The smartest thing Gov. Bobby Jindal did after his two triumphant special sessions was to go around the state giving the credit to legislators for doing what he asked them to do--almost making it sound like it was their ideas.
Back in town to start the regular session, they greeted him with a longer round of applause than at either special session opener. Clearly the governor is on a roll and legislators want to stay on for the ride.
That should not be hard as the road ahead, unlike the Road Home, appears fairly smooth. Thanks to a couple of extra billon dollars being pumped into the current and next budgets, Jindal doesn't have to choose, as his predecessors did, among healthcare, higher education and highways, when often there wasn't enough for any. When a governor doesn't have to ask a Legislature to raise taxes or to cut services, he can pretty much tell them what to do.
Instead of going for it all at once, this governor has parceled out his initiatives, from ethics in the first special session to a gradual redirection of more revenues into transportation, which was the less heralded but his most significant accomplishment in the second session.
Jindal is not going to crowd himself by attempting healthcare reform in the regular session. It appears he will hold that off--as well as the decision on how large of a new public hospital he will support in New Orleans--for another special session in the fall.
Yet he will address mental health, something he barely mentioned in his campaign, by devoting $89 million to more beds, outpatient services and crisis centers in the New Orleans area. He also wants a law to force some mental patients, shown to be dangerous to themselves or others, to accept outpatient treatment to keep them on their medication.
The centerpiece of his agenda will be workforce development, also known as finding and training workers to fill the 100,000 jobs now going begging. Getting the labor department and education bureaucracy to respond to the needs of business and industry has been tried before, and done before with mixed results, by previous governors and legislatures.
With the business community leading the charge and the unions staying out of the way, the newest reinvention and latest renaming of the labor department should go through with little opposition. But because the economy moves faster than government, it will take a few years to know if the new fix works, or needs to be fixed again.
For his major internal government reform, Jindal is the first governor to support revamping the state's construction budget process to better reflect state priorities as well as reality. Though the change would diminish the governor's influence in this area, he has little left as it is, after the previous governor used up the state's borrowing capacity for his next four years.
The governor will push other policy initiatives not through bills but with items in his budget. After passage in the last special session of a tax deduction for private school tuition, which was labeled back-door vouchers, Jindal has put $10 million in the budget for scholarships, or front-door vouchers, for about 1,200 New Orleans students to go from failing public schools to private or Catholic ones.
At the same time he backs more support for the city's recovering public schools with $8.5 million for extended day programs to remediate struggling students.
Rather than any real resistance from teacher and school board groups, the most friction probably will come from lawmakers outside New Orleans who will want more help for their own failing schools and trapped students.
The governor promises to continue the full formula funding for state universities, which the Blanco administration first achieved. Yet he has not embraced a tuition increase sought by the schools, saying he wants to see if students will support it. That should be an easy out, since it's doubtful the kids are going to march on the Capitol to pay more tuition.
Beyond his own substantial but not over-reaching agenda, perhaps the governor's greatest challenge will be to recognize which ideas by lawmakers he should embrace or go out of his way to avoid. As always, there will be plenty of the latter.
