So Long, Me-Maw

As reported here, [I]n New Orleans, they aren't shedding a tear over Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco's decision not to seek a second term.

Julia Reed of Newsweek, resides in New Orleans, and relates what was contained in two e-mails she recently received. One had to do with some armed robbery crimes that were recently committed, a trend that is on the rise in the Crescent City (Hey, Nagin! What are you doing to fix that, huh? Sorry, I digress.), while the second had to do with the announcement that Governor Kathleen Blanco will not seek a second term. Some excerpts from Ms. Reed's article, with my thoughts occasionally thrown in:

As crimes go in the city with by far the highest murder rate in the nation (96 per every 100,000 people in 2006; more than 40 people overall have been killed so far in 2007), these could actually be viewed as good news-nobody was killed or even shot, after all. But the real good news came in my next e-mail: Gov. Kathleen Blanco announced that she would not seek re-election to a second term. [Emphasis mine]

Blanco, a former high-school business teacher-turned-public servant, elected in 2003 as the first woman governor of Louisiana, became one of the many not-so-happy public faces of Katrina, along with New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and FEMA's Mike (Brownie) Brown. In the storm's immediate aftermath, she appeared so disoriented that one press account of her public appearances went so far as to suggest that she seemed "over-medicated." Times-Picayune columnist James Gill reported that "'Me-Maw's tranked' is the word on the street." (Blanco is sometimes nicknamed "Me-Maw" due to her grandmotherly affect.) That general perception was not helped when she was overheard by a CNN producer while still miked, admitting that she hadn't known it was the governor's responsibility to call out the National Guard.

She didn't know it was her responsibility to call out the National Guard? How did she even get elected to the office of Governor in the first place if she didn't know something as elementary as that? What kind of "assistants" does she have, anyway? Did anyone in her office think to give her a nudge, and whisper in her ear that she needed to call out the NG? It appears not, and those people who failed to properly advise her on something as important as this - something any first year civics student would have been able to tell her, if they still taught civics that is - should be fired immediately, and barred from holding any government job in the state.

But wait - there's more!

Indecision and failure to act have been the hallmarks of her administration. In neighboring Mississippi, Haley Barbour had convened two special sessions of the legislature before she called for her first one. Louisiana received the first half of the $7.5 billion earmarked for homeowners' reconstruction efforts in December of 2005, and the second chunk in June 2006. The so-called "Road Home" program offers owners of storm-damaged homes up to $150,000 in aid. But so far, bureaucratic hurdles put in place by the state have meant that only 3 percent of the 115,000 families who have applied for help have received it. Worse, the contractor handpicked by Blanco's administration to implement the process stands to make a jaw-dropping $765 million from the job, though it has further slowed progress with computer glitches and Keystone Kops-style mistakes. By contrast, 78 percent of Mississippi's applicants in a similar, but much less bureaucratic, program have received their checks.

Read that first sentence again - Indecision and failure to act have been the hallmarks of her administration. That was true before Hurricane Katrina hit, it was true in the immediate aftermath, and it's obvious it is still true today. For years, Mississippi was the unfortunate butt of a lot of jokes about ... well, about most things that went on in that state, and yet with proper leadership in the form of Gov. Haley Barbour making, and implementing, the hard decisions needed to help the state of Mississippi recover from Hurricane Katrina, 78% of applicants in a similar home recovery/rebuilding program to that in Louisiana have received money to help them rebuild, as opposed to a miniscule 3% of people in Louisiana having received help from the program there. That speaks volumes both for Gov. Barbour, and most loudly against Gov. Blanco. Now here's the kicker.

The irony is that when the program was finally launched last summer-with the official name "Governor Kathleen Blanco's Road Home Program"-critics cried foul, saying that she would get too much political credit for the payouts. Now, of course, she has been given all the blame for the lack thereof.

My question is, why did Blanco wait until last summer to launch this program? Is the legislature in Louisiana so inept that they couldn't get legislation pushed through to get this program off and running as soon as the first installment of federal funds was received? Or, is this just another example of Blanco's indecision and failure to act? Oh, and naming a program after yourself is just bilious, in my opinion, Gov. Blanco. After all, the money didn't come from you, it came from the federal government; you were simply supposed to properly allocate it. You rightly deserve all the blame for the lack of pay outs to those in need. Only 3% of the people eligible for the pay outs because of the hurdles placed in their way by your state government is beyond obscene!

A January poll showed her garnering only 24 percent of the votes in a race against U.S. Rep. Bobby Jindal, her 2003 opponent, who had 59 percent. Since then, she has dropped 8 more points, and last week in yet another embarrassing blow, HUD charged that the state was breaking federal law by requiring homeowners to wait for a series of reimbursements rather than giving them the option of taking a lump sum.

I must say that Blanco isn't entirely brain dead, as anyone in political office would realize that their re-election prospects with only 16 percent of the state vote are basically slim to none, especially after the state was charged with breaking federal law in making people take incremental payments, without giving them the option of taking a lump sum payment. The state agency responsible for making the pay outs quickly changed the rules, as we'll see in the next excerpt, to make HUD happy, but these missteps did not make the state Democrat Party happy - at all.

Though the State Recovery Authority agreed to change the program to address HUD's concerns, the feedback from the initial HUD announcement had been so negative that the state Democratic Party put strong pressure on Blanco to bow out sooner rather than later, so that it could field a better candidate.

As Ms. Reed goes on to state, no matter who decides to run from either side of the aisle, the prospects for the people of Louisiana are brighter now, than they have been in some time.

Now, if only "Mr. Chocolate" Ray Nagin would learn a lesson from all of this, maybe the prospects for the citizens of New Orleans would be brighter as well.

H/T Nealz Nuze, via Hollie-is-Right