Last Tuesday, Congressman Jeff Landry received the endorsement of the LAGOP’s State Central Committee to be Louisiana’s next Attorney General. Roger Villere, the Chairman of the LAGOP, touted Jeff’s life-long Conservatism, his history of fighting for Louisiana values, and standing against the radical agenda of Obama Administration.
Flanked by his family and supports, Jeff outlined part of his platform and the qualities that make him the ideal candidate for Conservatives.
But obviously, the reporters in the room weren’t paying attention to the remarks that Villere or Landry made. Instead, they came with their own agenda and a story that they had already written in their minds. Their narrative basically goes that Buddy Caldwell is a centrist senior statesman and the far-right wackos of the LAGOP are too stupid to see how lucky they are to have Buddy.
The first question was about Buddy, so was the second and the third. On and on it went until it seemed as if there was a conspiracy among all the reporters in attendance to play gotcha until they got the answer they were after.
The media loves nothing more than seeing Republicans attack one another but neither the Chairman nor Congressman Landry gave in to their obvious ploy.
As Landry tried to move the conversation back to the reason everyone was gathered, they continued to push the narrative they were after with WAFB’s Chris Meriwether leading the charge. There was no attempt to even try to come off as objective reporters.
Landry touted his record of being honest, hard-working, and ethical. The media took this as an opportunity to accuse Landry of thereby saying Buddy wasn’t any of those things. Landry responds that he’s there to talk about himself and not Buddy and again they ask. The bias was obvious to all.
All the media cared about was their narrative that this endorsement was so unprecedented to the point of being scandalous. They couldn’t wrap their heads around the fact that Conservatives wouldn’t roll over and accept a RINO like Buddy as fait accompli.
True enough, the state party hasn’t endorsed a challenger to a Republican incumbent since 1991, but then again, one would be hard-pressed to find such a stark contrast between a legitimate challenger and a Republican incumbent, like the one that exist between Landry and Caldwell, since 1991.
This contrast was also obvious to all in the party and Dan Richey, a member of the state Republican Central Committee, essentially said as much. “Caldwell is a Republican by convenience only, he’s a tool of the plaintiff bar, he’s broken state law repeatedly in order to hook his friends up with lucrative contracts for legal services and all of his political friends are still Democrats.”
At a time when Louisiana values are constantly under assault and the Obama regime continually trampling over State’s rights, the media was more interested in getting Congressman Landry to describe the work ethics of his opponent. Those were the only specifics they cared about. Not the specifics that Landry raised about the bloated budget of Caldwell’s Attorney General’s office in contrast to Jeff who unilaterally streamlined his own Congressional budget to save the taxpayers’ money. Not the specifics of their own media reports outlining the pay to play scheme Buddy has put in place in the Attorney General’s office.
It was clear what the media was after, a nice sound bite. But Jeff stood firm and refused to play their gotcha game.
