BACK AT THE BEGINNING OF SEPTEMBER, three weeks before Louisiana’s “jungle” primary for the seat of retiring Senate Democrat J. Bennett Johnston, the state’s Republicans were in a funk. Six GOP candidates were running against two Democrats, and Republicans feared the six would split the conservative vote and enable the Democrats to sneak into the runoff (which is between the top vote-getters, regardless of party). That prompted two developments: National Republican leaders threw their support behind conservative state representative Louis “Woody” Jenkins, and an arm of the National Republican Senatorial Committee spent $ 650,000 on ads trashing the Democratic candidates.
The strategy worked: Jenkins won the primary, knocking one Democrat out of the runoff. This has Republicans giddy at the prospect of picking up a Democratic Senate seat, but their giddiness looks premature. Jenkins’s opponent is Mary Landrieu, an attractive, moderate, 40-year-old Democrat who hasn’t been afraid to play hardball and is leading in the polls. The difference between the two candidates’ bases of support, says Wayne Parent of Louisiana State University, is that hers is broad but soft, while his is deep but narrow.
Yet there are a number of reasons why Jenkins should be the favorite. In the past eight presidential elections, Louisiana has voted Democratic only twice, and last year it elected a Republican governor, Mike Foster, with 63 percent of the vote. Formerly a state senator, Foster had become a Republican just six weeks before the primary; he then ran a remarkably right-wing campaign and later endorsed Pat Buchanan for president. Jenkins should also benefit from Mary Landrieu’s vulnerabilities: her association with New Orleans — her father was mayor — a city many of the state’s rural citizens see as a den of iniquity; her strained ties with the Democratic establishment; and her failure to win the endorsement of her Democratic opponent, Richard Ieyoub.
On closer inspection, however, it’s not obvious that any conservative tide will sweep Jenkins into the Senate. Bill Clinton leads in Louisiana, and he won the state four years ago with 46 percent of the vote. Foster’s victory last year came against a weak opponent, black liberal congressman Cleo Fields, and Foster himself has yet to issue an unqualified endorsement of Jenkins. And while all but one of Jenkins’s Republican primary opponents have endorsed him, his devoutly conservative philosophy could cause trouble in the New Orleans suburbs and Acadiana, an important swing region in the south that is full of Cajun Catholics who support abortion rights. Most important, says John Maginnis, editor of the Louisiana Political Fax Weekly in Baton Rouge, is that the conditions fueling support for a figure like David Duke earlier this decade — severe economic distress due to the oil industry’s collapse and a corrupt state government — have mostly disappeared.
While Jenkins is a polished, telegenic speaker who’s made two previous runs for the Senate, his statewide profile is limited to abortion. He’s best known for leading the 1990 fight to pass what would have been the nation’s most restrictive abortion law and for occasionally bringing a plastic fetus onto the floor of the legislature. More broadly, he brags of never having voted for a tax increase during his 24-year legislative career. “If you like Ronald Reagan, if you like Mike Foster, you’ll like Woody Jenkins,” says the candidate, who until two years ago was a Democrat.
Actually, with his opposition to abortion, gun control, gay rights, and NAFTA, Jenkins is closer to Pat Buchanan than to Reagan or Foster. He’s a founding member of the Council on National Policy, a conservative version of the Council on Foreign Relations, and was active in Friends of the Americas, a Cold War humanitarian group associated with Oliver North. This won’t mean much in a campaign concentrating on domestic concerns, but Jenkins’s close ties to reliably Republican groups ranging from the Christian Coalition to the state’s 25,000 Amway representatives (Jenkins and his wife among them) will come in handy.
The Landrieu campaign has combed through Jenkins’s thousands of votes in the legislature for 100 reasons why he’s “too extreme for the United States Senate.” Four of the first eight are votes opposing heavier penalties for drive-by shooters, criminal-background checks for nursing-home employees, criminalization of possession of a firearm on school property, and criminalization of spousal rape. Jenkins is also on the defensive over his proposal to scrap the income tax, abolish the IRS, and institute a national sales tax. Landrieu’s campaign is distributing an article House majority leader Dick Armey wrote last year in which he lambastes the sales-tax idea. Her mantra has become, “Under Woody, every day is tax day.”
Landrieu’s deft positioning on taxes is part of her own version of triangulation. When announcing her Senate candidacy in May, she took the obligatory digs at Newt Gingrich, but she also declared that as a senator she would “say no to old-line Democrats who think that throwing money at every problem is the only viable solution.” Thus, she’s for the balanced budget amendment, a capitalgains tax cut, and Clintonesque tax credits for college tuition and day care. She also supported the welfare bill and favors the death penalty, a constitutional amendment banning flag burning, and citizens’ right to carry concealed weapons. Gay marriage? She’s against it. “Overall, my record has been very moderate,” she told me, adding, “We need to find ways to give people a hand up, not a handout.” A rare chink in her moderate armor is that she’s accepted over $ 100,000 in bundled contributions from the feminist group Emily’s List — a fact the Jenkins campaign is all too happy to point out.
To longtime observers of Louisiana politics, Landrieu’s ascent is only natural. Her father, Moon Landrieu, was a reformist mayor of New Orleans from 1970 to 1977, who worked to integrate the city government (earning the moniker “Moon the Coon”), then spent four years as housing secretary in the Carter administration. While he was in Washington, Mary graduated from Louisiana State University and was elected to the state legislature in 1979 at the age of 23. She spent eight years there, then eight years as state treasurer, before unsuccessfully running for governor last year.
Yet for someone who has spent most of her adult life in the middle of Louisiana Democrats’ crooked politics, Landrieu has steered clear of trouble and managed to carve out a reformist reputation. This has earned her the enmity of party barons such as the ethically challenged former governor Edwin Edwards. Her renegade position within the party will help her with Republicans uneasy over Jenkins’s conservatism, but Ed Renwick, a political scientist at Loyola University in New Orleans, points out that this benefit will likely be outweighed by her troubles with fund-raising and turnout among traditionally Democratic voters.
Blacks, indeed, are Landrieu’s Achilles’ heel. Unlike Edwards, she’s never been a close political ally of the state’s black leadership, and her standing sank further when she refused to endorse Cleo Fields after he narrowly defeated her in the gubernatorial primary last year.
Fields returned the snub by endorsing her Democratic opponent this year, Richard Ieyoub, and he has yet to endorse her against Jenkins. After a recent breakfast with Fields and Al Gore at the vice president’s residence, Landrieu offered a half-baked apology, saying she was sorry if she had ever said or done anything that “offended anyone.” Yet no specific reference was made to Fields, which is wise since Landrieu risks alienating whites if she’s thought to be pandering to blacks. Nonetheless, with blacks about 25 percent of the state’s registered voters, she needs them to vote in large numbers if she is to win.
The latest independent poll shows Landrieu leading statewide by six points, though the poll was conducted while state newspapers were flogging a story about the nine liens placed on a television station Jenkins owns. Jenkins professes not to be worried by the negative publicity, but it only underscores Landrieu’s good-government credentials. She still has obstacles to overcome, from black indifference to lack of precedent for sending a woman to the Senate in a state that’s elected only one woman to Congress. But when it comes to tradition, Jenkins may have the bigger problem: Louisianans have never elected a Republican senator.
by Matthew Rees Baton Rouge, La.
