Scott Angelle shows his heart

With just 11 days left in Louisiana’s gubernatorial campaign, candidate Scott Angelle waded into a packed crowd at Pat’s Atchafalaya Club Tuesday night for a rousing political rally on his home turf.
If the 53-year-old public servant from Cajun country was worn-out from politicking around the rest of the state, the sea of friendly familiar faces was a better prescription than vitamin B-12. With one of his twin granddaughters on his arm, he worked the packed room from one end to the other, shaking hands, pounding backs, whispering in ears and beaming with that patented Angelle charm.
The Breaux Bridge native and resident is one of four serious candidates angling for one of two spots in a likely runoff. The others are U.S. Sen. David Vitter and Louisiana Lt. Gov. Jay Dardenne, both Republicans, and state Sen. John Bel Edwards, a Democrat.
A longtime-Democrat-turned-Republican, Angelle served both Democratic and Republican governors in high-profile positions – secretary of the Department of Natural Resources, lieutenant governor, legislative liaison, the LSU Board of Supervisors. He is now on the Louisiana Public Service Commission, an elected position.
Like perhaps many of those pressing up against the stage Tuesday night, Angelle is a political hybrid, once a conservative Democrat and now a populist Republican who famously during the drilling moratorium after the Macondo blowout stood up for “the Cheramies, and the Calais, and the Dupuis, and the Robins and the Boudreauxs, and the Thibodeauxs.”
After Lafayette party band Louisiana Red warmed up the crowd – and after introductions by old friend state Sen. Fred Mills Jr. of Breaux Bridge, and St. Martin Parish President Guy Cormier of St. Martinville, a protege – Angelle took the stage and owned it like a cross between Huey Long and Mick Jagger.
“Don’t count out a Cajun from St. Martin Parish!” Angelle shouted, hitting a few high notes from his stump speeches. “We need more taxpayers, not more taxes,” he said. “More people pulling the wagon and not as many in the wagon.”
Sitting down with editorial boards and TV interviewers over the past weeks, Angelle has drilled down on his policy positions, promising, for example, to comb through $2 billion in statutory dedications and over $7 billion in tax credits and exemptions that edge priorities like education and health out of the state budget.
No need to get into the weeds with this crowd, though. Granted, they were $50-a-couple supporters, but they were also folks who know Angelle as a former police juror, the first parish president under home rule, the guy who against all odds passed a tax that got all the roads paved, a hands-on administrator who once showed up on a bulldozer in a rainstorm to clear an overtopping drainage ditch.
In jeans and well-worn boots, Angelle downplayed policy in favor of personality. As he earlier told reporters in Lafayette, “We are right on the issues but people want to see more than just competence. They want to see a heart of a warrior and we will continue to reveal that over the next 11 days.”
The primary election is Saturday, Oct. 24.