GOP Gleeful Over Landrieu Revelation
by James Gill - Times-Picayune (excerpt)

It might not be immediately obvious why a U.S. senator from Louisiana, with no educational credentials, would presume to micromanage the public-school curriculum in Washington, D.C.

The mystery deepens when the senator is a Democrat, whose interference means a $2 million bonanza for a firm owned by intimates of the Bush administration.

In truth, Mary Landrieu's behavior isn't eccentric at all by Washington standards. She foisted a reading program on the D.C. schools only after the company that hawks it shoveled some serious money into her campaign fund.

Landrieu's spokesman said her sponsorship of Dallas-based Voyager Expanded Learning had nothing whatsoever to do with the moolah. Flacks say that every time some politician does a campaign contributor a favor. They might as well save their breath. Nobody will ever believe it.

A campaign contribution may not be the same as a bribe, but it can take a subtle eye to tell the difference. On this occasion, one of those self-appointed guardians of public ethics suggests that Landrieu may have crossed the line and has asked the Justice Department for a bribery investigation.

This happens just as U.S. Rep. William Jefferson, D-New Orleans, seeks to beat his own bribery rap by claiming that the favors for which he was allegedly paid off did not qualify as "official acts," as the statute requires.

Landrieu's acts were plenty official -- she added the $2 million as chairwoman of the D.C. Appropriations Subcommittee -- but proving a quid pro quo is notoriously difficult.

Still, she is up for re-election this year, and the GOP, which had already tagged her as vulnerable, is rubbing its hands with glee at her embarrassment. It doubtless suits the GOP just fine that, although it was in 2001 that Landrieu put Voyager in the D.C. budget, the story has just now come to light in the Washington Post.

Voyager employees and lobbyists gave $80,000 to Landrieu's 2002 re-election campaign, according to the Post, $30,000 of it from a fund-raiser held a few days before she appropriated the money.