There's that "culture change" thing again

Now that Eddie Rispone has given up, Lance Harris is running for State GOP Chair.  He says he wants to change the culture. 

Harris said the party needs a “culture change” and that he wants to bring “consistency and stability” to the leadership.

His announcement comes less than a week before the Republican State Central Committee meeting in Baton Rouge on Saturday where officers are set to be elected.

He is challenging LAGOP Chairman Louis Gurvich, a New Orleans businessman who took over the party in 2018 after long-time party chair Roger Villere stepped down.

Previously, we heard about this "culture change" business from party secretary Mike Bayham who appeared to be favoring Rispone.  But as far as we can tell the actual dispute here is over how much Republican candidates will have to pay Villere's consulting firm if they want party support. Gurvich appears to be the pro-Villere candidate.  Looks like Harris is signaling he is the "culture change" guy now that Rispone is out.

Some real soul searching going on here

Turns out Eddie Rispone, despite having spent the past several months scheming and maneuvering and spending a fair amount of money in an effort to become the next chair of the state Republican Party, has suddenly discovered he's too busy.  

Eddie Rispone, the Republican businessman who lost a bid to unseat Louisiana’s Democratic governor in 2019, is suspending his campaign for chairman of the party, weeks after saying he wanted to take over after seeing the party outworked and outspent during the governor’s race.

Rispone said in an interview he has “major obligations” in his personal and business life that would prevent him from devoting enough time to party chair.

Can't even spare them decency of coming up with a convincing lie. Boss move.  

On the other hand why bother when he's got Mike Bayham around to make stuff up for him. 

Mike Bayham, the secretary of the party, said Rispone “got a taste of unfortunately how fratricidal this party is.” Bayham has previously said the party needs a “culture” change, pointing to an attack mailer against him in his race for re-election to the Republican State Central Committee, whose origins weren’t disclosed.

“The guy is a serious businessman,” Bayham said. “I think he didn’t fully appreciate how much herding of cats there would be involved. When you’re chairman of the party you answer theoretically to over 220 (central committee) members.”

See the thing is Rispone, who spent the 2019 gubernatorial election on television cartoonishly praising Donald Trump in front of as many pickup trucks as he could find, is just too good for this party.  And since the "culture change" he's hoping for has more to do with who gets paid to make ads than anything else, maybe he's got a point.

Eddie Rispone: Perpetual outsider

One of the state Republican Party's long time major fundraisers and "kingmakers" who hilariously ran for Governor in 2019 as an "outsider" is going to run for the party charimanship as.. a self-described outsider. 

After successfully electing several candidates to the committee in December, Rispone is now looking to take even more control over the Louisiana GOP, running for chair of the party.

“It was never my intention to run but recognizing the substantial challenges we face as a body and as a party, I believe we need someone with major business and large organizational skills to ensure the party can be the most effective in helping elect conservatives in the future,” Rispone said in an email to party officials.

Remarkable that he can keep up that pose. Even now after having "recruited" (i.e. bought and paid for) a number of candidates to turn over seats on the central committee, Rispone continues to insist it was  "never my intention" to run for chair.  Until it was. 

Eddie also complains about having been "outworked and outspent" during the Governor's election. There's actually some truth to that. But it's Rispone's own fault. He and his campaign decided the way to win was to hide behind the President and a barrage of TV ads rather than appear at a runoff debate or god forbid actually talk to any real live people. But now Eddie says he's the guy to change this culture? 

Anthony Ramirez, who ran Rispone’s communications during the 2019 governor’s race, said after reviewing the results of the race, “we saw that the Republican party was clearly outworked on the ground.” And after poring through attendance records, they discovered nearly 40% of the Republican State Central Committee didn’t attend a single meeting last year.

See that? Republicans don't even want to talk to each other.  And who can blame them, really? Read the rest of this article and see how they treat each other.  

After stepping down as party chair in 2018, (Roger) Villere dove into political consulting work through CRV Consulting, who he runs alongside Phil Capitano, the former mayor of Kenner who was arrested this summer after police said he used his vehicle to ram the back of a woman’s car during a dispute over allegedly stolen property. Villere and Capitano also run the Louisiana Conservative Republican Coalition, which is registered as a nonprofit and which doles out endorsements to Republican candidates. It endorsed Capitano in his bid for re-election to the Republican State Central Committee this year, but Capitano was unseated by Keith Conley, a longtime Jefferson Parish government official.

