Our readers might remember that back in March, when Shawn Wilson emerged as the Democrats’ candidate for governor in this fall’s election cycle, he offered up a fairly peculiar justification for why he ought to get the job.

Wilson said that Louisiana needs a bridge-builder as governor.

Except, we said, there’s a problem with that…

Wilson’s problem is that, contrary to the claim in the video, he didn’t build a single major bridge as Louisiana’s DOTD secretary. Try to think of a bridge project of any real size or import in this state which was planned, designed and completed within the nearly eight years he’s been in charge of the agency which does those things, and you’ll likely come up dry.

Even those flyover ramps from I-10 into the New Orleans airport’s new terminal, which was finished in 2019 and had been on the drawing board well before Wilson got the job running DOTD, still aren’t finished. They might be completed before the election.

Or they might not.

It’s one thing to say you’re a bridge-builder. But when building bridges has literally been your job for the last seven-plus years and you’ve demonstrably sucked at that job, it’s a lot more humorous than descriptive to call yourself a bridge-builder.

This is the obvious problem with Wilson’s candidacy. The folks at the Republican Governors’ Association figured that one out in no time flat and decided, “Yep, we’ll act on this one.” A press release this morning…

Republican Governors Association (RGA) today rolled out a new video highlighting Louisiana Democrat Shawn Wilson’s failed record on infrastructure.

The 30-second video contrasts Wilson’s campaign announcement video with the truth about Louisiana’s continued infrastructure decline under Wilson’s leadership – Louisiana now ranks 49th in transportation and infrastructure.

“Shawn Wilson failed Louisianians time and time again when it came to delivering better roads and bridges. Under Wilson’s leadership roads got worse, not better, and Louisiana now ranks 49th in the nation for infrastructure. If Wilson can’t fix the roads and bridges, he certainly can’t fix Louisiana,” said RGA National Press Secretary Courtney Alexander.

View the video here.

Here’s the ad…

It’s hard to find people who take the idea of Wilson winning this race seriously, for a number of reasons. First, Louisiana isn’t Georgia or Florida, where you have enough white leftists who can team up with black voters so that a black Democrat can get to 50 percent in a statewide race. It remains to be seen whether a black Republican can win statewide; we’ll see if a Winsome Sears or Byron Donalds turns up at some point to test that theory.

But we just haven’t seen much evidence to indicate Wilson is going to do much better than, say, Cleo Fields or Bill Jefferson did. For a Democrat to win here, he’s got to look like John Bel Edwards and have enough ingredients to run the “conservative Democrat” scam that Edwards did. We’re not sure that gag hasn’t been burned over the last eight years.

The second reason we don’t see much buzz around Wilson is what the ad talks about. At the end of the day Wilson is a bureaucrat who runs possibly the worst, most dysfunctional agency in state government – and everybody knows it. DOTD is a joke, and it’s been a joke for decades. That Wilson couldn’t fix it doesn’t mean he’s a bad guy per se, but it does mean there’s no reason to believe he can fix the state as a whole.

Not that anybody thinks any Democrat can, or even wants to.

But when those flyover ramps at the New Orleans airport remain unfinished, the idea of the guy responsible for that snail’s-pace construction project getting a promotion to the most important job in the state is laughable.

And the RGA is apparently going to try to beat that into every head in the state. As they should.