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Secretary of State Jay Dardenne

• He was class president multiple times: at Walnut Hills Elementary, at Baton Rouge High School and at LSU.

• Ex-LSU hoops guru Dale Brown asked Dardenne the point guard to walk-on in 1972 and become part of his team of “unheralded players.”

• Dardenne gives a popular 2 1/2 hour one-man show, Why Louisiana Ain’t Mississippi, a presentation about Louisiana history, culture, politics, music, literature and trivia. “It’s a fun, fast, joke-filled crash course in Louisiana.”

• He won the Most Vile Pun award of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest with this pun-filled atrocity: “Falcon was her name and she was quite the bird of prey, sashaying past her adolescent admirers from one anchor store to another, past the kiosks where earrings longed to lie upon her lobes and sunglasses hoped to nestle on her nose, seemingly the beginning of a beautiful friendship with whomsoever caught the eye of the mall tease, Falcon.”

Around here we may love our 225 area code, but the rest of Louisiana isn’t quite as enamored, especially when it comes to statewide elected officials.

In fact, for the past 80 years, there hasn’t been a governor, lieutenant governor or secretary of state from Baton Rouge.

John L. “Jay” Dardenne Jr. finally broke the Baton Rouge curse when he became our new secretary of state.

How’d he do it? He credits tireless involvement with public and community service, his leadership from elementary school all the way to college, and his commitment to Louisiana for putting him in touch with people from all over the state and giving him a broad base of support.

“People nowadays do look at who the candidate is a little more so than exactly where they are from,” he says. That proved to be true in the Sept. 30 special election to complete the term vacated after the death of former Secretary of State W. Fox McKeithen.

Dardenne, a Republican, took 40% of the votes in historically Democratic New Orleans, a surprising showing and a hint that Baton Rouge has become the “new” New Orleans. Dardenne’s election could even signal a new crop of Baton Rouge-based statewide leaders.

“The greater Baton Rouge area is going to become the driving force in Louisiana’s politics for the next couple of decades,” Dardenne says.

In the past, Orleans and Jefferson parishes got all the attention in the southern half of the state, and a triangle of northern parishes surrounding Winn Parish produced the majority of governors. Now the focus has turned to Baton Rouge’s voting preferences.

From his election to the state Senate in 1991, Dardenne has been known as a candidate in favor of reforming inefficiency. He hopes to carry the epithet into his new position. Becoming more involved in voter registration and turnout efforts, he plans to revamp the secretary of state’s office by making it more customer-friendly. He also hopes to elevate Louisiana’s unique role among the 50 states.

As the ambassador for Louisiana’s culture and history, his clean image and articulate presence present a refreshing change from many statewide politicians of the past.

“There is no changing it,” he says. “It is why we are the way we are today, but that doesn’t mean it is the way we have to always be.”

Dardenne admits he doesn’t fit the stereotype of our colorful history, but he hopes it does fit “what Louisianians want our state to look like in the future.”

“While I don’t read too much into my election,” he says, “I certainly do think it is a harbinger of things to come.”