The narratives Democrats come up with these days are hilarious, and you can really tell who has talent and who doesn’t based on how they wield them. Randal Gaines, for example, who’s a termed-out Democrat state representative from LaPlace and now a candidate to unseat Katie Bernhardt as the chair of the Louisiana Democrat Party, isn’t all that talented.

And he proved it yesterday in his press release making the announcement that he’s running…

According to a release, Randal L. Gaines is running to replace the current Chair, Katie Bernhardt. She has held the position since 2020. Gaines plans to “reunite the party in the face of an extremist Republican-run executive and legislative branch, and put Democrats back on the map.”

“With the encouragement of elected officials, business leaders, community leaders, faith-based leaders, and activists from across the state, I am proud to announce my candidacy for Chair of the Louisiana Democratic Party,” said Gaines. “As a three-term Democratic legislator for Louisiana’s 57th House District, national military leader, statewide vote-turnout leader for Governor John Bel Edwards, national civil rights leader, and member of the Democratic National Committee, my experience has granted me the wisdom that everything rises and falls with leadership, which requires a compelling vision, a strategic plan, and follow through. In a time when all that we value, stand and strive for is at stake, I am ready to bring not only a functioning Democratic party apparatus but to deliver victories for our shared Democratic values in every corner of Louisiana.”

Somebody somewhere did a focus group years ago and came up with “extremist” as a word to describe populist conservatives, and you can tell who the hack Democrats are because they still use that term even when it’s totally inappropriate.

For example, Jeff Landry won a majority in a 15-candidate gubernatorial primary with 51.6 percent of the vote, and had he not won that majority in October, it’s hard to imagine he would have gotten less than 65 percent of the vote in November; all three of the statewide Republican candidates on the November runoff ballot did at least 65 percent and none of them had the name ID or money Landry had.

Not to mention Republicans, and most of the other GOP candidates in the primary talked about very similar policy proposals to the ones Landry is pushing, were well over 60 percent of the vote in that October primary.

In other words, Gaines is saying that almost two thirds of Louisiana’s voters are “extremists” or support an “extremist” political agenda. That’s what he’s offering as he promises to “deliver victories” for Democrats.

The way politics works is that if the other side is pounding you two-to-one, it’s you who’s the “extremist,” and if you want to stop getting pounded you have to adopt some of what the other side is doing. You might not like it, but your choices are either to stand on the sidelines and bitch about how wrong the majority is, or you can adopt as much of the majority’s view as you can stomach in an effort to become relevant and perhaps shape policy here and there.

If I’m Jeff Landry and Randal Gaines, who’s going around calling me an “extremist,” is the chair of the Louisiana Democrat Party, I’m going to go out of my way to kick his ass. After all, he’s already called me an “extremist” – why wouldn’t I get my money’s worth?

And here’s the thing: Katie Bernhardt is definitely going to get tossed out on her ear as the chair of that party, and it’ll either be Gaines or the crypto-gay Green New Deal/Democratic Socialists of America pro-Hamas communist Davante Lewis who takes over. After all, close to 62 percent of registered Democrats in Louisiana are black, and with Bernhardt’s benefactor John Bel Edwards fading into political oblivion on January 8 there is no reason why the party’s chair shouldn’t be black. It’s their party and they should lead it, especially given what Edwards and Bernhardt did.

Think about it. Following this year’s legislative elections, there will be only one white Democrat – Jay “Lunatic” Luneau – in the state senate. There are only five, if my count is correct, white Democrats in the state House of Representatives, and one of those is likely to go away if Chad Brown takes a job working in the state Department of Insurance (his seat would probably go to a black Democrat, though it isn’t out of the question for a Republican to win it).

So only six, or maybe even five, white Democrats in the entire 144-member state legislature.

That’s a breathtakingly paltry number. Why would anybody listen to them?

The thing is, Gaines could position himself between Lewis and Bernhardt and probably win that chairmanship. His value proposition to the white Democrats could be that “look, you’re done running this party, so forget about Bernhardt and decide whether you want a state legislator who’s worked with Republicans as the head of the Legislative Black Caucus and knows how things work, or else you’re going to get a gay communist running this party and never win an election again.”

And I guess that’s what he’s saying, but he sabotages that message when the first thing out of his mouth is that Jeff Landry and the rest of the statewide elected officials who just went into office with him are “extremists.” There are quite a few Democrats in Louisiana who voted for them, after all.

It just comes off like Gaines, for all his supposed credentials, is a run-of-the-mill hack. The guess is he’s likely to lose to Lewis – which as we’ve said, would be essentially a death knell for Democrat political relevance in Louisiana.

And Landry and his fellow “extremists” won’t owe a damn thing to either one of them.