be unwilling to increase the amount of money that his sales tax bill would raise, even from $369 million to $400 million. House Democrats said that means Harris is not willing to work with them or with the Senate, whose members are likely to want more tax revenue.

"It's a compromise that I'm even bringing this bill," Harris said.

Harris got what he wanted. Henry also got what he wanted. His war chest/slush fund isn't going to suffer one bit as a result of his actions this year.  And Seabaugh is well on his way to becoming a federal judge. All's well that ends well for these guys.



So is the Governor a Winna or a Looza? He can try to parse an essentially stalemated legislative year any way he likes. But as Mark Ballard correctly points out, so can his opponents.

John N. Kennedy, the U.S. senator and putative GOP gubernatorial candidate next year, tweeted: “Heck I don’t think even good ol’ Abe Lincoln could get reelected if he raised billions in new taxes like Gov. Edwards has done.”

Putting aside that President Lincoln is father of the income tax, yet was reelected, Louisiana legislators of both parties voted overwhelmingly in March 2016 to raise $1 billion in taxes for two years to give them time to repair a fiscal system that annually fails to raise enough money to pay the bills. Roughly two years later, legislators had made no fixes and had suggested no meaningful funding cuts to state services.

Since no one's material circumstances are demonstrably changed by any of this, voters can believe whatever they like. And in a state where confirmation bias strongly favors the Republican narrative, the burden of proof in these matters continues to rest on the Governor. All of which is to say that with a year to go before the reelection campaign kicks into high gear, John Bel is well on the road to being ousted by a clown.   Whether that clown ends up being Hewitt, John Kennedy, Jeff Landry or Ralph Abraham remains to be determined. But, leaving aside the improbable surfacing of any "serious sins" we're currently unaware of, any of those loozas looks like more of a winna than John Bel at the moment.