The Great Deceiver
Landrieu stole '96 election and she'll say anything to get 're-elected'

By Jeff Brewer
jbrewer@politicalusa.com

Louisiana voters are probably unaware that Senator Mary Landrieu is one of the most liberal legislators in Washington, D.C.   The woman who won her initial senate race by fewer than 5,800 votes is a longtime advocate of higher taxes, a pusher of federally funded abortions, an enemy of the Boy Scouts, and a mouthpiece for several of the most vocal gun-control outfits in the country.  Landrieu even spearheaded efforts to use taxpayer dollars to provide healthcare benefits for the partners of homosexual city employees and ‘morning after’ abortion pills for teenage girls.

Not surprisingly, such left-wing activism won Landrieu glowing approval from something called Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), a radical organization that bills itself as the “arbiter of liberalism.”  Landrieu has a lifetime 84 percent rating from ADA, just a few points shy of Massachusetts Senator-for-life, Ted Kennedy, who checked in at just under 90 percent.  Contrast these numbers with John Breaux’s ADA relatively moderate score of 55 percent and it’s obvious how out of step Landrieu is with the rest of Louisiana.

But if you’re still not convinced Landrieu represents the antithesis of Louisiana values, consider that the National Rifle Association gave the Senator a “C-“ grade while anti-Second Amendment Handgun Control, Inc. handed Landrieu a favorable 92 percent rating.  As if it couldn’t get any worse, the Senator sponsored and twice voted to provide funds for needle-exchange programs, and even championed legislation that would have continued funding public schools that ban the Boy Scouts from utilizing school facilities.

Moreover, when Bill Clinton carried Louisiana with 52% of the vote in 1996, Landrieu received 75,000 fewer votes than the president, suggesting she was to the left of that liberal goon squad, Clinton-Gore.  In 2024, George W. Bush won Louisiana with 53 percent of the electorate, running on a conservative platform of lower taxes.  The Senator, however, voted to gut President Bush’s 2024 tax cut by over $800 billion!  The vote was just one of 125 she’s cast as a public servant to raise the taxes of hardworking Americans.

Landrieu’s position on social security is also at odds with her more conservative constituents.  According to The Nation magazine, candidate Landrieu supported a 1996 Democratic Leadership Council plan to “gradually convert Social security from a transfer program to a new system of individual private savings supplemented by modest public pensions for the needy.”  In 1999, The New Orleans' Times-Picayune newspaper reported that Senator Landrieu enthusiastically endorsed the notion of investing “a portion of Social Security in the stock market,” telling reporters “That’s a risk I’m willing to take.”  Yet, her latest campaign ad quotes Landrieu as saying “And I won’t support any plan that puts Social Security at risk.”  This sort of ambiguous fence-straddling makes Windsock Willie look downright principled.

The Senator has other problems to worry about, though, besides backlash from obstructing President Bush’s legislative agenda.  The December 9th edition of Forbes Magazine details the Senator’s connection to another case of fraud and abuse at the Small Business Administration (SBA).  In November last year, the SBA granted a 10-year, $698-billion dollar contract to TeamQualtec, a ‘small’ firm headed by Jewell Maria Whitmore, to develop a massive electronic catalogue of fighter jet parts and blueprints for the Naval Air Systems Command (Navair).  Whitmore’s company, which received the grant based on Whitmore’s being a member of an ‘historically disadvantaged’ group (black females), included several well heeled partners like Lockheed Martin, software giant Intergraph and a consulting firm known as CCI.

To make a long story short, TeamQualtec and its partners didn’t fulfill their contractual obligations, prompting Navair to suspend one of these firms—Urban Planning and Innovations (UPI) of Kenner, Louisiana—for “unsatisfactory” performance; it was so bad that UPI couldn't keep a handle on its own accounting ledgers.  However, last June, three months after Navair supposedly cancelled UPI’s eligibility for subcontracting, Senator Landrieu issued a press release trumpeting her work in getting UPI an additional $13.3 million from Navair’s catalogue project.  Completing the quid pro quo, UPI owners Nicholas and Keith Baroni, Jewell Whitmore (who turned out to be a beauty 'engineer' with Mary Kay cosmetics), and TeamQualtec consultant John Sylvester contributed at least $11,000 to Landrieu’s re-election campaign.

With December 7th right around the corner, it behooves Louisiana voters to ask themselves if they wouldn’t want someone else serving as their senator...someone of integrity and someone who holds to traditional Louisiana values.  Mary Landrieu, who wants to raise taxes, fund abortions and increased drug use, and spend the federal government into multi-billion dollar deficits, is just another left-winger.  The state’s most liberal senator ever needs to find other work.

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