Every Wednesday, Talk 107.3 FM’s Brian Haldane has an interview with Garret Graves, the congressman from Louisiana’s 6th District which comprises most of the Baton Rouge area and parts beyond in South Louisiana. This time, the interview was quite a bit more interesting than normal.

Graves spends a lot of the interview talking about the House Speaker selection and the considerations the Freedom Caucus managed to get out of Kevin McCarthy before they agreed to assent to his Speakership. It’s interesting, because we saw for a whole week that McCarthy’s supporters – or many of them, and not including Graves – were griping about the grinding process of 15 ballots before McCarthy finally got enough votes to take the Speakership, and yet the end product is something everybody is touting as a vast improvement of Congressional process.

And rightly so. The House is a great deal better as an institution today than it was before the current members were sworn in, which Graves rightly recognizes.

He’s exceptionally excited about the 118th Congress and its potential given things like the reform of the budget process into 12 separate appropriations bills.

All of which is good stuff, though not exactly remarkable. But then, Haldane asks Graves about the governor’s race, as his name has been bandied about a good bit lately, and particularly since Lt. Governor Billy Nungesser backed out of running. And things really become interesting from there.

As excited as Graves sounds about Congress in the first part of the interview, he seems positively giddy about the governor’s race. He says a couple of things – that he’s having lots of folks excited about the prospect of his running, and then he says there’s “overwhelming” response about one candidate in particular.

Which is Jeff Landry, obviously, and while Graves seems a bit cryptic in what he’s saying it’s pretty obvious he means that all of these people are coming to him and screaming about how terrible it is that Landry might be governor.

We don’t doubt that’s true, though it would be instructive to know who the people are who are so opposed to Landry and begging Graves to run. And it did strike us that if Graves is going to get into the race he would have done himself a favor not skirting the issue with evasive language. Just step up and say you think too many people hate Landry for him to win and so you’re thinking about running to save the state from a Democrat who’ll make things even worse than they currently are.

That’s the argument that somebody running in the “moderate” lane of this race would make, whether credibly or otherwise. If Graves is going to run, then he had just as soon make it clearly and not try to be cute about it.

Landry’s base is bigger than Graves’ is, and Landry has contacts and alliances around the state which are bigger and better than Graves’ are. Landry has two of Graves’ four GOP congressional colleagues already endorsing him in Clay Higgins and Mike Johnson, and Landry has Eddie Rispone and Ralph Abraham, the two Republicans who ran for governor in 2019 and got 53 percent of the vote in the primary, endorsing him. Landry has the endorsement of the state GOP. Landry is going to be the endorsee of Donald Trump as well, and he might even get Ron DeSantis’ help in the race.

And Landry has $6.5 million in his war chest between his campaign and his PAC. He’s going to have four times that amount to spend before it’s over.

What that means is taking Landry on is a big project. You’ve got to be pretty bold to do it. And starting off with an evasive, lots-of-people-don’t-like-this-one-particular-candidate-that-I-won’t-name isn’t bold.

Anyway, that’s what we thought of the interview. Your reaction may differ.