Leadership and Crisis (4 page)

Louisiana National Guard members are truly the unsung heroes in the oil spill response efforts. Throughout the disaster, they logged more than 2,250 flight hours during response operations, dropped more than 21,300 sandbags weighing 46 million pounds to stop oil from entering sensitive marsh areas, and stood up 24 miles of protection systems along the coast including Hesco Baskets, Tiger dams, and land bridges. I’m proud of these men and women who worked
tirelessly to protect our way of life against the oil. Many of these same soldiers have served multiple tours overseas, but when duty called again, they stepped forward and honored our state, fulfilling their mission and their duty to “Protecting What Matters.”

The experience of the oil spill reaffirmed my faith and trust in the common sense and wisdom of the American people. Local fishermen and coastal leaders often showed more practical wisdom than the bureaucrats and elites. They are wiser than the Establishment wants to give them credit for. They are hard-working and generous. And the core American values that I was raised on—hard work, responsibility, accountability, innovation, stewardship—are clean, sharp, and true.

CHAPTER 2

WHO DAT?

It was 2:30 a.m. at a diner somewhere outside Monroe, Louisiana, in the waning days of my first run for office. I was running to be the next governor of Louisiana.

People told me I was nuts, that I was a fool to run; I had no money, no one knew me, and I was, shall we say, an atypical candidate. When we took our first poll, I clocked in at about 3 percent of the vote. The margin of error for the survey was 4 percent. So it was statistically possible that fewer than zero voters supported me.

With the help of a ragtag group of supporters, I ran an unusual campaign highlighting detailed proposals for sweeping reform of Louisiana’s fiscal policy and ethics rules. Against all odds, starting at the back of the pack of seventeen candidates, I won the primary, throwing me into a bruising runoff against Democrat Kathleen Blanco, the state’s then-lieutenant governor.

Politics in the Deep South is often described as “Bible belt during the day, knife fighting after dark.” That’s about right, except more so in Louisiana.

With only a few days left in the contest, my media advisor Brad Todd talked me into staying awake for the final forty-eight hours
of the campaign to tour the state in an RV. I will never forgive him for that.

So there we were—me, the staffers who had drawn the short straw on this insane two-day trip, and Republican National Committee Political Director Blaise Hazelwood—at a diner somewhere near Monroe. I worked the tables, talking to the few folks in the restaurant. They were puzzled. Why in the world was I here in the middle of the night? Why wasn’t I sleeping? Had I been drinking? What did I think I was accomplishing? Those were all pretty good questions. Basically, they were asking in true Louisiana parlance—Who dat?

Well, I hope to answer that question in this book—not just in terms of my background, but more importantly, in terms of what I stand for, the principles and ideas that I espouse.

The national media tends to misunderstand Louisiana. You will not find a more giving, generous group of people on the face of the earth, and this extends beyond all racial, class, partisan, or religious lines. One has only to look at the response to Hurricane Katrina to understand that. The efforts of folks in north Louisiana to help their kin in the south are legendary. The faith community in particular responded with thousands of acts of sacrifice and giving.

But during my campaign, some national Democrat operatives were hell bent on dividing the people of Louisiana along any lines they could. Just a few weeks earlier, the president of the College Democrats of America, an LSU law school student named Ashley Bell (who was not from Louisiana), wrote a now famous memo to fire up the liberal troops. The memo stated:

Arab? Really? And what’s with the lousy grammar? I hope this person didn’t actually get a law degree.

In my 2007 campaign for governor, the Democratic Party of Louisiana really stepped in it when they ran a TV ad attacking my faith. It was an amateurish and ill-advised advertisement which took my words out of context and attempted to divide the people of Louisiana along denominational lines, and to question my Christianity. The people of Louisiana completely rejected this tactic, and to their credit, many prominent Democratic elected officials publicly renounced the ad and this shameful attempt to attack my faith.

Reporters from Washington and New York often treat me as something exotic: I’m a Christian with Hindu parents; a son of immigrants who was elected a Republican governor of a southern state; a social conservative who graduated from Brown University and Oxford. Reporters often insinuate that because I attended college in the Ivy League and in England, my faith and social conservatism must be an act designed to win votes in the Deep South. When they realize these positions genuinely reflect who I am, they’re often astonished.

National reporters have also often said to me, “It must have been so tough for you growing up in the Deep South.” To which my response is, “Um ... no. It was not tough, in fact it was tremendous. I’m a son of the Deep South, so you can keep your prejudices to yourself.” Louisiana is my home and I’m proud of it.

I’ve never had it tough, but my dad did. He grew up poor in India, the only one of nine children to get beyond the fifth grade. For me, growing up middle-class in Louisiana was anything but tough. Compared to my father, I grew up in great riches, because I grew up in America.

In our house, the last thing you wanted to do was to complain about how hard you had it or how tough your life was. That was a mistake you made only once, because it would unleash from my dad a lecture covering everything from poverty, to gratefulness, to his formative years in India, to America’s place in world history, to the value of hard work, to the importance of compassion, to the unique promise of the American Dream. Being subjected to that speech kept my brother and me from complaining—ever.

We are all prone to take things for granted—our loved ones, our jobs, our houses, all of it. It’s hard not to. But the immigrant viewpoint of my parents really helps put things in perspective. My folks are the most genuinely thankful people you will ever meet.

