Louisiana’s
Mary Landrieu is flailing in the political current. The three-term
Democratic senator is a Hubert Humphrey liberal masked as a John Breaux
left-centrist, submerged in a national party that’s now left of George
McGovern, in a state where political winds are blowing starboard.
And she’s anchored by weight of her own choosing. Landrieu didn’t have
to ignore opinion polls and vote for Obamacare, but she did. She didn’t
have to vote for radical Obama nominees like Debo Adegbile, pro bono
legal advocate for cop killer Mumia Abu-Jamal, but she did. It was her
own choice to vote against repealing the medical device tax and to vote
increasingly pro-abortion in a pro-life state. She started her Senate
career somewhat left of her Louisiana mentors Breaux and Bennett
Johnston, and moved even further left. Breaux’s lifetime American
Conservative Union rating was 45, Johnston’s 41; Landrieu’s is 20.
This
is a real concern: Sportsmen are seen as a largely Republican
constituency, and the runoff takes place on Louisiana’s last
duck-hunting weekend and the first day of deer hunting. Cassidy’s
campaign must keep hunters from assuming they don’t need to vote
because his victory is “in the bag.”
It’s no wonder Landrieu is all but written off for reelection. No
candidate won a majority in Louisiana’s nonpartisan primary held
Election Day, so the two top candidates face a runoff December 6. Polls
show Republican Bill Cassidy, a doctor and three-term congressman, with
a double-digit lead.
But Landrieu still fights—hard. Even on Election Day, addressing a
media scrum after casting her own vote, she ripped into Cassidy: for
his votes on disaster relief, for refusing to debate enough, for
opposing “equal pay.” Despite a relentlessly negative campaign—which
has drawn copious criticism from local and national press—the Landrieu
effort maintains an energy that, in the Louisiana political tradition,
has an appealingly entertaining vibe. That energy emanates from
Landrieu herself, who for 35 years of public life has tried to outwork
everybody around her. Now, stitching together a biracial conglomeration
of mini-coalitions in every working-class small town, her campaign
might be the nation’s last of its kind: old-style Southern populism,
with a dusting of Cajun spice.
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