Governor Could Face Populist Challenge — POLITICS / JOHN MAGINNIS, September 4, 2006

A year from now, the campaign for governor will be in full swing, but it is uppermost in the minds of the political class today.

Those who follow this blood sport have heard Gov. Kathleen Blanco declare she is running for re-election and they have seen Congressman Bobby Jindal revisiting every corner of the state, laying the groundwork for a potential rematch of the 2003 election. Also on the road is state Sen. Walter Boasso (R-Arabi), who is selling voters on the proposed constitutional amendment for levee board consolidation, but is also testing the gubernatorial waters.

Yet the biggest noise and news of the past week came from Public Service Commissioner Foster Campbell, who told reporters at a West Monroe event that “there’s a 90 percent chance that I’ll run” for governor next year. The Bossier Democrat has been saying as much privately for over a year, but this was the strongest public statement of his ambition.

The challenge he poses to Blanco comes at her from two troublesome directions: the left and the north.

A Campbell campaign would be run on a big idea, his signature issue of making the oil companies pay for their environmental damage to Louisiana’s coast with a tax on oil and gas that runs through the state’s pipelines to its refineries. His proposed 4 percent Processing Fee would raise $6 billion annually, which would he would couple with abolishing all personal and corporate income taxes and the severance tax on oil and gas produced in Louisiana.

Because Blanco unequivocally opposes such a tax, Campbell lumps her in with Jindal and the state's two U.S. senators as patsies of the oil interests. They are “tap dancing around and begging for money” from the federal government, he said, when they should “look at the people who caused the problem, and I’m talking about the oil industry.”

His is not a new spiel. When he was a state senator, Campbell tried time and again to pass a constitutional amendment for the Processing Fee, but he never got close. Much of the support he did get, however, came from senators in North Louisiana, where stubborn strains of populism and Longism persist and which now makes up Campbell’s PSC district and political base.

This could be a problem for Blanco, who won the close 2003 runoff with support from the political left and North Louisiana, though she is neither liberal nor from there. In the primary, she benefitted from there being no candidate from North Louisiana and two from the left, Richard Ieyoub and Buddy Leach, who split the populist vote and gave her room to come up the middle.

Next time around the governor could face a challenger whose anti-oil company tirades could attract populist Democrats and who comes from the region where she needs to run strong.

Campbell has his own obstacles to overcome. Personally, he might be too hot a stove for what most voters want in a governor. He also needs money. He estimates the campaign would cost $3 million, which is more than ten times the amount he reported in his account at the end of 2005. But since then, say political sources, he has been picking up checks from some leading trial lawyers, who are angry that Blanco sided with the oil companies to pass an oilfield remediation bill this year. The new law makes it harder for landowners to win big damage awards from companies that polluted their properties.

Like populists, the trial lawyers are another group who were not with Blanco in the 2003 primary but who rallied around her in the runoff. Now Campbell could stand in the way of her getting them and their campaign contributions back again.

If there is a silver lining for the governor in all of this, it is that the oil companies, hoping to neutralize Campbell’s tax issue, could lean even harder on their friends in Congress to pass an offshore revenue sharing bill favorable to Louisiana this year.

Their lobbyists are publicly dismissive of Campbell, but they can’t afford to take him for granted. Nor can Blanco.