The Bitter End

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.

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.

Two weeks before the runoff, Mary’s brother Mitch, mayor of New Orleans, traveled three hours west, across the Atchafalaya Basin’s miles of marshland, to the town of New Iberia. The mayor is his sister’s best advocate, casually engaging and remarkably persuasive.

“My sister is the oldest of 11 children,” he says, “all born within 11 years. That’s why she’s so bossy.” (The audience, 50 luncheon guests of the local Democratic party, laughs appreciatively.) “But she’s always shown a serious streak of independence. It allows her to serve with great distinction.” He continues with a tally. “Our coast is disappearing at 100 yards every 45 minutes, and Mary took up the fight. She made sure Louisiana got its fair share from offshore oil and gas,” he says. “Mary is 100 percent for Louisiana, all the time. .  .  . She got money for Barksdale Air Force Base. She got money for Fort Polk. She got money for Interstate 49. She went to battle for us again and again.”

He builds a compelling case for his sister with an infectiously upbeat demeanor. His defense of Obamacare is deeply personal but not maudlin: Nineteen years ago, doctors found a malignant, three-pound tumor in the stomach of the mayor’s daughter Emily, then 6. All the usual, horrendous treatments followed; Emily survived and is now a successful executive of some sort. Without Obamacare forcing coverage of preexisting conditions, her father says, she would probably be ineligible today for health insurance.

Cassidy provides the flip side to that argument the next day, back across the marsh and the Mississippi, in the town of Gonzales, a half-hour south of Baton Rouge and best known for its Jambalaya Festival. Cassidy is focused, disciplined, clinical—about as far from Louisiana’s populist tradition as can be imagined. Asked before the rally for some favorite anecdotes from the campaign trail, he comes up with nothing folksy. Instead, he says, “I’ve been struck that Obamacare has been the principal issue. In Jefferson Parish, a 54-year-old woman who had had a hysterectomy, had no children, is being forced to pay $1,500 per month for a plan covering things she doesn’t want. She asks me why she would ever need obstetric care or pediatric dentistry. Then there was a guy in Hammond, mid-50s, boys 18 or 19 years old. Two years ago his family paid $12,000 a year for insurance; last year it rose to $21,000, and this year they’re told it will be another

20 percent increase.” He concludes: “If people are not getting a subsidy, they are getting pounded.”

But this is Louisiana; there can’t be politics without flavor. The rally, featuring Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal and senator David Vitter, along with Florida senator Marco Rubio, is at a huge expo center. Cassidy’s pavilion contains dozens of (empty) livestock stalls; in the next pavilion is a gun show. From another pavilion, an announcer calls dancers, musicians, and “girls who want to play a princess” to take the stage, and a sound akin to that of war drums erupts just as the Cassidy rally, 200-strong, begins.

It’s Vitter who captures the strange juxtaposition: “On one side, there’s a gun show. On the other, there’s an Indian powwow. America is a great place, isn’t it?”

When Cassidy finally speaks, he spots a supporter named Eddie Lambert in the crowd. Cassidy says that when he mentioned the rally, Lambert said, “Man, I’ll be duck hunting that day. But I’ll tell you what: I’ll get my limit before noon, and I’ll be sure to show up.”

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.”

As Cassidy’s rally ends that afternoon, the Landrieu campaign is just getting started in Opelousas, back across the Atchafalaya. Landrieu herself isn’t there—she’s campaigning in Shreveport—but New Jersey senator Cory Booker is wrapping up a tour of Cajun country for his Democratic colleague. One might wonder why a Louisiana senator would host a serial fabulist from New Jersey, but Booker has charisma, which serves the goal of a dozen Landrieu events statewide this day: galvanizing Democratic constituencies, often black, for the first day of early voting.

Booker’s caravan is an hour behind schedule, but the crowd of about 250, 90 percent black, hasn’t minded at all. A five-piece ensemble called the Soul Express Brass Band was on the floor blowing sounds you might hear on a New Orleans street; 15 minutes later, the Keith Frank and the Soileau Zydeco Band is on stage raising the roof, while several couples dance spontaneous two-steps.

Booker doesn’t speak long because time’s running out to bus people to the polls for that day’s early voting. But his energy is palpable, and the crowd loves it when he says: “This state can tell all those Obama haters that we are motivators. Let it be a referendum on the president, because we support the president.”

But most of Louisiana emphatically does not—and Cassidy has made sure every sentient being in the state knows that Landrieu has voted with Obama 97 percent of the time.

Landrieu also suffers from population migrations brought by Hurricane Katrina. It’s not that the black Democratic base in Louisiana is smaller—it isn’t—but that it’s much harder, at least in New Orleans, to get out the vote. Katrina’s temporary displacement of communities citywide helped undermine the power of a spate of previously super-strong black political organizations known by the acronyms SOUL, BOLD, COUP, and LIFE, along with the progressive Democrats of the now-imprisoned former representative William “Cold Cash” Jefferson. More permanently, the Lower Ninth Ward, whose relatively concentrated population was easy to round up by bus in past elections, was wiped out by the storm and remains, nine years later, the scene of scattered, lovingly tended homes amidst acres of empty lots and ruins.

The numbers are instructive: With boatloads of gambling money turning out liberal voters to support a referendum for a land-based casino in November 1996, Landrieu eked out a 5,788-vote win with the help of 47,213 votes in the Ninth Ward. In her first reelection, in 2002, she got 31,365 votes from the Ninth in the primary. This year, while still earning well over 90 percent of Ninth Ward votes, her total fell to 17,845.

Losing 30,000 votes in just one ward, and nearly 14,000 from the most recent midterm contest, is a tough blow in a tight race.

Bob Mann, a top Breaux aide for 17 years and now a Louisiana State University professor and Times-Picayune columnist, says it is “quite remarkable” how badly Democrat fortunes have fallen in just 12 years. “Mary is sort of marooned on an island by herself,” he said. “She’s a pretty strong swimmer, but the tide is strong against her.”

New Orleans native Quin Hillyer is a columnist for the Baton Rouge Advocate and a contributing editor to National Review.