Consider Landrieu’s predicament.
In the ex-Confederate states (Virginia, with its northern population tied with
an umbilical cord to the big government liberalism of Washington, D.C.
excepted), only four Democrats survive in the Senate (with two running for
reelection also this year and endangered like Landrieu). Of the six times they
have run, none has won by less than Landrieu’s biggest win ever in 2008. And
while undoubtedly the presidential ticket of Democrats that won 52 percent of
Louisiana’s vote in 1996 helped her win by an official count of fewer than
6,000 votes, in subsequent presidential elections Republicans would take the
state with 53, 57, 59, and 58 percent of the vote. In her last election, she
remarkably ran ahead of her own ticket some 12 percent.
Her last name does help; would
anybody have paid attention to some 23-year-old sorority chick running for the
Legislature without a famous last name in the world of state politics, much
less have elected her? But the name only paid the entry fee to country club
membership; as things transpired, she turned out more than capable of keeping
up with the annual dues.
How she does it even befuddles it
seems to a degree the guy likely to end her reign, Republican Rep. Bill Cassidy. Discovered
by a reporter milling around the same pre-game football crowd where earlier
Landrieu assisted in the performance of what is called a “keg stand” (lower
head below feet in a push-up stance, get pumped-up line from tapped keg into
mouth, have it opened up and let pressure do the rest), Cassidy told her that Landrieu
never would hang in a crowd like this. As for himself, he wandered in not long
before kickoff and had not much opportunity to engage retail politicking, and
was surprised completely when informed Landrieu had been there and done that.
No doubt Landrieu never has been
on the receiving end of a keg stand in her life, and if she deigned to show up
at fraternity parties in her sorority days chances are she’d never even
assisted with one until this time. Because, as Cassidy did get correct about
her, every move makes is politically calculated. More to the point, Landrieu
wouldn’t be caught dead in such a situation surrounded by the boozy hoi polloi unless she figured it would
win her more votes than lose them.
And that’s her primary resource
in being able to stay in office for so long under increasingly adverse
conditions – she can make herself appear to be whatever she wants to serve an
audience’s needs, even if she would appear contradictory to different
audiences. Thus, for example, she can proclaim loudly – even if she has delivered
absolutely zero in terms of being able to expand drilling and
transportation of its product – that she’s a friend to the petroleum industry,
while winking at environmentalists and having her
political action committee donate big time to industry opponents so that
there are enough of them around to keep her unable to deliver, following
perfectly the strategy
popularized by her BFF, Pres. Barack Obama.
Aside from issue content, she
achieves this by a combination of selective constituent service, fulfilling
the needs of those who can bring her the most campaign support, and by appearing
to care to the remaining citizenry. In that way, all audiences have some
excuse to support her. Understand that she come from an exceedingly politicized
family, where from the day she was born she grew up in an environment infused
with the imperatives of policy combat, deal-making, and strategizing about how
to win the next election. It comes entirely naturally to her and, the results
show, she excels at doing it.
Yet this greatest strength of
hers also contains the pattern for her destruction politically. Only so many
balls may be kept in the air at once; only for so long can she prevent the
determined from making others curious about what’s going on behind the curtain.
The more information that is made available about her and her actions, the
greater the contradictions between the image she presents and what she does in
reality become apparent.
Sure, in a Dukakis-riding-a-tank
moment she might mainline a football fan to show how she’s one of us, but
she also disregarded regulations that let her spend
at least $34,000 of taxpayers’ money on campaign activities over a dozen
years that demonstrates she thinks she’s better than us and thereby has no clue
as to what it’s like being one of us. She may adopt
children and promote that through legislation, but her concern for them
seems to begin only once they have left completely the womb, leading her own
bishop (assuming she actually does live in New Orleans) to declare that her
pro-abortion legislative voting behavior meant Catholics
in good conscience should not vote for her. She talks about how
indispensable she is for the state, yet with a voting
record that put her to the far left politically in a state whose majority
prefers conservatism she votes early and often against the wishes of its
people.
Contradictions like these she
cannot forever outrun. In a national election with these dynamics, even the
most assiduous retail politicking and deal-cutting cannot keep one from getting
exposed by a determined opposition, a determination fueled by the non-recursive
nature of the relationship – the more she makes herself vulnerable by the
intensity of the contradictions, the greater the determination of the opponents
she attracts.
While Cassidy may have
misdiagnosed the extent of her scripted approach to politics to exclude
facilitating a fan on a mission to achieve a glorious drunk, in a more philosophical
moment earlier in the campaign a staffer of his uttered something quite
perceptive: this Senate campaign would come down to the electorate’s
preferences, imbued in a political culture steeped in personalism and populism,
of whether it has moved into a “post-pork
paradigm” that would have it focus more on ideas and their consequences. As
the campaign enters the month prior to the general election, in the six months
since that remark the truth of this has become more apparent than ever.
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