2theadvocate.com | News | Cazayoux touts health plan

By SARAH CHACKO
Advocate Capitol news bureau
Published: Apr 27, 2008 - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

If not for the blue-and-yellow signs covering the front of the small Main Street office, it would be hard to guess that inside are the workings of a congressional campaign.

“You can see that this is a working headquarters,” said 6th Congressional District Democratic candidate Don Cazayoux, seated on an old couch behind the front window as staff and volunteers work the phones a few feet away. “It’s certainly not for show.”

The office — with a giant handmade calendar stretched across the wall, stakes for yard signs piled in a corner and small tables set up along the walls for phone calls — is a clear example of the “retail politics” all the candidates are undertaking in this election.

Cazayoux, Republican candidate Woody Jenkins and three candidates outside of the major parties — Peter Aranyosi, Ashley Casey and Randall Hayes — will be on the ballot for the May 3 general election.

Under a congressional election format new to many Louisiana voters, the candidate with the most votes — even if the total is less than 50 percent — will win outright.

Cazayoux’s campaign manager, Katie Nee, said she is keeping the campaign focused on the candidate’s message, choosing a network of people over a slew of signs.

Asking friends to invite friends for house parties and throwing themed volunteer nights at the headquarters, the campaign is building its own events to get Cazayoux face time with interested and informed voters, she said.

“If you can talk directly with a voter, person to person, I think that’s the most effective way,” said Cazayoux, a state representative from New Roads. “Now, it’s not the most efficient way, but I think it’s the most effective way.”

Cazayoux, 44, said his personal, pro bono work as a small-town lawyer in New Roads led him to politics.

“A lot of time it was helping people through the bureaucratic maze of government and just organizations that are bigger than them,” he said. “It was, to me, a natural progression to go in a legislative direction.”

Cazayoux’s father is a small-business owner in New Roads, and his mother is a retired teacher. Cazayoux graduated from Catholic of Pointe Coupee, going on to earn psychology degrees from LSU and a law degree from Georgetown Law School in Washington D.C. He and his wife Cherie have been married for 21 years and have three children.

Cazayoux said he focused his eight-year legislative career on issues he believed would make a difference in society, including early childhood education, Internet sex crimes and ethics.

Cazayoux said he tested the ethics reform waters with financial disclosure bills before Gov. Bobby Jindal introduced his own ethics package this year.

“I had gone to school out of state and was aware sometimes of how people thought of us,” Cazayoux said. “All of these issues, I think, impact our ability to attract companies to locate here and allow companies to stay here.”

But the issues Cazayoux would face in Congress if elected are far broader, as witnessed by the questions from about 45 women who gathered at the Walden Subdivision Clubhouse on night last week.

They asked the candidate about Social Security, education and the war in Iraq. Health care was a hot topic, with questions on how access to it could be increased and costs reduced.

Cazayoux’s health-care plan — similar presidential candidate Barack Obama’s — has become an issue for the Republicans.

Cazayoux said he would like the public to have access to the Congressional health-care plan and to expand the State Children’s Health Insurance Plan, which now covers about 111,000 children in Louisiana working families.

Ads paid for by Republican groups say the Cazayoux’s plan is bureaucratic and would result in tax increases. Cazayoux said that analysis is wrong. And the Republicans, he said, aren’t even offering a plan.

“The other side doesn’t have any ideas on health care,” he said. “They want it to stay the same.”

Republicans are hitting Cazayoux hardest on his voting record, particularly during his first four years in office. Many ads are focused on measures, pushed under a Republican governor, that raised income taxes and taxes on groceries and cigarettes.

Cazayoux said many of the taxes were temporary taxes that if not renewed would have left a budget hole requiring funding cuts for universities, hospitals and law enforcement.

Jenkins has taken greater issue with Cazayoux’s stance as a “conservative Democrat,” saying that the parties are too polarized at this time for a moderate Democrat to do anything in a Congress controlled by liberal Democrats.

Cazayoux said he feels most solutions to big problems are going to be found in the middle. He has been endorsed by the Blue Dog Coalition, a group of moderate and conservative Democrats in Congress who claim to promote positions “which bridge the gap between ideological extremes.”

“If I can’t be a moderate or conservative Democrat, I think I would not be serving my district well or the country well,” Cazayoux said. “The claims that you cannot talk to both sides to solve a problem to me is mind-boggling. If that is the case now, we’ve got to find a way to change it.”


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