Virginia Boulet: The Smart One
by C.W. Cannon

According to Boulet, the city has suffered under "a business class determined to build a Carribbean economy."

I talked to Virginia Boulet by phone while she took her brown Doberman for a walk. I remarked that such a breed seemed more fitting for the guy who sits next to her in the debates, rabid Rob Couhig. She laughed and admitted that the debates weren’t the best format for her, or for predicting who might govern best, or even who might win. She brought up the painful example of the Bush/Kerry debates. She says it’s because the debate format favors aggressive, even rude behavior. If a primary debate with a slew of candidates can be compared to a high school or college classroom, Boulet would be the smart girl in the front of the class who in fact does know the correct answers, and who raises her hand dutifully in observance of classroom protocol, but who’s too polite—or too cognizant of the meaninglessness of flying bullshit—to put much effort into amplifying her mouth. But does the smart well-bred girl win elections in America?

Virginia Boulet is no geek, though. She’s approachable, earthy, chatty. Mellow guys and gals feel her proto-stoner cool chick vibe so heavily that they might get a head rush when told she’s been a high-stakes mover and shaker on Wall Street and at Adams and Reese, the blue-stocking law firm where she worked alongside litigating Doberman Rob Couhig.

How did she do it? She says speaking softly and refusing to unleash testosterone photons on everybody in the room is actually a good way to do business, to make deals, to make companies and government entities alike fork over requested dough.

Boulet applied to Yale the very first year they accepted applications from women. Billary attended the law school while she engaged in shadowy unnamed undergraduate party options. (I asked her if she inhaled—the legal substance of her answer was evasive, though the audible grin was not, at least not to a kidder). Her gut sense of what college life should entail—and, sure, the goal of economic revitalization—has led her to one of her signature bold proposals: move UNO downtown, where the party is.

Where, exactly? In and around what is today humbly named the Iberville “Projects.” In a debate she said “Put some Ivy on it, it’ll look just like Harvard.” (Why didn’t she say Yale? I guess because Yale doesn’t have the red brick like Harvard and Iberville do). She painted a picture of the quads of Iberville peopled with kids “playing guitar and throwing Frisbees” and heading into the quarter “for dinner.” I suggested the obvious: wouldn’t the bleary-eyed hacky sackers prefer to smoke dope in legalized Amsterdam-style “coffeeshops”? She said she wouldn’t “go there”—again with the audible knowing grin. Same response for replacing Iberville with what occupied the spot before, Storyville: “Nooo, I’m not going there, ha ha”.

However, like most people who lose elections, she has a clear grasp of how demagogic bullshit skews voters’ holds on reality. She actually thinks the current residents of Iberville are being rudely handled in public discourse, especially in the trademark Reaganite rhetoric of opponent Peggy Wilson. She says she finally let Wilson have it in a setting conducive to airing disagreements in a civil manner—a two-woman debate over tea sponsored by a British news organization. She took Wilson to task for her racially divisive “welfare queen” and “pimp” rhetoric. Sure, some women on welfare might bend their bureaucratic data for an extra fifty bucks, but Rob Couhig got eight million from the state (for his private business, the Zephyrs). She wasn’t sure exactly how many tens of millions Ron Forman got for his non-public enterprises. “I’m not calling Rob Couhig and Ron Forman welfare queens,” she said, “but I would ask whether a welfare queen has to be a woman.”

Then she let slip a comment far more damaging than an admission of illicit inhalation: New Orleans, she averred, has suffered from a “business class determined to build a Caribbean economy.” Forget about whether she inhaled with Billary at Yale—what did she READ there?

Hint: she signed up for the Peace Corps right after graduation, went to the Dominican Republic, and failed to not be moved by the standard Third World stuff that good Americans are supposed to not think about. She said that she thought of the 1970s Dominican Republic once again as she stood behind Baptist Hospital the other day and beheld a row of creaky moldering double shotguns. She said the spirit of hope was greater in the great big island Iberville nation next to Haiti than it is here now.

Such thoughts might betray her as that smart girl in front of the class, who knows she can nail the assignment better than anyone else, yet who also may know her stupid classmates will never acknowledge her over the obnoxious guy who won’t shut up—because they all just want to get to lunch anyway, even if they don’t have a lunch. The upside is, she’s been sharing her notes, and the boys who get all the attention have begun cribbing from them. Maybe they’ll decide they can’t govern without her, either, and give her a job—three of her opponents have already offered.


C.W. Cannon is the author of Soul Resin, a novel set in a New Orleans even stranger than our own. He teaches English at the University of New Orleans.