Walter Boasso known as hard worker

• By MICHELLE MILLHOLLON
• Advocate Capitol News Bureau
• Published: Sep 25, 2007
• Editor’s note: Second in a series of profiles of the major candidates for governor.

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The fact that state Sen. Walter Boasso launched his container cleaning company with a garden hose and a box of Tide appealed to former legislator Armand Brinkhaus.

“I thought that’s no false pride,” Brinkhaus said of deciding to send a campaign contribution to Boasso after watching his commercial in the governor’s race. “It just intrigued me. I said, ‘Let me send that man $500.’ ”

Boasso is not focusing much on fundraising in his bid to become governor. He is using his personal fortune to fuel his campaign.
His commercials tell his story of growing up on food stamps, founding his business at age 19 and becoming a millionaire.

That money helped propel him into the state Senate, where he took on river pilots and levee boards, powerful interests that control a lot of money and patronage. He led efforts to impose state rules on the mostly unregulated river pilots and to consolidate a fractured levee board system into two boards.

Now he wants to be governor.

“Big challenges? You bet. But someone has to stand up for the little guy,” Boasso tells voters in one commercial. “I know I will.”
Boasso, a Democrat, acknowledges his goal for the Oct. 20 primary election is simply to get into a November runoff against the front-runner, U.S. Rep. Bobby Jindal, a Republican. Boasso’s other major opponents are Public Service Commissioner Foster Campbell, a Democrat, and New Orleans businessman John Georges, who has no party affiliation.

Most political experts point to Boasso as the candidate with the best chance of facing Jindal in a runoff.

Boasso — who left the Republican Party after the leadership endorsed Jindal for governor — started soft, toting around a cardboard cutout of Jindal in a series of television commercials. Since then, his ads have taken a more serious turn by delving into issues such as insurance and showing his flooded home after Hurricane Katrina.

The Katrina catalyst
Colleagues point to Katrina as the trigger that propelled Boasso into the governor’s race.

But his sister, Carol Ortego of Meraux, thinks the seed was planted before the storms.

She said her brother is running for governor because he is tired of seeing people leave Louisiana for better opportunities in other states. That migration was well under way long before the hurricane.

“The storm is just another stepping stone. I don’t think that was the trigger. I think it was there before,” Ortego said.

Boasso, 47, said the aftermath of the hurricane solidified his decision to run for governor, especially a moment of frustration in January when officials were pointing fingers at each other for the storm recovery’s meltdown.