This column marks the debut of Oscar, TheHayride.com’s resident voracious rodent and all-around pestilential influence. We want it known from the beginning that any relationship between what the little guy says and the editorial position of TheHayride.com staff is completely coincidental – were it not for certain contractual and/or economic factors unfortunately in play we would have laughed derisively at the idea of a nutria offering commentary on a serious political site.

But, it is what it is. So don’t judge us too harshly for what Oscar says – for that matter, don’t judge Oscar too harshly. He is, after all, a rat…

OK, first of all, don’t call me a rat. I’m not a rat. I’m 20 pounds of hardbody Myocastor coypus – and you people definitely don’t know what that means, but what it doesn’t mean is “rat.” Got it? You call me a rat, and I’ll crap on your porch.

So anyways, the Super Bowl was terrific. Down here in Barataria where I stay at, even the mud-turtles were juiced up about it. I’m especially happy for Peyton Manning – from the time that cat was knee-high to a grasshopper he always wanted to throw a touchdown pass for the Saints to win a game and he finally got to do it. We all ripped him and his brudder for giving LSU the bah-fungu out of high school, but hey – bygones be bygones, right?

I even liked the commercials. Hell, why wouldn’t I? My nephew T-Bill, who went out to Hollywood looking for fame and fortune years ago, made his debut in a Super Bowl spot. T-Bill got mixed up in the L.A. scene too much, and he had plastic surgery and does high calonics and yoga and all that, but the boy has some talent. He showed it. Got himself a gig on stage in front of some old farts in black tie. We used to laugh at him for whitening his teeth when he was a kid, but now he’s livin’ da life.

Speaking of the spots, though, what’s up with all the commercials where guys don’t have pants on? Did these all come from the same ad agency, or what? Look, I’m a nutria, OK? I never wear pants, and I go commando at that. But because I’m a nutria nobody expects me to. You people expect your men to wear pants, and you should. Somebody needs to tell Madison Avenue – even the commercial for the company that makes pants had guys with no pants on.

Creepy.

Speaking of creepy, Tim Tebow tackles like a girl, and he wears gay-guy T-shirts. So I can understand why the ad he was in was controversial. Best I can tell, he didn’t have pants on, either. That’s why the heifers in the pro-choice gang had a problem with the ad, right? No? Oh – they don’t like the ad because it tells people they can’t have an abortion if they want one? Did the ad say that? No? Hey – it’s over my head. I’m a nutria, remember?

I did catch Obama on TV before the game. He wasn’t talking about the game. He was talking about himself.

Scintillating. Which is nutria for “I’m-so-friggin’-bored-I-could-slash-my-wrists-with-a-cut-up-beer-can.” 

Real tough questions from Katie Couric-Riefenstahl, too. And real honorable of CBS to put that puppet show on an hour and a half before game time. Like I said, I’m a nutria and I could still figure out what they were up to. Here’s a little piece of advice, guys – Katie’s ratings aren’t in the terlet because nobody’s seen what she can do. They’re in the terlet because we know exactly what she can do.

By the way, I hear hizzonna Mitch Landrieu is the new mayor in New Orleans. That’s nice. Mitch has done real well for himself since he gave up trying to have hair; for a while he had some of us a little worried down here we might end up as a toupee or two on the man with all the effort he was putting in. We were all hoping for our cou-zan John Georges to win – OK, he’s not really a cou-zan; he paid me to say that.

But if Mitch is the mayor of New Orleans, who’s gonna be Lt. Gov.? They say Jindal is picking somebody for the job soon – if he’s got a couple stones what he’ll do is appoint Jay Dardenne for the job since Dardenne’s gonna run for it anyway. If Dardenne moves up then Jindal can appoint somebody as Secretary of State and then he’ll have a whole ticket to work from next year when everybody’s up for re-election.

If he appoints Sammy Kershaw I’m gonna blow chunks.

All right, that’s all I got. I’m off to watch a little nutria porn - but do me a favor, wouldya? Tell Kip Holden if he wants to trade us off to the Chicoms in exchange for drywall or whatever he’s gotta ask nicely first.

Polls had shown Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu lingering below 50 percent in his attempt to subdue an 11-candidate field in the New Orleans mayoral race held Saturday, but as it turns out there might not be any need for a runoff.

With 37 of 366 precincts tallied, Landrieu is carrying better than 65 percent of the vote, far ahead of Troy Henry’s 16 percent. Henry had been seen as a candidate with a chance to sneak into the runoff and beat Landrieu based on pure demographics, but his campaign fell apart in the last two weeks of the race.

Republican-turned-independent-turned-Democrat John Georges is polling just 7.44 percent despite outspending the field to finish third. Republican Rob Couhig sits at four percent in fourth place.

No one denies that Lt. Governor Mitch Landrieu is the frontrunner in the New Orleans mayor’s race. But a new poll released Wednesday by WWL-TV in New Orleans indicates the third-time candidate could be in some familiar trouble from here on in to Election Day.

