Mike McConathy Has No Business Running Against Alan Seabaugh

Yesterday, Jeff Sadow posted a pretty good rundown of a state Senate race in the making for next year, namely the Senate District 31 contest which has now shaped up between current state representative Alan Seabaugh and recently-retired Northwestern State University basketball coach Mike McConathy. I want to add some thoughts to that.

McConathy is the winningest basketball coach in the history of Louisiana college hoops. But he’s also the losingest. In fact, his career winning percentage is under 50 percent. That’s more a function of coaching at places where there weren’t a whole lot of resources than it is a reflection of whether he was good at his job. When McConathy had some talent to work with, his Northwestern State teams were usually pretty tough.

But here’s the thing: there is zero relationship between being a basketball coach at a directional college and being a member of a state legislature. And while in an ordinary election cycle and in an ordinary district you could say “well, he can learn,” nothing about the time and place in question is ordinary.

Louisiana is in extreme decline. Our major cities are hellscapes with rampant crime, runaway corruption, empty storefronts, horrific leadership and demoralized populations. Our state budget is bloated beyond recognition, wholly dependent on federal largesse and unsustainable. Our state government is more incompetent and actively destructive than ever before. And our state legislature, despite millions and millions of dollars of campaign money spent to turn it Republican and, hopefully, conservative, is led by weaklings whose chief goal is their own power and not the advancement of our people.

So it’s no wonder that over the two terms John Bel Edwards has been our governor, we’ve lost almost a quarter of a million people in net outmigration, and Louisiana’s population overall is now declining.

This isn’t a time where we can put retirees from government jobs – McConathy coached basketball at a government school, so that makes him a retired government employee – into the state Senate and see if they’ll learn how to be a good legislator.

Worse, McConathy has admitted he doesn’t know anything about the issues. He just always thought it would be cool to be a state legislator, and now that he has free time he figures he’ll try his hand at it.

Sounds like somebody who can’t wait to tackle the tough fights necessary to pull the state out of its swoon, right?

It doesn’t help that McConathy is being backed by all the old Usual Suspect crowd in the Natchitoches area, like Democrat trial lawyer, former state representative and John Bel Edwards fundraiser and confidant Taylor Townsend. The new plan is to find stooges for the old white-Democrat mob which is responsible for our lowly status among peer states and run them as “R’s.”

Which, whether McConathy understands that or not, is what he is. He’s a stooge for the status quo crowd, the nursing home operators and river pilots, the connected lobbyist mob and the rent seekers. Make him the senator from District 31 and you’ll get a guy who’s a regular at the crawfish boils and fishing rodeos – and a guy who will never, ever make the tough votes needed to beat back the woke Left on things like stopping lunatics from mutilating confused kids with “gender-affirming” surgeries or breaking down the bloated, corrupt, abusive bureaucracy holding Louisiana back, or overhauling our noxious tax code.

Good-time Charlies bankrolled by the status quo crowd won’t do any of that.

You need warriors who don’t care about the crawfish boils and fishing rodeos but who are there to be agents of positive change no matter how much the status quo mob hates it. You need a supermajority of those.

Seabaugh hasn’t just been one of them. He’s been their leader. From fighting taxes to cutting stupid government to standing against Edwards’ idiotic COVID lockdowns, he’s been the man in the arena for Louisiana’s conservatives. And though Alan’s fun to hang around, and he’s one of the best speakers we’ve had at our Hayride dinner events over the years, he’s no Good-time Charlie. When he walks into that Capitol he’s there to fight for the people of this state.

So much so that deranged Democrats have threatened to kill him. On the floor of the House. In front of everybody.

Seabaugh doesn’t have to take time to “learn” the issues. He knows them cold. He’s lived them.

It’s a joke to run somebody who’s never even set foot in that Capitol against Alan Seabaugh and claim that he’s a fellow Republican. Mike McConathy ought to realize what he’s being set up for, get wise to the fact he’s a stooge of the people who’ve held this state back, and drop out.

Otherwise, he ought to get ready for the humiliation he’s got coming.