State Rep. Mark Wright, a Covington Republican, said Villere’s group sent a mailer endorsing his opponent for the Republican State Central Committee, using “the Republican party seal or something that looks exactly like it.”

The picture coming into focus here is one of a good old fashioned dispute over territory and patronage.  You wanna run for something in Louisiana as a Republican?  Well here is the list of people you need to hire or bribe or both. Villere and Capitano and  want to be those guys on the one hand.  Rispone is installing his own people on the other. (There are others vying for position as well including Lenar Whitney apparently.  You'll just have to read the article.)  

The Villere faction is backing current chair, New Orleans private security mogul Louis Gurvich, over Rispone.  It doesn't take much reading between the lines here to see why.  Eddie "refused help" from Villere.. which is to say, he didn't pay him for anything.

“I have made up my mind I’m going to be against Ripsone,” Villere said. “I thought he was a poor candidate (for governor) … You need a party chair who can bring people together. Why would you elect a party chair who refused help in the runoff and didn’t bring people together in his own race?”

And, of course, the pro-Rispone side's motivations are just as petty and personal. 

As part of the race for state central committee – typically low-profile, low-wattage affairs that are decided by a few dozen votes – Bayham said he was hit with an “ugly” mailer that attacked his weight, which he says was sent by someone other than his opponent. (Spending on Republican State Central Committee races doesn’t require disclosure under Louisiana’s ethics laws, like other campaign spending.)

“This is what this party does. We cannibalize ourselves because this is about control and contracts and not about defeating the Democrats,” Bayham said. “We have to see who is going to finally change the culture of this party. Is Louis prepared to do it or is an outsider like Rispone prepared to do it.”

Villere said in an interview he had “nothing to do with” the mailer attacking Bayham, calling it “reprehensible.”

There's that "outsider" characterization again, though. It sure is doing an awful lot of work. 

There can only be one flag pin

The Louisiana Republican Party today considered and then set aside a scheme to restrict convicted felons (or anyone they don't like) from running in state elections with the little "R" next to their names. Some of them, it turns out, are embarrassed (or at least upset) that David Duke is running for Senate as a Republican this year. 

The proposed regulation would automatically prohibit felons from running for office as Republicans in elections after November, unless an exception was made by the state Republican Party's executive committee.

It also would allow Louisiana's Republican Party to block anyone from getting the "R," for Republican, with a name on the ballot if three-quarters of the State Central Committee voted to bar that person from running as a Republican.

They decided not to do anything, though. The rule under consideration would likely have caused legal headaches in addition to not actually doing anything about Duke anyway.

Even if the changes had been approved Saturday, they wouldn't have been made in time to block Duke, who pleaded guilty in 2002 to bilking his supporters and cheating on his taxes, from running as a Republican in the Louisiana Senate race this fall.

Besides that, the committee members can cry all they like but it doesn't change the fact that David Duke represents a sizeable portion of the Republican Id  and has for decades. We took a little time to explore this last year, in fact.  The nervous denials of the Republican state central committee are no different from the #NeverTrump movement of the national party in this regard.  These are the candidates and ideas they've built a machine pandering to. It's not so easy to just up and ditch them.

Republicans at the state and national level are currently trying to re-brand themselves out of the hole they've dug themselves. Which is why we're suddenly seeing the racist Wallace Dixiecrats, Reagan Democrats, and Limbaugh Dittoheads they've courted for years redefined as an unfamiliar alien force called the "Alt-Right" as opposed to some good and virtuous Republican Party that supposedly exists independently of all that.  It's disappointing that the Hillary wing of the Democratic Party is enthusiastically aiding the GOP in this re-branding effort. But that's a topic for a different post.

Anyway, all of this resulted in some amusing kabuki at the GOP meeting which the T-P covers in the article we began this with.

Duke did not attend the meeting, but his campaign coordinator, Michael Lawrence, did speak out against Republican leaders toward the end of the gathering, well after the rule change had already been deferred.

Lawrence, who was wearing a pin that included both the American and Confederate flags, started shouting that Villere had refused to let Duke speak to the crowd at the meeting. Villere, wearing his own pin with American and GOP flags, told Lawrence over the public address system that the gathering was a "private meeting" and Lawrence would have to leave.

Villere, speaking into a microphone, then called for security to take Lawrence out of the building when Lawrence refused to stop shouting. Five men in suits surrounded Lawrence and escorted him to his car.

