Bayou Voodoo

Vitter, buffeted by multiple controversies, is trailing in polls by 11 to 20 points his Democratic opponent, John Bel Edwards, the minority leader in the Louisiana house and a West Point graduate who uses his military background to feign a conservatism his record belies.

Vitter once was expected to win easily. That was before he ran a harshly negative primary campaign that appeared to inspire exactly nobody, and before a final week of the primary so nightmarish for Vitter that the only thing missing was Elm Street’s Freddy Krueger.

Some background is in order: Until a decade ago, Louisiana was a swing state. For the Democrats, Bill Clinton won its presidential electors in 1992 and 1996; Mary Landrieu won Senate races in 1996, 2002, and 2008; and Kathleen Blanco was elected governor in 2003.

But the Bayou State has voted for four straight Republican presidential tickets, gave two huge victories to GOP governor Bobby Jindal, and provided Republicans a clean sweep of statewide offices. Last fall, three-term Senate incumbent Landrieu was defenestrated by challenger Bill Cassidy by 12 points.

Vitter—a ruthless political mastermind—played major roles fundraising and strategizing for the broad-front Republican ascendance. Meanwhile, he built a conservative, reformist record on public policy during a quarter-century in various offices.

Even Vitter’s well-publicized inclusion on an apparent client list of the so-called D.C. Madam (he admitted “a very serious sin” in 2007), combined with a wallflower personality in large gatherings and a legendarily explosive temper at slight provocation, could not stop him from winning reelection to the Senate with an overwhelming 19-point margin in 2010. Just a year ago, Vitter led Edwards by 18 points in a head-to-head poll for governor.

Louisiana, though, features a “jungle primary” in which all candidates share the same ballot and the top two finishers, regardless of party, face a runoff if neither receives over 50 percent of the vote. Edwards—scion of a political family full of county officeholders but no relation to former governor and scofflaw Edwin Edwards—was the only major Democrat in the race. But two other significant Republicans ran. Lieutenant Governor Jay Dardenne and Public Service Commissioner Scott Angelle both boasted good-government records and far more approachable personalities than Vitter. Neither, however, enjoyed Vitter’s high name-identification, fundraising ability, or reputation for slaying supposedly powerful “interests” in Louisiana’s pockmarked political culture.

For most of 2015, the race remained unusually sleepy, with Vitter making relatively few public appearances while the others struggled to raise cash and gain attention. But all three other candidates sniped at the oft-absent senator in every public forum, as Vitter’s campaign and supporting PACs trashed the two other Republicans in hardball ads while leaving Edwards alone. Vitter’s tactics succeeded in keeping Dardenne and Angelle from catching fire, but certainly didn’t add any “warm fuzzies” to his own reputation.

By midsummer, Edwards caught Vitter atop the four-way polling, and by late summer in hypothetical head-to-head match-ups too.

Enter Vitter’s eight days from Hades. One week before the October 24 primary, a blog oddly named American Zombie posted an interview with a former New Orleans prostitute who claimed to have “serviced” Vitter several times during a period preceding the D.C. Madam scandal. Saying she had passed a lie-detector test administered by a respected authority, Wendy Ellis alleged, on camera, that the pro-life senator had fathered her child 15 years ago, told her to abort it, and cut off all contact with her after she refused. (She said she put the child up for adoption.)

Ellis provided not an iota of proof; Vitter’s camp denied the whole tale. Later news reports showcased various apparent contradictions between her American Zombie interview and earlier stories she had told, including statements to a judge in an unrelated case in Arkansas.

Still, the story roiled Louisiana politics during the final week of the primary—and erupted again, two days before balloting, when (a) a stripper friend of Ellis told American Zombie that Ellis had indeed been pregnant with Vitter’s child; and (b) the well-respected Gambit, a New Orleans weekly, reported that a popular French Quarter barber, whose shop faced the alleged brothel, said that Vitter procured several haircuts there during the time period at issue while “waiting for the girl across the street.”

That same preelection morning, Jefferson Parish sheriff Newell Normand arrested a man for video-taping Normand’s “private” conversation at a coffee shop with an attorney prominently supporting Edwards, a noted local private eye, and a Republican state representative. It turned out the videographer was himself an investigator working for a Dallas group hired by the Vitter campaign to do opposition research. Very strange.

