NEW ORLEANS — In a state both famous and infamous for its roguish politicians, Bobby Jindal’s methodical, wonkish style is strikingly different. His first plan of attack as Louisiana’s governor-elect strikes at the heart of the state’s tradition of celebrated cronyism and rampant corruption.
The Republican congressman, a day after his historic win in a field of a dozen candidates for governor, pressed ahead with his campaign pledge to clean up the state’s image. One of his first acts will be to call a special legislative session to enact ethics-in-government laws.
“If I go down as one of the more boring but effective governors, I’ll take that as a great compliment,” Mr. Jindal said at a press conference yesterday. “Our people don’t want to be amused by our politics anymore. We don’t want to be entertained.”
Mr. Jindal won outright the state’s open primary election, finishing atop the slate of candidates with 54 percent of the vote and avoiding a November runoff election. The newly elected governor, who will take office in January, becomes Louisiana’s first dark-skinned governor since Reconstruction, more than a century ago, and the nation’s first Indian-American chief executive.
On a spectacular autumn day, only 46 percent of the eligible voters turned out, and the decline in the number of voters, down from 1.4 million four years ago to 1.3 million Saturday, revealed a dramatic drop in the number of voters in New Orleans, a Democratic stronghold battered by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Four years ago, 121,841 Orleanians voted for governor, and only 75,880 voted this year.
Mr. Jindal defeated two wealthy candidates who financed their own campaigns. State Sen. Walter J. Boasso of Arabi, a Democrat, and John Georges, a New Orleans businessman who ran as an independent, spent millions trying to force a runoff.
The two most recent governors — Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, a Democrat, and Mike Foster, a Republican — governed with no accusations of cronyism, but the state has a well-earned reputation for shady politics, and Mr. Jindal made ethics in government the most prominent plank in his platform.
Former Gov. Edwin Edwards, a four-term Democrat, is serving prison time for bribery and extortion involving the awarding of riverboat casino licenses. In the past decade, Louisiana has sent an insurance commissioner and elections commissioner to prison, and a calendar of corruption cases is pending in New Orleans. When David Duke, a grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, made the runoff against Edwards two decades ago, a popular bumper sticker popped up on cars across the state: “Vote for the crook.”
Louisiana’s reputation for indulging a good time — “let the good times roll” — has long extended to politics, and colorful governors have been a staple of the state’s politics. Earl Long, brother of the near-legendary Huey Long, was once committed to a state mental hospital by his wife and paroled himself to chase into neighboring Arkansas with a Bourbon Street stripper in pursuit of “the perfect country ham.”
Mr. Jindal vows to relegate corruption to the past, taking his victory as a sign of support for a fight against corruption. He has never identified who or which agencies he says are corrupt. But he vows to get rid of the guilty: “They can go quietly, or they can go loudly,” he says, “but they’re going to go.”
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