Costello uttered this plaintive
question after having gotten shot in a police ambush organized by his mole in
the state troopers, betrayed because the mole thought Costello would betray him
to federal authorities. In this instance, conservatives statewide suffered
betrayal at the hands of some voters who typically cast ballots for Republicans
in statewide contests but did not this time because they feared delivering the
state’s top office into the hands of Republican Sen. David Vitter. After all,
they got told often and long enough, even by Republicans, that Vitter was mean
and that Edwards served in the military.
The state’s populist heritage
played some role in this, a trait that Edwards skillfully exploited. With a
public conditioned so long to evaluate politics on the basis of personalities
and not issues, the Edwards campaign hammered at this and obfuscated as best it
could, if
not falsified, to mass audiences that large majority of his issue
preferences incongruent with the Louisiana public’s, with some obvious success.
But he needed help from the
Republican, in the form of some of its legislators and erstwhile gubernatorial
candidates. As the GOP became the majority party more from Democrats’
insistence on following the national party to the left than from articulating
and acting upon a consistent conservative agenda, it never has learned to govern
on the basis of that agenda. It downplayed ideology most of this election – in part
because its leading figures had violated core principles of conservatism
through legislative tax increases imposed this past session – giving voters
mostly echoes rather than choices.
And as antipathies came to the
surface based on Vitter’s take-no-prisoners style of campaigning and governance
over the past quarter-century that irked the good-old-boy Republicans more
enamored with the populist tradition than committed to conservatism, they put
personal agendas and ambitions ahead of the good of the state. They showed
their true colors in either failing to support Vitter and his conservative,
reformist agenda or, worse, in actively aiding and abetting Edwards in a return
to a governing philosophy that once made Louisiana the laughingstock of the
states.
(Thus, Republicans and
conservatives should feel justified suspicion that, in any future political
endeavors, Republicans-In-Name-Only Public Service Commissioner Scott Angelle; Lt. Gov. Jay Dardenne;
state Reps. Bryan
Adams, Chris
Broadwater, Thomas
Carmody, Kenny Havard, Joe
Lopinto, and Rob
Shadoin; state Sen. Danny Martiny;
and state Sen.-elect Ryan Gatti do not seriously advocate conservatism. No
individual who honestly believed in the principles of conservatism would
support, tacitly or openly, a candidate with beliefs largely inimical to
conservatism when a committed conservative remains as an option, and seemingly
so easily sell them out.)
Vitter deserves blame as well for
his loss. He banked too heavily that heavy fire by his ambitious GOP opponents,
who took the electorate’s preference of Vitter over them like jilted suitors,
and by Edwards would not erode his long-standing favor in the Louisiana public’s
eyes. He ran a campaign too aloof and should have realized much earlier that by
not sating the thirst of the media, chattering classes, and of the rest of his
enemies by him performing a kabuki
theater act of contrition for his “serious sin,” they could use it to do the
same as did his political opposition.
It was not the serious sin that did
him in – how else could that explain the giving four times to the serial
adulterer and criminal Prisoner #03128-095 the keys to the Governor’s Mansion –
but that when left to fester by a detached campaign it too easily could become
part of a larger narrative pushed by all of the above to trumpet the alleged
despicableness of Vitter. A core set of voters, that sees a vague apology for actions
of the distant past as acceptable for someone ideologically reliable that they
send to Washington, by contrast thinks it important to have a down-to-earth,
visibly – even grovelingly contrite – leader of the state, a point the Vitter
campaign never seemed to get.
However, to think Edwards’ election
signals any kind of hope for longer term success by the state Democrats
entirely misunderstands the event. Indeed, precisely because he now has a chance
to govern, the odds shorten that the party will become more marginalized than
ever. The state’s latent populism, the precondition that makes the coming
together of the fluky, perfect storm elements that produced this result,
remains virulent only because no opportunity has come to discredit it fully.
That juncture is reached. If the legislator
Edwards witnessed filing bills, casting votes, and making speeches seamlessly
mutates into governor, he will govern so far removed from the preferences of
the majority of Louisianans that he will bury liberalism in Louisiana for a
generation, not only because the public will object to it but also because what
policy preferences of his he succeeds in enacting will fail.
Unless Edwards goes against type
and the entirety of Louisiana’s Democrats follow, the underlying contradictions
between their liberalism and the public’s desires, and what’s good, for Louisiana
will become obvious. In all likelihood, this aberrant election result in the
longer term squaring of the majority’s interests with the state’s election
outcomes and subsequent policy made only will slow the maturation of the state’s
political culture from a personality-based liberal populism to an issues-based
conservatism, not alter its inevitability.
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