Landrieu has a big lead at the moment, with 45 percent of respondents saying they’re with him. Businessman Troy Henry comes in second with 14 percent, while Rob Couhig and John Georges have eight percent each. James Perry (3 percent) and Nadine Ramsey (2 percent) bring up the rear. Nineteen percent remain undecided.

Among the internal numbers in the WWL poll, conducted by Dr. Ron Faucheux: Landrieu is polling 53 percent of whites and 40 percent of blacks, while Henry is getting 22 percent of blacks and just two percent of whites. Georges, who is spending more money than anyone in the race, is getting 10 percent of the white vote and six percent of the black vote, while Couhig is getting 16 percent of the white vote and 1 percent of the black vote. Perry (five percent of the white vote) and Ramsey (one percent) are each getting three percent of the black vote.

In a very hopeful sign for Landrieu, he’s getting 37 percent of the city’s Republicans (just shy of six percent of the total vote comes out of that number), which is a larger percentage than one would expect. But with only 51 percent of the Democrat vote going Landrieu’s way, he may be running up against a ceiling of support.

Landrieu especially needs someone other than Henry as a runoff opponent if he can’t get to 50 percent, and right now it looks like that’s not in the cards. Henry is the candidate with the best potential for growth, as with an electorate somewhere in the range of 60 percent African-American and a quarter of it still undecided he’s got a natural constituency from which to pick up support. Henry is also still a relative unknown, as 38 percent of the voters say they don’t know enough about him to have an opinion. That compares to seven percent for Landrieu, 52 percent for Couhig (who is unlikely to catch Henry given the “R” by his name) and 31 percent for Georges.

The traditional narrative about frontrunners in polls is that if they’re not above 50 percent they’re vulnerable. Landrieu, for all his advantages, is still five points shy of the magic number. And if he gets into a runoff with Henry, he runs into the same black-white demographic nightmare he faced against Ray Nagin four years ago, with the same problematic positioning on the other side – Henry, the private-sector candidate with an appeal to New Orleans’ white business community (which admittedly has not materialized to date, though with Couhig and Georges combining for 39 percent of the Republican vote and another 10 percent undecided he has potential with that group) can play the exact same double game Nagin did – stoking the racial differences in the black community while castigating Landrieu as a hard-core lefty among the white community.

The interesting question now is whether the candidates at the bottom and middle of the heap will continue in the race, or where their support will go in the runoff. Couhig won’t quit, since  as the only Republican in the race he has a standard to carry. Georges’ arrogance and deep pockets might keep him in the race,  though he’s clearly not gaining the ground necessary to catch Henry to make the runoff. Perry and Ramsey’s support will in all likelihood move to Henry, or at least most of it will. It’s reasonable to assume that Henry is going to pick up the majority of the undecideds barring a major gaffe, because if Landrieu hasn’t made a case to vote for him by now one wonders whether it’s possible for him to ever do it.

In the end, Henry’s fate will depend on whether he can reel Couhig and Georges in as endorsers. Landrieu’s best hope is to drive a wedge between those two and his closest competitor, without agitating his black support. It’s a dicey proposition, and one with very high stakes for a politician who has seen his mayoral dreams collapse before near the finish line.

After seven years of Ray Nagin, the people of New Orleans are all too familiar with the idea of a buffoon as their mayor.

It’s questionable whether an appetite exists for another pea from that pod. Such an appetite would have to be ravenous in order for it to do John Georges any good in his attempt to succeed Nagin in the city’s top job.

Georges was caught on audio making ludicrous statements to the Orleans Parish Democratic Executive Committee about how Mitch Landrieu hasn’t done anything about Jim Letten remaining as the U.S. Attorney in the city, among other things. The rant, captured by lefty blogger Eli Ackerman at wecouldbefamous.blogspot.com, set off a good deal of controversy in the city, not to mention a good bit of ridicule of the failed 2007 gubernatorial candidate, who has crossed the spectrum from being a registered Republican as late as 2006, an independent when he broke a state record for a major gubernatorial candidate by spending some $61 per vote in 2007, and a Democrat now in pursuit of the mayor’s job.

Asked about his dippy speech on Friday, Georges told the Times-Picayune the whole thing was a goof. And oh, by the way, the cigarette and video poker magnate informed the paper that he’s crazy like a fox because he was actually just trying to herd his audience away from endorsing Landrieu – and lo and behold, he was successful since the OPDEC ended up endorsing Troy Henry.

Impressed yet? Here was Georges’ actual quote:

“I went into that room with the look of a serious-looking guy,” Georges explained. “I went in there and kicked into this routine and blamed Mitch for keeping U.S. attorneys and not having hospitals. I knew I couldn’t convince a group of people that after switching parties I could get their endorsement. But I knew it would cost Mitch millions of dollars by (Landrieu) not getting the endorsement.”

And here’s a little more:

“It’s a room of 100 mostly African-American Democrats,” he said. “Some are with Bill Jefferson. Some are with Marc Morial. Who knows who these people are? I walked into a room of strangers.”

The takeaway from this? John Georges is his own biggest fan. And he’s really funny…but not in the way he thinks he is.