Finally, later that day, Vitter was a passenger in a fender-bender, his car driven by a woman simultaneously serving as a top fundraiser both for the Vitter campaign and a Vitter-supporting PAC. The minor wreck served as an obvious metaphor.

In the next day’s election, an embarrassingly low-turnout affair, Vitter sweated the results for hours before pulling away from Angelle, 23 percent to 19.3 percent, for the second runoff spot. Edwards won 40 percent to lay claim as the clear frontrunner (and has since garnered the endorsement of Republican Jay Dardenne).

Edwards—seen as friendly and unthreatening if not tremendously charismatic, and boasting of running a race without airing a single negative ad—can probably hold his lead if the race revolves around likability. Vitter, instead, must make it a battle not of personality or character, but of governing philosophy and fastidious official behavior. (Think of Alexander Hamilton, willing to admit adultery in order to clear his name of misconduct with official finances.)

“You don’t have to have a beer with the governor, and it doesn’t affect your life one bit if he’s a nice guy,” wrote Scott McKay, proprietor of the conservative Louisiana blog the Hayride and regular contributor to the American Spectator. “What does affect your life is the kind of governance he offers. Vitter offers aggressive conservative reform virtually across the board, built on a foundation of .  .  . relative friendship to business, pro-growth policies, educational choice and reined-in government growth.”

Populist-oriented reforms are Vitter’s calling card. As a state legislator, he almost singlehandedly shamed colleagues into adopting term limits. In the U.S. House and Senate, he has refused to accept the taxpayer-funded pension program, opposed automatic cost-of-living adjustments for Congress, and led the fight against exempting congressional staff

from Obamacare.

And his voting record is solidly conservative: lifetime American Conservative Union rating of 92; Competitive Enterprise Institute and National Right to Life, 100 each.

Edwards, despite his campaign persona and frequent mention of his background in the 82nd Airborne, is no such conservative. His lifetime rating from the Louisiana Family Forum is a mediocre 55, from the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry an abysmal 39, and from the National Federation of Independent Business an even worse 33.

Edwards is particularly close to teachers’ unions and has strewn roadblocks in front of various forms of school choice. He also bashed Jindal’s brilliant private leasing of the state’s unique “charity hospital” system.

And while his remarkably responsive and friendly campaign staff provides substantive answers on Edwards’s positions on a range of issues, his website contained nothing remotely approaching a “platform”—much less the highly detailed, reformist document readily available online from Vitter.

Twice provided the same teed-up question—“I’m writing for a conservative publication; what are the best reasons why right-leaning people should vote for you?”—Edwards repeated the same, nonideological answer: “I am a leader and a uniter, and David Vitter excels only at destruction and division. [Vitter’s approach] doesn’t work well in the governor’s office. It doesn’t fix roads or improve health care.”

Later in the interview, after finally citing his 100 percent rating from the NRA and his pro-life consistency “informed by my Catholic, Christian faith,” he volunteered this, unbidden: “That same Catholic, Christian faith tells me that accepting [Obamacare’s] Medicaid expansion is the right thing to do, so the same tax dollars that we pay to other states will come back to us.”

Vitter clearly will paint Edwards as a liberal. Vitter began the runoff with a brutal, Willie Horton-type ad. Edwards, he said, is joining Barack Obama in a sentencing-reform plan to release “5,500 dangerous thugs .  .  . back into our neighborhoods.”

“This year there are only three big races in the country,” Vitter told me,  referencing gubernatorial races in Kentucky, Louisiana, and Mississippi. “A lot of tea leaves will be read based on these outcomes, especially my matchup as a clear, strong conservative against a clear, pro-Obama liberal. If the liberal wins the upset in a red state, that result is going to be spun significantly by the media, for the Democrats, in the context of the presidential campaign.”

All things considered, Vitter’s supporters might well adapt a famous slogan from an earlier Louisiana gubernatorial race. “Vote for the john: it’s important.”

Quin Hillyer, a Louisiana native, is a veteran conservative columnist living in Mobile, Alabama.