Louisiana’s Trumpy Next Guv Has Already Drawn First Blood

Louisiana Gov.-elect Jeff Landry had barely finished giving his victory speech late Saturday night when his first political casualty had already been recorded.

The two-term attorney general rolled to an unexpectedly easy first-primary victory with 52 percent of the votes in a crowded field of 15 candidates. He was already the presumed next governor, but most political observers thought he would at least be pushed into a runoff with Democrat Shawn Wilson. But Wilson, one of only two Democrats in the race, polled only 26 percent of the vote in the state’s lowest election turnout in a decade.

The time-honored political proverb “to the winner goes the spoils” has never been more in evidence as scores of political appointees will be replaced by Landry’s own people when he is inaugurated next January but at least one individual didn’t wait for the axe to fall.

Robert “Bob” Mann, the respected journalist and historian who currently holds the Manship Chair in Mass Communications at LSU, announced Sunday that he would end his 18-year tenure at the university at the end of the spring semester. His departure caps a stormy relationship he has had with Landry for nearly two years and Mann has no reason to believe that LSU will break with its tradition of abandoning staff and faculty under fire.

LSU has a well-deserved reputation for cratering to pressure in lieu of defending academic independence and freedom of speech:

• In 2009, Ivor van Heerden, deputy director of LSU’s Hurricane Center, was fired as he was scheduled to testify as an expert witness in a case against the Army Corps of Engineers for its pre-Katrina work in New Orleans. The university ended up paying van Heerden $435,000 and spent nearly $1 million to fight the geologist before finally settling.
• Steven J. Hatfill, a biological warfare expert, was fired in 2002 after his name appeared, along with about 30 others, as a “person of interest” in connection with an investigation of anthrax attacks in the U.S. He was subsequently exonerated. Mark Emmert, then the LSU chancellor, said Hatfill’s firing was “in the best long-term interest of the university.”
• Teresa Buchanan, a tenured professor who specialized in early childhood education for 20 years, was fired for her use of profanity in her classroom. In her case, a federal judge upheld her dismissal.

So, Mann, who could read the tea leaves, got the jump on Landry, announcing his retirement before Landry could take the initiative to have Mann fired.

“My reasons are simple,” Mann said in a Sunday tweet. “The person who will be governor in January has already asked LSU to fire me. And I have no confidence the leadership of this university would protect the Manship School against a governor’s efforts to punish me and other faculty members.”

Mann has been something of a lightning rod at LSU for some time. For a while, he published a political blog that took Louisiana elected officials and bureaucrats to task. That was primarily during the administration of former Gov. Bobby Jindal, who left office in 2016. The sticking point at that time was Jindal’s repeated budgetary cuts to higher education. Mann’s pointed observations rankled the governor and legislators alike, with some calling for him to be disciplined or even fired even back then.

But matters began to really heat up in December 2021 when Landry dispatched one of his assistant attorneys general, Lauryn Sudduth, to a meeting of the university faculty senate on his behalf to read a letter condemning a faculty senate resolution sponsored by Mann and several other professors. That resolution called for LSU to bring its vaccine mandate into conformity with state law and national guidelines. It called for LSU to test unvaccinated and partially vaccinated students weekly and for the school to update its COVID vaccination exemption procedure.

Mann, incensed that Landry himself did not deem the matter important enough to make a personal appearance, pilloried the attorney general in a tweet, saying, “Louisiana AG Jeff Landry sending some flunkie to the LSU Faculty Senate meeting today to read a letter attacking covid vaccines is quite the move from a guy who considers himself ‘pro-life.’”

Landry countered in the battle of tweets: “Yesterday, Manship Chair Robert Mann attacked a professional and accomplished woman, an Assistant Attorney General for the State of Louisiana, calling her a ‘flunkie.’”

With Landry saying Mann’s tweet “can not be without consequence,” Mann countered by suggesting that Landry have someone in his office “explain the First Amendment to him.”

Mann has worked as press secretary for former U.S. Sens. Russell Long, J. Bennett Johnston, and John Breaux and as communications director for former Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco. He also served as communications director for the Louisiana Democratic Party.

He has written a number of books, including the critically acclaimed A Grand Delusion: America’s Descent into Vietnam, Daisy Petals and Mushroom Clouds: LBJ, Goldwater and the Ad that Changed American Politics, and The Walls of Jericho: Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, Richard Russell and the Struggle for Civil Rights.

Landry, on the other hand, is the consummate political opportunist, picking up Donald Trump’s endorsement along the way. When Landry first ran for attorney general eight years ago, he finished second to the incumbent by two percentage points. The third-place candidate, Geradine Broussard Baloney, had 18 percent. She endorsed Landry in the November runoff and when Landry won, Baloney’s daughter, Quendi Baloney, was hired for the AG’s Fraud Section, which seemed somehow appropriate, given that in 1999, she had been charged with 11 felony counts of credit card fraud and theft, eventually pleading guilty to three counts and receiving a suspended prison sentence.

Landry also was implicated in a $17 million scheme to hire Mexican welders and pipe-fitters under H-2B visa rules, ostensibly issued only when there is a shortage of American workers, through three companies owned by him and his brother. Under terms of the deal, the Mexicans would work for Chicago Brick & Iron, the prime contractor on a $7 billion pipeline project. The three Landry companies were to be subcontracted to a company run by Houston labor broker Marco Pesquera.

Pesquera made millions of dollars by defrauding the immigration system to bring more than a thousand Mexican laborers to the Gulf South but his luck finally ran out when he was convicted and began a three-year prison sentence in December 2019 for fraud.

Asked what his post-LSU plans are, Mann said, “Just keep writing books. I am open to finding another teaching position somewhere outside Louisiana.”

Asked if that might include Texas or Florida where Republican administrations are rewriting education standards both in public schools and in higher education, Mann answered with an emphatic, “Never.”