BAY ST. LOUIS, Miss. -- Don’t accuse Gene Taylor of not understanding the needs and concerns of his constituents, especially not this election season.
Hurricane Katrina didn’t really give a rip who you were when she struck her deadly blow on Aug. 29 last year, didn’t care if you were a hairdresser or a Realtor or a plumber or even, as is the case with Taylor, a 17-year member of the U.S. House of Representatives. The storm demolished the Bay St. Louis Democrat’s Cedar Point home of 28 years right along with those of his neighbors.
A wild boat ride into the disaster area with his teenage son gave Taylor his first shocking glimpses of the devastation and a perspective on the storm wider than the view from any congressional hearing chamber. It’s an outlook that has led Taylor into pitched battle with insurance companies and ex-FEMA director Michael Brown, and has kept him constantly hustling for federal assistance for his state and district ever since the storm waters receded.
As a result, the former Bay St. Louis councilman and state senator, already popular with local voters to a degree that most politicians can only dream of, has become even more revered. “Hometown hero,” the Sun-Herald newspaper labeled him in an adoring front-page spread last spring. Taylor faces a Republican opponent, but when the votes are counted Tuesday, “We’re looking to do in the low 80s,” says aide Beau Gex nonchalantly, meaning percent.
That’s a pretty heady number in a time when a neighboring congressman, William Jefferson of Louisiana, faces nagging questions over $90,000 found in his freezer, House members seem to be resigning regularly in the face of scandals and only 16 percent of U.S. voters approve of the job their federal lawmakers are doing. Dozens of interviews around Taylor's district did not turn up a single voter, Republican or Democrat, who had a bone to pick with the incumbent. Waveland cop Theresa Beeson summed up the sentiment: "Gene Taylor is the man."
'He's yummy'
In addition to his hurricane heroics, Robert Redford good looks -- “He’s yummy,” says another female admirer -- and solid constituent services, the 53-year-old Taylor’s immense popularity can be laid to his personal lifestyle, plain-speaking ways and conservative stands on the issues that matter most to the voters of a district that supported President Bush in 2004 by 66 percent.
A tae kwon do karate black belt for years, he practices the self-reliance he preaches. He’s rebuilding his own hurricane-ravaged house, setting 3,000-pound concrete pillars with the help of buddies and hefting dozens of 16-foot-long rough 2X12s into place by himself. He often drives himself around the district in an aging diesel Mercedes wearing a leather jacket, khakis and well-scuffed Topsiders.
Taylor’s suggestion that insurance agents should be registered like sex offenders drew widespread local appreciation and national media play. After Taylor took Brown to task at a congressional hearing for the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s response to Katrina, the former FEMA director struck back in a recent Playboy magazine interview by calling the congressman a “little twerp” and saying “he can just bite me.” Taylor quickly issued a statement calling Brown an “incompetent fool” and saying Brown was lucky that Taylor had not done more than “just verbally kick his butt.”
A devout Catholic and a regular at area Masses, Taylor is a staunch abortion foe. While in the state Senate, he authored one of the toughest sentencing laws in the nation for drug pushers. He’s pro-gun and pro-death penalty. He has voted against gay marriage and gay adoption, against affirmative action, for random drug tests for federal employees and for school prayer. While he votes with Republicans on many issues, the card-carrying Blue Dog Democrat is harshly critical of Bush’s fiscal policy and a stern balanced-budget advocate; he voted against the president’s tax cuts.
Even his token Republican opponent, arch-conservative Biloxi accountant Randy McDonnell, finds it difficult to criticize Taylor’s record in Congress, choosing instead to blast the incumbent’s membership in what McDonnell describes as the anti-gun, pro-abortion, pro-gay, soft-on-crime, woodpecker-loving Democratic Party.
A Democrat in GOP territory
Which brings up the pretty good question of why someone with Taylor’s views on so many things is a Democrat in a district that hasn’t voted for his party’s nominee for president since Taylor was a toddler back in 1956.
“I think of it as the party that represents the average Joe,” Taylor says as he leads a couple of journalists on a quick tour of the 4th District. “The Republican Party represents Bechtel.”