As Americans, we take many of our freedoms for granted, including our freedom of religion. I am intensely interested in learning about a person’s faith, or lack thereof. I think it says a lot about people, about their decision-making process, about how they think, about what drives them.

Everyone has at some point thought about God and matters of faith, some more than others of course. I’ll tell you about my own faith journey in the next chapter, but I’ll just mention here that I would best be described as an evangelical Catholic. I love the teachings and doctrines of the Catholic Church, and I have tremendous admiration for
the zeal of evangelical Protestants. But at the end of the day, it’s all about faith, not about religion, not about church, and not about denomination.

Sometimes a little faith can come in quite handy during a campaign. I found that out on a plane during my 2007 campaign for governor.

When you run for statewide office, there is tremendous pressure to be everywhere at once. You travel at all hours of the day and night, using any means you can find; most often by car, sometimes in a campaign bus, and sometimes via plane. But the plane trips are far from glamorous. In this case it was a flight from Shreveport to New Orleans, where I planned to give a speech and then enjoy the rare opportunity to sleep in my own bed. We were on a borrowed sixseater, single engine propeller plane, the kind where everyone wore a headset just so we could communicate with each other over the sound of the engine.

In the front seat next to the pilot was Hal Turner, head of the Louisiana Sheriffs’ Association. Imagine the big, imposing, southern sheriff type—that’s Hal. He was a big dude in a small plane. In the back with me was Melissa Sellers, our campaign communications director, and Kellie Duhon, our campaign political director.

Five minutes after takeoff on this late afternoon, the pilot, a guy who looked old enough to have bombed Dresden, began fidgeting nervously. He announced on the headphones that there was a problem—we had a bad alternator and were not producing electrical power. In order to preserve what power we had, he was going to shut down our GPS, our turn coordinator, and all other modern means of navigation. We would have no radio at all if we stayed aloft much longer.

At this point, Melissa muttered under her breath, “Holy crap, we are all gonna die.” Except she did not say “crap.”

The pilot then announced, “Well, we should turn back now and probably land in Shreveport.” His tone of voice intimated that this was the only available course of action. This was followed by about fifteen seconds of silence that Melissa and Kellie insist lasted three hours. So I broke the silence.

“Are you sure? How far can we go? Is there any way we can make it to Alexandria?” I thought it was a reasonable question. After all, that would get us halfway home. Besides, we had to land
somewhere
, and it might as well be as close to home as possible. But Melissa thought I was out of my mind (which wasn’t an entirely new idea among my staff). Hal shot me a strange, quizzical look. Fortunately, the Sheriffs’ Association was supporting my candidacy, so Hal decided to take one for the team and keep his objections to himself.

Meanwhile, the pilot was continuing to play with the instruments, tap on gauges, and fidget with various knobs and buttons in a semi-hurried fashion. We later found out this guy had flown every kind of bird you can imagine, and was exactly the man you want at the helm in this situation.

The pilot then came on and said, “I think I can get you to Alexandria, if I conserve power and use my maps, but there is no way we can make it to New Orleans.”

Melissa was now even more convinced we were going to die. She started glaring at me like it was all my fault. But I had a campaign to win, and I needed to get to New Orleans, if not for the event, at least in order to make good on tomorrow’s schedule.

I told the pilot, “Okay, let’s go for it.”

We later learned that at that point Melissa hurriedly tried to get right with God. She began thinking that she should have called her mom more often, and wondering when she had last told her sister she loved her.

After rummaging around the floor through various books and maps, the pilot grabbed a large Atlas-looking book and plopped it on Hal’s lap. As a tough-guy sheriff, Hal was pretending to be unfazed by the whole thing. But he later admitted it was just an act.

I tried not to look at Melissa, but when I did, the body language was not good. So here in the front seat we had Hal nervously holding a large map, and this elderly pilot scratching out notes on it with a pencil. In the back you had me reading the newspaper, Melissa preparing to see God, and Kellie desperately wishing for a cigarette.

We were back in the old days at this point, navigating by hand. But judging by the pilot’s age, this was nothing new for him. We heard him announce into the radio that we needed to make an emergency landing in Alexandria. It wasn’t particularly welcome news when he confessed he was not sure if he could get the landing gear down without electric power.

So I decided to look at my Blackberry and catch up on my reading, a move that infuriated Melissa and didn’t sit so well with Kellie, either. Melissa later told us at this point she was contemplating what her funeral would be like. She wrote me a snarky note on her Blackberry, asking if I had a Bible handy or any of “those religious writings from college that got you into political trouble.”

Laughing, I reached into my pocket and gave her a rosary. Melissa is not Catholic, but she clutched that rosary with both hands and curled into the fetal position.

The pilot showed me how to operate the manual crank to lower the landing gear. That was really the last straw for both Kellie and Melissa. Fortunately, my help wasn’t necessary, and the pilot got the landing gear down with the remaining power.

When we cleared the final tree line, we saw emergency response vehicles with flashing lights along the landing strip, standing ready for what Melissa was sure would be a terrible crash. The pilot turned the radio back on and with the little power left, asked into the radio who the emergency equipment was for.

“It’s for you,” was the response. Uh-oh.

The pilot, to his great credit, set us down without incident. Melissa began hugging—a lot. First she hugged Kellie, then she hugged Hal, and then me. (I’m not a hugger.) She saved her biggest and longest hug for the pilot. I’m pretty sure she told each of us that she loved us. Then she started round two of hugging.