Reason No. 6,430 to always trust crabwalk.com: Remember a few months ago, when I mentioned that Dead White Male Strom Thurmond had fathered a black daughter? I told you so!
I’m back in Dallas, still unpacking. No one [choose one: broke into/torched/filled with packing foam] my apartment while I was gone. I did, however, return to a freezer holding a single link of boudin. (I thought I’d thrown it out. I can’t imagine pork products bought in July would still be edible in December, no matter how frozen solid they may be.)
Mickey Kaus has defined an admirable goal for Internet journalists (although I think it can apply just as well to all us journos): “Leibling Optimality,” named in honor of the late New Yorkerist A.J. Leibling. Its definition, based on a famous Leibling quote: “being better than everyone who’s faster than you are and faster than everyone who’s better.”
I finally got a copy of Panther and installed it on my laptop. First negative reactions: that left column in the Finder is annoying as hell on a small screen; there appears to be no way to override the absurdly large white space Panther puts between icons in icon view; the new x-height settings for Lucida Grande and other typefaces makes everything in Safari just a touch harder to read. On the plus side, it did make my iBook/G3 500 faster, as promised. We’ll see how this all works out — I’ll wait a little while longer before upgrading my desktop.
Have I mentioned how nice it is to have a desktop with a big monitor again, after 15 weeks of living on a 12-inch screen? It’s nice.
Finally, Sen. John Breaux, The most powerful Cajun in American history, is retiring. A sad day for us Cajuns — whatever you think of his politics, he’s a good guy. Breaux’s from Crowley, about five miles from my house. It’s strange to think that when he was my age (28), he was already a congressman.
At least it appears there’ll be three strong candidates in the race to succeed him: Republicans David Vitter (a Rhodes Scholar I interviewed a couple years back) and Bobby Jindal (another Rhodes Scholar and 32-year-old wunderkind who almost got elected governor last month) and Democrat Chris John (who’s also from Crowley and has a good reputation around my neck of the woods).
4 thoughts on “back in town, misc posts”
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Any thoughts on the recent Louisiana governor’s race? Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, the Democratic Lt. Gov. who defeated Republican wunderkind Bobby Jindal, seems like a pretty dull, standard-issue state pol. Nothing wrong with her, but nothing exciting, either, other than the fact that she’ll be the first woman governor in Louisiana. But that seemed to say more about Louisiana than about Babineaux Blanco, and she never really got much attention at the national level.
In contrast, Jindal had a lot of buzz, at least out here in California–brilliant, young, child of immigrants, free-market enthusiast, converted Catholic.
My assumption is that Jindal’s cultural conservatism turned off centrists who might otherwise have found his technocratic, “New Louisiana” (my term) approach appealing. And he sure wasn’t going to win over New Orleans liberals–Orleans parish alone provided Babineaux with about 90% of her margin of victory.
I haven’t read a thing about this race since the election and would love to hear what folks are saying in LA.
I’ve never heard anyone get excited about Blanco. And while he did piss me off by attacking the French (saying we should uninvite Chirac from the Louisiana Purchase bicentennial celebration because of Iraq), I do have a weak spot for smart guys like Jindal. I wouldn’t have been upset if either one won — I’d take either over the term limited incumbent, Mike Foster.
I think the general response to the race in Louisiana was surprise that we could have a governor’s race without Klansmen or the openly corrupt playing a role. I think people think both candidates were good people — not always something you can say about Louisiana governor’s races. Plus, I was kinda proud of the state being able to deal with a non-white candidate like Jindal in a fairly mature way. There really wasn’t any race-baiting or thoughts that he shouldn’t be elected just because he’s not a white guy. That was refreshing.
In other words, the most unusual thing about the election was how damned normal (and un-Louisiana) it seemed. I remember talking with my family about how strangely uninvolved the electorate was in the race even just a month or so before election day. Relatively few TV ads, little buzz about anybody. It was just a boring race.
Welcome back!
Yeah, I was also struck by the normalcy of the Jindal-Blanco race, given the general nuttiness of Louisiana politics over the years. (I say that with all due respect–as a former resident of Providence, RI and a current resident of San Francisco, I understand how certain places can become attached to entertaining pols, no matter how loony they appear to the outside world.)
Jindal attracted attention (among other reasons) because he represented the opportunities available to really smart, hard-working people, and I never heard his ethnicity cited as an obstacle to his electability. And that strikes me as an important development, not just for Louisiana but also for the country at large.
So apparently the “Wacky Governor’s Race” torch has been passed from Louisiana to California. Sigh.