Most of the reaction we’ve seen to the naming of Gov.-elect Jeff Landry’s transition team chairs has been positive. That makes sense – it’s a group made up of people Landry trusts, which he’s well within his purview to choose, but it’s also a group of very highly accomplished people with something to say about the future of this state.

We had a post yesterday on the transition team; you can see it here.

But not everybody is happy, and it’s not hard to discern why in at least one case. We bring you Sharon Hewitt, who among gubernatorial candidates anyone had heard of in the primary two weeks ago came in dead last…

With so many outstanding female business leaders in our state, it is disappointing that none of them are on the transition team. This is a swing and a miss. https://t.co/OHjz3jhW50

— Sharon Hewitt (@sharonhewitt) October 25, 2023

And even better than that…

In appointing only one woman, his wife, to an 8 person transition team, Gov-elect Landry said: “Something my mama would say is that you always need a good woman to make sure those men get everything right."

SPOILER ALERT: That is completely tone deaf and an insult to every… https://t.co/cNXLgeCy6G

— Sharon Hewitt (@sharonhewitt) October 26, 2023

So not one, but TWO tweets bitching about an insufficient number of female beans in Landry’s transition team jar.

Wow.

Let’s get a few things out in the open now that (1) the election is over and (2) Hewitt has decided she’s going to keep fighting it, like one of those poor Japanese saps stuck on some forgotten South Pacific island years after World War II ended.

First, I attended a goodly number of candidate forums this year and even moderated a couple. I was exposed to Hewitt’s canned campaign speech more times than I can remember.

And other than Hewitt reciting her life story as a girlboss, I can’t tell you a single thing about that speech that anybody can, or ought to, remember.

She brought absolutely zero to the table other than the fact she’s female and everybody else is not. So for her to trash Landry over the fact he named a bunch of men (plus his wife Sharon) to chair the transition team is so annoyingly on-brand for her it’s not even funny.

Or maybe it is funny. But not anywhere near as funny as somebody who managed all of 1.74 percent of the vote on October 14 lecturing somebody who got 51.6 percent of the vote as to what’s “out of touch.”

Sharon Hewitt grossly misread the public, and she did so on something which was glaringly apparent. Namely that there is zero appetite in Louisiana for a girlboss running things. And that’s hardly shocking – we elected somebody exactly like Sharon Hewitt as governor 20 years ago, and Kathleen Blanco was such a terrible disaster in office that she couldn’t even run for re-election. Not to mention there are girlbosses currently in charge of Louisiana’s two largest cities, and LaToya Cantrell and Sharon Weston Broome are utterly awful leaders actively destroying those places.

She proceeded to wait too late to get into the race, then she whined about getting outhustled by Landry for the state GOP endorsement, she persisted in a hopeless campaign despite having very little money or indication of support, she attacked the frontrunner, she put out reams of policy statements none of which inspired any interest or even controversy and then she refused to drop out of the race when it was obvious she was taking up space that either Landry or one of the other Republicans could have used.

So it isn’t just Jeff Landry who would rightfully have a beef with Sharon Hewitt. If I was John Schroder or Stephen Waguespack I’d be pretty uninterested in anything she says as well.

And here’s the thing: there are lots of people who have grievances with her, because while she ran around talking about what a great state senator she was, the fact is Sharon Hewitt’s record was anything but a recommendation for higher office.

She’ll tell you about how she passed oodles of bills. The vast majority of those were insignificant nothings. A few weren’t, but when it came to the truly high-profile things she tried to involve herself in, you saw exactly what kind of leadership Sharon Hewitt had on offer.

Remember when the controversy first brewed up over the state issuing a contract over voting machines? The election integrity people, the ones who ultimately settled on Brandon Trosclair as their Secretary of State candidate after they essentially wore Kyle Ardoin out and made him decide not to run for re-election, were pretty happy at the outset when Hewitt took up their cause and began making demands of Ardoin.

But that didn’t last, and by the time the procurement of new voting machines had become a bureaucratic fiasco thanks to her involvement, the election integrity gang had mostly decided they were more in favor of Ardoin than they were of Hewitt. That was the end of Sharon Hewitt running for Secretary of State like it was fairly obvious she wanted to.

So she set her sights on running for governor.

But she’d already made another commitment by then. Hewitt promised the state Republican Party and many of its activists that she would pass a bill bringing back party primary elections to replace the jungle primary we’re stuck with at present. Given that she was the GOP Senate delegation chair, it was thought Hewitt would have enough stroke to get such a bill passed.

She never even brought the bill. Didn’t even file one.

And naturally, Sharon Hewitt didn’t stand with the conservatives who wanted to preserve the state’s constitutional spending caps. She threw in with similar political mediocrities like Fred Mills, Page Cortez, Bret Allain and Pat Connick in voting to drop government cash out of helicopters rather than give tax relief or pay down debt.

But you’re supposed to vote for her because of her plumbing, dontchaknow.

The sense of entitlement in this – and how out of touch it is, too – is astonishing.

We don’t have anything against female leadership. Louisiana’s legislature is beginning to fill up with women who are fantastic leaders and who barely even bother to make sex an issue in how they do their jobs. Sharon Hewitt probably doesn’t even rank in the top 10 among that group in terms of faithfulness to the people of the state or effectiveness when it comes to real things.

But Sharon Hewitt is about Sharon Hewitt. Always has been. Rejected by the voters and rendered irrelevant by her own bad choices, she is now apparently going to be an ankle-biter as Landry attempts to pull this state out of its swan dive, and that means we’re no longer under any obligation to hold back the truth.

That's not a very graceful end to your political career, Sharon.

— Scott McKay (@TheHayride) October 26, 2023