It looks as if Louisiana Democrats
may have learned the wrong lesson from the upset win last year by Gov. John Bel Edwards
from the names
popping up as potential Senate candidates this year.
Edwards won
on a fluke. He chose to compete for a statewide office more insulated from
the national politics of the Pres. Barack Obama
era that unapologetically illuminate Democrats as representatives from a party
well out of the mainstream, with an electorate tilted more to Democrat
candidates, and a race that attracted Republican candidates who put personal
ambition ahead of supporting the right agenda for the state that led them to
sabotage out of spite the one among them that received the most votes.
Do not bet on that combination
happening for the Senate contest. With any Democrat running for office more
easily tied to the party’s extremism and an electorate more favorable to
Republicans than for state offices, any Democrat to have even a ghost of a
chance must have centrist views – especially in that none of the Republicans
running have built up the fear and loathing many in the GOP had for Sen. David Vitter, defeated by
Edwards in a runoff. It seems unlikely that they will repeat the circular
firing squad of last year that left out Edwards, who as a result of that
sideshow managed in enough voters’ minds to separate his very liberal voting
record from an image of himself built on God and guns.
And so what Democrats, to varying
degrees, seem to be offering themselves as future senators? Apparently largely oblivious
to the recent Edwards experience, they range from an old populist to liberals of
varying intensity to a caricature of the wacky left.
Regnant Longite Public Service
Commissioner Foster Campbell
has explored running. The independently-wealthy Campbell is one of the few
old-school populist Democrats left in any significant state office who
effortlessly imagines bogeymen oppressing people on one count or another,
hoping to unite the alleged aggrieved into a winning coalition that has faith
in big government evening out things. But Louisiana’s electorate has matured to
the point where that has become a largely unconvincing argument from the
knowledge that the winners and losers created by big government more often
produces help for special interests rather than for the people.
Also talked up as competitors, state
Sens. Eric LaFleur and Gary Smith share common traits in having
started as House members first elected in 1999, then moving to the Senate,
although Smith four years after LaFleur who made the move in 2007. Both also started
out more liberal and populist in the House but in the Senate moved towards the
center. With a Louisiana Legislature Log
voting score over the past eight years of 39, LaFleur has voted significantly
more liberal than the chamber and a bit more than his partisan colleagues,
while Smith’s score of 52 is considerably more moderate than his chambers’
party and just below the Senate chamber’s average over the past four years.
Although Smith seems more moderate
than LaFleur, the latter may have the advantage chasing support, as he led the
Democrat caucus in the House and also does now in the Senate. Both ran
unopposed last fall but had fewer than $200,000 in their campaign accounts that
they indirectly could manipulate to use for a Senate run, a pittance of what
would make them competitive.
Then there’s previous lieutenant
governor candidate Carolyn Fayard, whose political icebergs she struck in that
campaign made the Titanic as it sank
look seaworthy. Not only has she supported a long list of far-out liberal
issues and causes, but she once ridiculously
bleated that “I hate Republicans …. They are cruel and destructive. They
eat their young” and became implicated in shenanigans
to skirt campaign finance laws that escaped
potential punishment only through creative legal technicalities. She also
would have considerable sums to draw upon, being and coming from a family of super-wealthy
trial lawyers
In reviewing these four, and
applying the only rule of thumb Democrats can control – back as moderate a
candidate as exists, because there’s nothing you can do about the Republicans
running or the electorate favorable to them – Smith should receive the
encouragement and resources to run. Instead, among Democrats, given LaFleur’s
party leadership, Campbell’s long-standing political career and his wealth, and
Fayard’s ability to throw raw meat at activists and her wealth, Smith seems the
least likely around which the party would coalesce. In fact, chances are better
that either Campbell and/or Fayard run than LaFleur and/or Smith and that at
least one of the first pair runs regardless of whether either of the second do,
making for a certain Republican victory and even an inability for a Democrat to
make the general election runoff.
If so, then Louisiana Democrats
completely whiffed on the lesson of Edwards’ election, thinking that because the
state elected a liberal, by completely discounting the perfect storm conditions that
got him there, lightning will strike again and again. In reality, their only
hope at wielding any but the most trivial influence in state policy-making over
a long span of time is to select moderates who actually win and then who vote
as moderates. Offering up unrepentant liberals against uncontroversial
conservatives guarantees a string of election losses and minority party status
for the foreseeable future.
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