Jeremy Alford and Mitch Rabalis /
Part one of three: From Coteau to the Capitol
BORN TO A CARPET CLEANER in the French-speaking hamlet of Coteau, Kathleen Babineaux first viewed a small piece of her native Louisiana in 1942 through infant eyes, just 10 days before Christmas.
Her parents, Louis and Lucille, never strayed far from the small bayou communities of Acadiana. Neither did their first of six children, who grew into a young lady with “no political ambitions” and a “huge heart.” She went on to attend elementary school in New Iberia, graduate from college in Lafayette and later teach business concepts to high schoolers in Breaux Bridge.
Along the way she married Raymond “Coach” Blanco, in 1964, two years after he elevated Catholic High School in New Iberia to an unlikely state championship. The first-of-its-kind regional win granted him legendary status among the sugarcane fields, dance halls and churches of Louisiana’s Cajun heartland. By the time he did it another two times as an assistant coach at what is now the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, he was walking in high cotton.
Among the few things that could trump football at the time was politics. The rhetoric and antics of the candidates, practically all of them men, and their campaigns could rip holes clean though the lands that Thomas Jefferson purchased at a discount. Yet those same populist pirates and perennial reformers, with the same rhetoric and antics, could just as easily repair those tears, all the way from the coast of Cameron up to the Claiborne state line.
That world fascinated Coach Blanco, although he was more focused on campus politics by the 1970s, when a need for stern leadership was advancing him along the pecking order of deans. Mrs. Blanco continued to teach in the years following their union, until she became pregnant and took a temporary leave of absence.
As she watched her husband’s “huge public persona” grow, Mrs. Blanco welcomed their first child to the world and their second, and she thought about returning to work. Then there was child three and child four, which were followed by child five and child six. The temporary leave from her teaching job had seemingly become permanent.
AFTER 16 YEARS OF DIAPERS and teething, terrible twos and crayon-accented walls, mood swings and puberty cycles, graduations and breakups, cooking meals and washing clothes, and mopping and folding, 1980 came into focus in a new way for Mrs. Blanco.
She landed a job with the U.S. Commerce Department, as a district manager for the Decennial Census. Soon after she partnered with Coach on the family’s new consulting and polling firm — a source of income and hobby the Blancos would nourish over the next four decades or so.
For a time she pursued a career in insurance through a local State Farm branch. After weeks with no response, Mrs. Blanco delivered a simple ultimatum to the secretary of the man who had been her primary contact. Either he return her calls or she would camp out in the reception area until he met with her. Which he did, begrudgingly.
“I’m just uncomfortable hiring a married lady with children,” the man said candidly, based on Mrs. Blanco’s recollections. “Look, this kinda job is gonna put too much stress on your little family.”
“And, heaven forbid,” he added for good measure, throwing his hands up, “I don’t wanna be responsible should you get a divorce.”
No matter where life took her in the coming decades, she never forgot about the slight.
“I took great pleasure as governor of telling that whole story to the national head of State Farm,” she said.
Dejected, Mrs. Blanco went home to coexist with the washing machine and mop and the otherwise joyous chaos that was a house brimming with family. On the kitchen table lay a distraction, wrapped in the pages of The Advocate. One item in particular caught her attention. Luke LeBlanc, her state representative, was retiring.
IN 1983, MRS. BLANCO RAN for an open seat in the Louisiana Legislature, shocking even Coach. Believe it or not, Mrs. Blanco had never even been to the Capitol in Baton Rouge. But she knocked on doors and did it the hard way, carrying push-cards that were designed by her husband, who had plenty of polling data.
“Nobody inspired her, she was a self-motivator,” said her husband, Coach Blanco. “I told her, “You have to make your own name.” She worked hard, and she would come home at night and we would talk politics.”
She won, and no one was more surprised than herself. Like that, Mrs. Blanco became Representative Blanco, the first female lawmaker elected out of the Lafayette region and one of only five women serving in the Louisiana Legislature.
“I had no political ambitions,” she said. “But I thought to myself, ‘I’m going to do public service, where I’m not going to make a lot of money and get rich, but it will be personally fulfilling and rewarding.’”
The political world truly opened up for then-Representative Blanco when she became Commissioner Blanco, thanks to a 1988 upset that placed her on the Public Service Commission. Huey P. Long, Jimmie Davis, and “Big John” McKeithen had all sat on the PSC prior to capturing governorships. So the office came with a touch of mystique, which in turn lifted Commissioner Blanco’s profile.
“The minute you get onto the Public Service Commission in Louisiana, people assume that you’re going to run for governor,” she said. “I thought that was so uniquely bizarre, because that was never my intention… I didn’t have that vision of me being the governor at that point in time.”
History had set its sights on Commissioner Blanco, who was the first woman elected to the PSC and the first woman chosen to serve as its chair. By 1991 she was ready for prime time and became an official candidate in a dramatic race for governor.
[Parts two and three will be published during September’s final week and October’s first. An oral history recorded Aug. 14, 2018, inside the Blancos’ Lafayette home, served as the basis for this series.]