He sees the San Francisco-based construction behemoth as a prime example of special interests that have made billions with the help of Republican allies in the Bush administration and Congress. In Mississippi, Taylor says, Bechtel got $16,000 each to deliver FEMA trailers about 75 miles in a “cost-plus, no-bid contract given to a major contributor to the president’s campaign.”
Taylor believes that Bechtel stood to make more money by extending the delivery of the trailers “with what appeared to be eye-droppers,” one reason it took so long to get them to Katrina victims. That made him wonder about how efficiently Bechtel was operating under its billions of dollars in deals to help rebuild Iraq. “I called (CEO and Chairman) Riley Bechtel” and told him to expect Congress to investigate. “If you’re doing this badly in Southern Mississippi, what are you doing in Iraq? And I keep my promises.”
Having served under most possible combinations of Democratic and Republican presidents and Houses, Taylor says the current situation with Republican control at all levels has been the worst. If Democrats retake Congress, voters can expect “a lot more scrutiny at every level of how our nation is run.”
“It really has been a rubber-stamp Congress,” he says. “That’s when you get corruption, when nobody’s watching.”
New view of insurance industry
Taylor says Katrina also taught him that the insurance industry is in need of some serious watching. “As a state senator and a congressman, I voted for almost every tort reform issue that came up, which means I voted with the insurance industry. I have come to look upon these guys in an entirely different light since the storm, based on what they did to people in my neighborhood and what they did to me.”
He believes Congress must remove the antitrust exemption now enjoyed only by insurers and Major League Baseball, establish federal regulation and mandate all-perils coverage, policies that will end after-the-fact arguments between companies and customers like the one along the Gulf Coast about whether Katrina’s wind or water caused the damage.
In a Democrat-controlled House, Taylor would expect to get the chairmanship of the Armed Services Subcommittee on Projection Forces. The panel’s focus on shipyards plays to the 13 years he spent in the Coast Guard. And the full committee is an apt assignment for a member with Naval Station Pascagoula, Keesler Air Force Base, Camp Shelby, and Seabees and Air National Guard units in his district.
Taylor, who voted against the 1991 U.S. invasion of Iraq but for the 2003 war, is among those questioning the current situation. “It probably makes me angrier than most when they say ‘stay the course,’” he says. “They need to do a better job of steering the ship if they’re going to stay the course.”
In his five visits to the war-torn nation, he has seen Iraqi sentiment turn from 80 percent support of U.S. troops to 80 percent against. “I don’t see how you turn that around.” He suspects that the U.S. presence may have done more to encourage terrorists than discourage them.
Discussing Iraq at town hall meeting
“There is no link between 9/11 and the Iraqis, other than what Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity say,” Taylor told his audience at a town hall meeting in Long Beach last week. Asked if leaving would only do more to embolden terrorists, he replied, “I’m not convinced. … You didn’t see the Afghanistanis follow the Russians to Russia. The Vietnamese didn’t follow us to San Francisco. They just wanted us out of there.”
Taylor himself doesn’t want to go anywhere. He relishes the local-boy-makes-good role that lets him help his friends and neighbors. He’s eager to get his own house rebuilt and looks forward to spending holidays there with his wife, Margaret, who is in advertising, and kids Sarah, 27, in the financial sector; Emily 24, who works for her dad’s campaign; and Gary, 18, who just started attending the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy. He thinks it will be at least five years before the area returns to something like normal.
If he were to leave Congress, he thinks he might like to teach. And it’s clear from watching him speak to a group of sixth-graders at St. Vincent de Paul Catholic Elementary School in Long Beach that he would do well. He patiently explains everything from the federal deficit to the Bosnian conflict.
When one of the kids asks why local political leaders are pressing so hard to rebuild when chances are that another hurricane will someday knock it all down again, he tells them it’s simple: “We think it’s the best place on Earth.”
Waveland mayor in tight re-election battle
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I'd live in NYC. I love it. Any day I can get to work in something other than my car is a good day. Can't do that here.
Gene Taylor is a great guy. Probably oine of the least wealth members of Congress, is beholden to no one, and is an approachable guy.
R., BSL (Sent Mar 1, 2007 9:55:45 PM)
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BJ (Sent Apr 12, 2007 1:12:33 AM)
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