For Gop's Scalise, Being No. 3 Boosts Popularity

More than a dozen political action committees, including the American Hotel and Lodging Association, Comcast, Capital One and the International Dairy Foods Association, quickly donated to the newly installed whip's campaign while previous contributors — Facebook, Microsoft and Halliburton — wrote another check. In a rapid-fire chain of events in June, Republicans elected the 49-year-old Scalise, the onetime chairman of the conservative Republican Study Committee, to serve as the whip, the chief vote counter who occasionally has to twist some arms. A separate bill would shut off an Obama administration program to grant temporary work permits to immigrants brought here illegally as children, potentially making them subject to deportation. Campaign contributions also helped Scalise engender goodwill as he gave a fair share of his money to some two dozen Republican incumbents and challengers. [...] it didn't hurt that on his first day in his new Capitol offices — in a room Illinois congressman Abraham Lincoln used — Scalise served his colleagues gumbo, jambalaya and boudin sausage prepared by Cajun chefs. The red-meat rhetoric plays well as Scalise refers to fierce opponents of the Keystone pipeline as "crazy, radical environmentalist nut jobs" and complains about "extreme, leftist policies that are failing." The congressman holds town halls in his expansive district that includes parts of New Orleans, its suburbs, the Bayou and cities and parishes integral to coal production, gas drilling and the fishing industry in the Gulf of Mexico.