As political miscalculations go, this one ranks right up there with Hillary Clinton storing her emails at home so she could use her State Department server to level up her World of Warcraft blood elf death knight.
On Feb. 11 during a statewide address on Louisiana’s budget issues, Governor John Bel Edwards threatened to shut down Louisiana State University and its football program in an effort to combat the state’s $940 million budget deficit if his new tax plan isn’t approved by the state legislature.
ICYMI: full video of Governor John Bel Edwards quote of the future of college football in Louisiana. pic.twitter.com/G42INObiBz
— Kelsey Wingert-Linch (@KelsWingert) February 12, 2016
“If you are a student attending one of these universities, it means that you will receive a grade of incomplete, many students will not be able to graduate and student-athletes across the state at those schools will be ineligible to play next semester,” Edwards said. “That means you can say farewell to college football next fall.”
Guess what, John Bel Edwards. No one in Louisiana is going to say farewell to football next season, but they will likely bid you adieu in the next election. Edwards just committed political suicide in Louisiana on live television.
I'm no politician by any means, but if you want to see just how pissed Louisianan's can get, threaten to take away their LSU football.
— Jacob Hester (@JacobHester18) February 12, 2016
Edwards, a democrat, was elected just last year, replacing republican governor Bobby Jindal, who you may know from his presidential campaign or not know at all, based on the actual results of his presidential campaign. But you know who John Bel Edwards is now, by God, and that’s not a good thing for him. No politician wants this much bad news and certainly no democrat wants to be the face of a Tax Hikes vs. College Football debate. Every republican in Louisiana is in the emergency room right now getting treated for all the high fives they’ve been sharing for the last five days.
It’s a scare tactic. It’s dumb and in the end Edwards will be the only victim. His tax package is now doomed and, if he’s lucky, he’ll get to stay in office long enough to be voted out at the regularly scheduled time without some kind of recall or special election.
First act as Gov. of the great state of La.was it smart for John Bel Edwards to raise taxes, cut TOPS,and threaten @LSUfball #probablynot
— Ben McDonald (@realbenmcdonald) February 12, 2016
“I appreciate that he is trying to a get a point across to the public and to the Legislature,” Louisiana congressman Cameron Henry, a republican, said. “But (saying that) … you’re going to shut down universities, shut down TOPS (state public university scholarships) and shut down LSU football is a little over the top.”
A little? Edwards is the first democrat that I can remember in my lifetime that’s threatened to shut down educational institutions over money. There are over 30,000 students enrolled at LSU alone and the fact that Edwards thinks that his threat is all about shutting down football shows how stupid he really is.
Just last November three LSU physicists won the Breakthrough Price in Fundamental Physics for their work in discovering neutrino oscillations that changed the very nature of our understanding of particle physics.
You know that big announcement from NASA last week where they said that for the first time in human history gravitational waves were detected? Guess where the heavy lifting of that search took place. Yep, Louisiana State University.
Think deafness might be a problem we’d like cured throughout the world? So does LSU and just a couple of years ago scientists at the LSU Health Sciences Center made a huge move to do so by successfully curing deafness in mice for the first time in all of recorded history.
But, you know, football right?
And that’s just the tip of the ice berg, not only for LSU, but Louisiana Tech, Louisiana – Lafayette and plenty of other state universities that are not only educating students, creating productive members of our society and changing the world and our understanding of it for the better, they also might play a little football.
Never mind the fact that LSU football actually makes the university, and the state, money. They produced a cool $57 million in profit last year alone.
Friendly reminder: #LSU football turned a profit of $57 million last year, and TAF gave LSU athletics $14M.https://t.co/7WK3AL0K74
— Ross Dellenger (@RossDellenger) February 12, 2016
So maybe before you idly threaten to cut off the education of thousands of young people, end worldwide scientific research and stop life-saving and enhancing medical breakthroughs in their tracks, John Bel Edwards, you might want to take a moment to think it through before you decide it’d be cute to threaten to take away everybody’s football.
