The operating assumption of both Ralph Abraham and Eddie Rispone in this year’s election was that John Bel Edwards won in 2015 because of — shall we say, unusual? — circumstances like the sex scandal that troubled his runoff opponent David Vitter.…
In the last days before a close runoff election, Louisiana's gubernatorial candidates have better things to do than think — like shaking hands and kissing babies; giving statements to sway whatever undecided voters are left, if any; and milking co…
John Bel Edwards is mostly right, and his critics mostly wrong, on the state of Louisiana’s economy. So why is a generally popular governor in relatively good economic times having a hard time being re-elected? It’s the D behind his name, when Rs …
Mocking tweets from Donald Trump’s White House is shooting clay pigeons on the ground.
The staid precincts of Louisiana Public Broadcasting took on a Jerry Springer air with the debate in a governor’s race that spread more heat than light.
Even before the scandal of Lane Grigsby’s attempt to fix the Senate District 16 runoff, “Governor Grigsby” was an ironic phrase among politicos, if a trifle disparaging to his friend Eddie Rispone, the nominal Republican candidate for governor.
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It’s hard to think of a serious candidate for governor who has as little official experience as Eddie Rispone, the Baton Rouge tycoon whose millions invested in ads pushed him into second place in the primary election.
If a runoff were the certain outcome of Saturday's primary election, would the president of the United States be in Lake Charles on Friday?
In what other city or state in the nation could Cleo Fields manage a political comeback? After appearing on an FBI surveillance videotape taking large amounts of cash from arch-crook Edwin W. Edwards in 1997, Fields passed off the event as innocen…
If you’re a Republican voter who doesn’t know much about U.S. Rep. Ralph Abraham, maybe you’ll believe that he is a Nancy Pelosi camp follower who voted with the liberal speaker of the U.S. House more than 300 times.
Ralph Abraham, a backbench member of Congress and now a GOP candidate for governor, has multiple college degrees and a pilot’s license, suggesting he's pretty smart — not anywhere close to the flake-and-nut brigades often attracted to the movement…
It was probably inevitable that the two major Republican candidates for governor would fall out as the Oct. 12 primary nears. After all, their mutual goal is to force Gov. John Bel Edwards into a runoff, but the overriding goal of the two GOP camp…
Louisiana is no longer alone in having an all-comers election, commonly called the open primary. Other states, most notably California, also have some variants of our system.
Based on the votes cast in recent elections, you can make two political arguments about the boundaries of the proposed St. George “city” movement.
Whatever one might say about Edwin W. Edwards and the late Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, they were always good Democrats.
We now have a quantifiable level for Louisiana Republicans’ fear of Donald Trump — at least $30 million, or maybe $40 million.
Maybe it’s difficult, after literally decades of John Noland’s wrestling with the tough problem of affordable housing in Baton Rouge, to pick just one of his pithy — and sometimes grumpy — observations. But this one was perfect, as he talked about…
Even the president of the United States is now tweeting out conspiracy theories. In some quarters, the conspiracy theory close to home is the Baton Rouge Area Foundation, pulling strings from its aerie on the top floor of the IBM building in downtown.
When Ralph Abraham and Eddie Rispone signed up Tuesday as Republican challengers, they learned within a day just how much the advantage of incumbency gives to John Bel Edwards.
“Now, in our country under our free enterprise system, we have seen medicine reach the greatest heights that it has in any country in the world,” we hear. “Today, the relationship between patient and doctor in this country is something to be envie…
If radio host Jim Engster is a friend of yours, tell him that friends don’t do to friends what he did to yours truly.
The name "Middleton" has probably been most in the news lately because of seemingly endless reports of flooding and other damages to the library at the center of LSU’s campus.
If there’s a bipartisan winner in Congress this year, it’s health care.
You’ve never had it so good, from the GOP perspective, and John N. Kennedy, lifelong politician and officeholder, probably makes as sound a pitch for Trumpism as can be made.
Maybe the population numbers are not that big, and that’s one of the problems, but there is a crisis in small-town Louisiana.
Political scientists seem to agree that Americans are the world’s leaders in voluntarily paying their taxes every year.
Ask just about anybody at the State Capitol, and they’ll tell you Taylor Barras is one of the nicest guys in the Legislature.
It’s too crass for politicians to acknowledge it openly, even in the age of frankness ushered in by Donald Trump, but legislators know it is one of the fundamentals of political physics: If you give somebody a benefit, you’ll never get it back.
Let us hold down the celebrations, please, but more than half of the 2019 session of the Louisiana Legislature is now past.
We live in an age of skepticism, but there is more and more danger from people who believe misinformation on social media, particularly when it comes to vaccinations.
If the sheer geographical realities don’t persuade politicians, maybe a poll shall: There is widespread support for funding a passenger rail service connecting New Orleans and Baton Rouge.
“I’m a small-government guy.” The way that Ralph Abraham, physician and pilot from north Louisiana, drawled out that statement, it sounded like 28 syllables.
The word “retirement” might mean something pleasant for most people, but for the growing ranks of the elderly poor, it’s a sentence to hard labor without end.
At the annual meeting of the Public Affairs Research Council Thursday, a Republican challenger to Gov. John Bel Edwards was primed during a forum right after the luncheon to say that Louisiana has been bad for business in the last four years.
If nothing else, John Bel Edwards is a man of the system.
Mark your calendars, denizens of the State Capitol, and not in a good way.
Maybe it seems a historical issue now, but if one lived through the dramatic hearings and legislative battles of 2012 over public education, the changes wrought by Gov. Bobby Jindal and his aides, including one Stafford Palmieri, continue to be an…
There is, apparently, no official motto of city-parish government, nor of the Metro Council. But in the newly refurbished council chambers on the third floor of the neo-Stalinist building on St. Louis Street, a motto might be inscribed over the do…
Years ago, Baton Rouge businessman Jim Bernhard told a story of how a classmate of his ended up as president of the Senate in North Carolina. Bernhard, a supporter of LSU and higher education, was frustrated by Louisiana’s unwillingness to pay the…
Louisiana has the lowest unemployment rate in a decade.
When a passel of business leaders and officials gather Thursday in Baton Rouge for an economic development “summit,” will it be a pep rally for re-election of Gov. John Bel Edwards? That’s what the Louisiana Republican Party rather ineptly argues,…
When Amazon was showered with offers by the cities and states of the Union for a new job-creating second headquarters, it was clear all along that comparative backwaters — e.g., Louisiana — would never be competitive.
It's difficult to think of two more different visionaries in the Republican Party than Haley Barbour and Kristen Soltis Anderson.
While it is a dramatic symbol of New Orleans, the Dome is officially the Mercedes-Benz Superdome, and it is owned by the state, not the city.
"In 2001,” recalls Davis Rhorer of the Downtown Development Authority, “we had zero hotel rooms in downtown.” It was shortly after that year that national consultants reported that Baton Rouge’s investment in meeting rooms, theater and arena — at …
John Bel Edwards’ opponents should probably hope that January is the cruelest month and things will get better in the election by October.
With the greetings, if not fawnings, of Louisiana’s Republican elite, Donald J. Trump arrived at Louis Armstrong International Airport trailing clouds of glory.
On Monday, it was morning in Louisiana again.
There is generally a crowd for the mayor’s State of the City speech to the Rotary Club of Baton Rouge, and Sharon Weston Broome’s talk was well-received by the group.
It’s a shame that Louisiana is one of the states with relatively few women in its Legislature, although that is changing over time, and we’ve had one woman reach the governorship, Kathleen Babineaux Blanco.