If the political stars had been aligned a little differently, Gov. Buddy Roemer of Louisiana and not Gov. Bill Clinton of Arkansas might have been the Southern New Democrat elected to the White House in the 1990s. But Roemer’s very promising first decade in elective office ended in disarray and defeat, and by the time he died last week in Baton Rouge at 77, he was largely remembered as a bright comet who fell to Earth prematurely from a mixture of bad luck and poor judgment.

The son of a wealthy planter-politician in Bossier City, near Shreveport, Charles Elson Roemer III was blessed with good looks, a nimble brain, the gift of the gab, and outsize ambition that he seemed destined to realize. Graduating from Harvard at 21, he earned a master’s degree at the Harvard Business School and, returning to Louisiana to work in the family business, founded a successful computer company and the first of a number of banks he would help run during the next several decades.