Leadership Quote by Kathleen Blanco

Blanco’s line is boosterism with a hard edge: a governor selling a complicated state to an audience trained to look for risk. The verb choice, “hustling,” is doing more work than the list of assets that follows. It signals hustle culture before the term went mainstream, a preemptive rebuttal to the caricature of Louisiana as leisurely, corrupt, or perpetually in recovery. She’s saying: I know the game, I’m in the room, and I’m not waiting for anyone to rescue us.

The triplet of “natural resources,” “unique culture,” and “fantastic workers” is calibrated to stitch together constituencies that don’t always trust each other. “Natural resources” nods to oil, gas, ports, and the industrial corridor that keeps the tax base alive while raising moral and environmental questions. “Unique culture” is the state’s most exportable myth and its soft power, a way to turn Mardi Gras, music, and food into an economic argument without sounding like a tourism brochure. Then she lands on “fantastic workers,” the populist keystone: growth won’t be framed as giveaways to outside corporations, but as a bet on local labor.

In context, this reads like a post-Katrina and post-industrial-anxiety pitch even if spoken in routine economic-development mode: Louisiana must be legible to capital without losing its soul to it. The subtext is defensive pride. She’s not just courting “new industries”; she’s asking permission to modernize while promising the state won’t be flattened into a generic Sun Belt product.