State Democrats play dead
The seminal moment for Sam Jones came on the Thursday after the Monday that Hurricane Katrina came ashore in August 2005.
Gov. Kathleen Blanco, for whom he worked as an adviser, was under attack — mostly by Republicans — for government’s poor response to the calamities caused by the hurricane. “I said, ‘If you don’t answer that pretty quickly, it’s going to be set in stone,’ ” Jones recalled last week.
Blanco said, according to Jones, that she would focus on helping people instead of trying to win the political game.
“I knew, right then, she wasn’t going to run for re-election,” said Jones, now a Democratic state representative from Franklin. “I was never more proud of her.”
For Albert L. Samuels, a Southern University political science professor, that was the moment the Democratic Party ceased being a player on the statewide level.
“Katrina was hugely important,” Samuels said.
The response to Katrina by local, state and federal governments exposed long-ignored weaknesses in infrastructure, emergency procedures and government policies, Samuels said. Fairly or not, Democrats were held responsible, a perception Blanco did not even try to overcome, he said.
In addition, a couple hundred thousand of the party’s most reliable voters were evacuated, Samuels explained. For years, New Orleans-area Democrats provided the numbers that propped up statewide candidates facing an increasingly conservative electorate in the rest of Louisiana, he said.
Together, Samuels said, the two situations began what utility linemen call a “cascading failure.”
Republicans in 2007 won the majority of the statewide seats and almost a majority of the Louisiana Legislature. Then, some white Democratic legislators in vulnerable districts switched parties, giving the GOP a majority in both chambers.
In September, the Democrats failed to field a single significant candidate for statewide office.
Leaning on an “it could have been a lot worse” argument, Democratic Party leaders trumpeted success after the state legislative elections ended Nov. 19.
Well-funded Republicans, led by U.S. Sen. David Vitter and Gov. Bobby Jindal, targeted Democratic Party incumbents in the Louisiana Legislature in hopes of electing overwhelming majorities in both chambers. But Democrats retained 45 seats in the 105-member House of Representatives and 15 seats in the 39-member state Senate.
The only incumbent Democratic representative who lost — Rickey Hardy, of Lafayette — was backed by Jindal, Vitter and Lafayette Parish President Joey Durel.
“I’m not trying to tell you it was a great, banner year for Democrats,” said state Rep. John Bel Edwards, of Amite and chairman of the House Democratic Caucus. “But at least we stopped the bleeding.”
In answer to Vitter’s and Jindal’s millions, Edwards, Jones, and Democratic state Reps. Karen St. Germain, of Pierre Part, and Patricia Smith, of Baton Rouge, put together what Jones called the “Lazarus plan.” Basically the idea was to play dead while Jindal and Vitter danced on their graves, he said.
Mail pieces, radio commercials and recorded phone calls tried to link Democratic legislative candidates to President Barack Obama. The Democrats ducked that fight, instead having their candidates focus on roads, bridges and other local issues, Jones said.
“The idea that there are some interlocking relationships between Louisiana state representatives and the White House is preposterous and I think the people saw that,” Jones said.
Jones said their legislative wins — including five freshmen in races targeted by the GOP — marked the emergence of a new Democratic Party in Louisiana. It’ll have younger elected officials, more moderate with a business-oriented platform. “We are the party of safety nets, not entitlements,” Jones said.
That’s spin, said G. Pearson Cross, head of the political science department at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.
All the election results showed was that some races can be nationalized — think Vitter’s re-election last year against Democratic U.S. Rep. Charles Melancon, of Napoleonville — and some cannot. Bailing out banks too big to fail is not an issue that the people of Bunkie expect their state representative to tackle, he said.
On the other hand, Cross said, “I’m kind of surprised that it wasn’t a bigger sweep for Republicans. But the big story for this election, the one historians will remember, was the inability of the Democrats to field a statewide candidate.”
Mark Ballard is editor of The Advocate’s Capitol news bureau. His email address is mballard@theadvocate.com.