Standing in the parking lot after being thrown out of the meeting, Lawrence said Duke planned to sue the Louisiana GOP if they passed any new rule that would block him from running as a Republican in future elections. He said Duke considered it a violation of his constitutional rights.

"Roger Villere has been running this organization like Fidel Castro for 12 years," Lawrence said.  

Just for fun we should see about sending Villere a Cuban flag pin.  

The Nungesser Administration seems to be going well

It might be a good idea to get someone from IT to make sure Lt. Governor Billy Nungesser's spam filter is working. We can't keep falling for phishing schemes.

With the state facing an estimated $750 million shortfall in next year’s budget, Republican Lt. Gov. Billy Nungesser rolled up his sleeves to work on finding a solution of his own.

The result: an ambitious, potentially transformative arrangement that on paper proposes reviving Louisiana’s once dominant shipbuilding industry, creating more than 30,000 new jobs and investing nearly $1 billion into charitable endeavors involving education, health care and housing initiatives.

Too good to be true? That’s Gov. John Bel Edwards’ take.

Despite initiating a global correspondence and telling his letter’s recipients — who included U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and the Iraqi prime minister — that he was working at Edwards’ behest, Nungesser actually kept the newly elected Democratic governor in the dark, both men say.

Why keep the Governor in the dark on such a massive deal? Well, it looks like Nungesser (and State GOP Chairman Roger Villere) got roped into an elaborate scheme put on by a guy named Markos Fuson. I don't want to spoil the article for you entirely. But the synopsis goes like this. Fuson's company is a Delawre based corporation called Alexandros. It is described in the article as "a 'healing' company with a background in medical technology"  is supposed to have brokered a deal with the Iraqi government to import oil to Louisiana using ships built at the now shuttered Avondale shipyard to be refined in Lake Charles at a facility not currently configured to do this sort of refining.

Seems legit, right?  Ok, well, what if I also threw in this nugget. 

According to Alexandros’ proposal, Fuson had committed to investing 100 percent of his profits from the joint venture into Louisiana’s motion picture industry. He then pledged to invest his share of the film profits into a “to-be-established” charitable foundation that would offer education, health care and housing assistance to “minorities in Louisiana.”

What could go wrong?

Anyway here we are just a few months into Billy Nungesser's stint at Lieutenant Governor and already things are getting weird. We suspect there's plenty more where that came from. Get used to reading this phrase.

Nungesser also blamed his staff, whom he relies upon to vet his documents. In this case, the letters never should have reached his desk, he said.

Letters

I know this happened last week, but I really wanted to flag this unhappy letter written by Roger Villere and Reince Priebus about the Dardenne endorsement.

But Priebus and Villere sent Dardenne a tersely-worded letter.

“You cannot claim to be a conservative fighter for Louisiana principles and publically (sic) endorse an Obama liberal like Mr. Edwards,” they wrote in the joint letter.

Villere, in a separate statement, compared Dardenne to Saban’s betrayal of LSU. LSU and Alabama face each other on the football field Saturday.

“After decades of using the Republican Party and its members for his benefit, Jay has decided to end his political career by supporting a candidate who opposes every public policy position that he once espoused,” he said. “It is sad that Jay allowed his personal feelings to cause him to betray his party and state.”

It's difficult to conceive of Dardenne as Saban given the former's 4th place finish in the primary vs the latter's dominating performance on Saturday night.

It's even a further stretch, though, to even ponder what the phrase "Obama liberal" might even mean. The President's record as a corporate-friendly moderate on domestic economic matters and as a virtual neo-con in all aspects of his foreign policy stands for itself.   Consider that along with Stephanie Grace's description here of what a John Bel Edwards administration might actually look like, and we begin to suspect the phrase "Obama liberal" actually means "not very liberal moderate guy."  At least it does for people who live in the fact-based universe. But, remember, we are talking about Republican Party chairmen here which is a different matter entirely. 

For instance, despite their best effort, Villere and Priebus fail to match the full fury of crazy unleashed here by St. Tammany Parish GOP Executive Committee Chair Peter Egan who compares Dardenne's endorsement to "a jilted man firing indiscriminately at his ex-wife’s car." Oh well. Odds are more Republicans will stab the party in the back and endorse Edwards before this is over so if Villere and Priebus want to try again, they can.  Come stronger with the take, though.