Posted on 02/25/2014 5:30:05 AM PST by SeekAndFind
Baton Rouge, La. — Mary Landrieu is Louisiana political royalty, but her reign as the state’s senior senator may come to an end this fall.
Like California’s Jerry Brown, New York’s Andrew Cuomo, and Arkansas’s Mark Pryor, Landrieu was born into Democratic politics. Her father, Moon Landrieu, served eight years as mayor of New Orleans before he became Jimmy Carter’s secretary of housing and urban development. Her younger brother Mitch was reelected as mayor of the Big Easy in February.
Landrieu is now facing a reelection battle of her own, and it will be the most difficult of her career. For Republicans, recapturing a majority in the U.S. Senate may hinge on her defeat.
The race is shaping up to be bellwether of sorts for the GOP’s chances to take over the Senate. The latest polls show her running neck and neck with her most formidable Republican opponent, Bill Cassidy, a 56-year-old congressman, but it won’t be an easy fight.
The nonprofit group Americans for Prosperity, which has spent nearly $30 million already this election cycle, is running ads against Landrieu in every media market in the state. But a source close to the group says the Louisiana race ranks just “sixth or seventh” on the group’s target list, behind races in West Virginia, South Dakota, Montana, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Alaska (in the first three of those states, the Republican is running for an open seat).
As it happens, the GOP needs to pick up six seats to recapture a Senate majority — a win in Louisiana could put the GOP over the top.
Landrieu, 58, has held public office for virtually her entire adulthood. She was elected to the Louisiana state house at the age of 25 and has fought to stay in public life: After losing a gubernatorial bid in 1995, she put her defunct campaign infrastructure to good use, turning it around to run a successful campaign for the state’s open Senate seat the following year.
In 1996, she had the help of President Clinton, who barnstormed the South on behalf of Democratic congressional candidates. She was also aided by Louisiana’s jungle-primary system, in which candidates of both parties appear on a single ballot. As six conservative Republicans duked it out among themselves, Landrieu gained ground. In the runoff, she beat Republican state representative Woody Jenkins by three tenths of a percentage point.
Republicans saw their next chance to take the seat in 2008 (in 2002, Republicans ran Suzie Terrell, a former elections commissioner with little name recognition). Much had changed in the years since Landrieu was first elected to federal office: George W. Bush carried the once-Democratic state in two close national elections, and Bobby Jindal was elected governor, while Democratic voter registration continually declined. Democrats accounted for 52 percent of Louisiana voters in 2008, down from 60 in 2000 (that number stands at 48 percent today, still higher than the registered Republican tally, 28 percent). Hurricane Katrina, too, had displaced more than 90,000 mostly African-American Democrats from New Orleans.
But Landrieu’s challenger, John Kennedy, wasn’t the ideal candidate for the increasingly red state: He had challenged David Vitter for his Senate seat in 2004 as a Democrat. As state treasurer in 2004, he had endorsed John Kerry, but he ran against Landrieu as a supporter of the Bush agenda. Landrieu was able to repurpose the opposition research Republicans had produced on Kennedy in his state-treasurer race, and one of her attack ads closed, “John Kennedy, one confused politician.” And, of course, Landrieu had Candidate Obama, in a state with a substantial share of black voters, to buoy Democratic and African-American turnout.
Over the past six years, Louisiana has become even more favorable to Republicans. In fact, Landrieu remains the only Democrat elected to statewide office. Since 2011, when Republicans gained control of the state senate for the first time since Reconstruction, the GOP has controlled every major statewide office. Mitt Romney carried the state by 17 points.
Landrieu has maintained her position in part by balancing the demands of the national Democratic party with the views of her constituents. She supports the Keystone pipeline and opposes cap-and-trade legislation. She recently became chairman of the Senate energy committee, where she can, and surely will, push for offshore oil and gas development, a move backed by the many companies that do business off Louisiana’s Gulf Coast.
In 2014, though, neither Bill Clinton nor Barack Obama is boosting Democratic fortunes at the top of the ticket, and right now, the Democrats’ troubled health-care bill appears likely to overshadow all other issues.
Many endangered Democrats have pled ignorance and turned quickly on the Affordable Care Act this year, but Landrieu has done a more delicate dance. She proposed a bill to allow people to keep health-insurance plans canceled due to the law, but she’s refused to back down from the president’s promise that Americans “can keep their plans.” She told The Weekly Standard in October, “We said when we passed that, ‘If you had insurance that was good insurance that you wanted to keep it, you could keep it.’” She also said in August that traveling to Europe made her ashamed of her own country because “their workers all manage to have health insurance that can’t be taken away.”
Enter Bill Cassidy, M.D., the Republican congressman determined to make Landrieu pay for her support for the law. A physician who has spent years treating the indigent in Louisiana’s charity-hospital system, Cassidy says he ran for Congress in 2008 so that he could play a role in the national health-care debate.
Over lunch at George’s, a dimly lit dive that sits under an I-10 overpass in Baton Rouge, Cassidy rails against Louisiana’s state hospital system, which he believes augurs poorly for the fate of Obamacare. By way of illustration, he tells me about a coworker, a Ugandan doctor who, after navigating his truck through the potholes that litter the drive to the entrance of the old Earl K. Long Medical Center, which closed last year, exclaimed, “I thought I was in Kampala!”
“When the bureaucrat has the power, the patient’s service suffers,” Cassidy says. President Obama and the Democrats who crafted the Affordable Care Act “never had my formative experience.”
That experience includes nearly three decades working with poor and uninsured patients, who comprise an above-average share of Louisiana’s population. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, he mobilized a group of volunteers to convert an abandoned Kmart into a field hospital where he and others treated storm victims.
Cassidy specializes in liver disease and, when he is back home in Baton Rouge, oversees a hepatitis clinic, treating patients and working with medical students and residents. “My real love is liver disease,” he says at one point during rounds at his clinic, a statement that may never have been uttered by a congressman.
He is tall and square-jawed, with a serious mien, but he is quick-witted and almost joyous with patients and with his students. “You’re looking good man, you’re making some good changes in your life,” he tells a 41-year-old African-American man who has come to the clinic suffering from both Hepatitis C and HIV. Inspecting his arms, Cassidy asks, “Did you used to donate blood or shoot drugs?” Then, surveying extensive burn marks across the man’s chest, he inquires about them and learns the patient was scorched in a fire as a three-year-old. Cassidy puts his a large hand on the patient’s shoulder and exhales. “Oh, man, I just feel sorry for you when you were three years old, buddy.” Before heading out of the exam room, he stiffens a bit and tells him, “Again, I’m Dr. Cassidy, and I’m also your congressman. If I can serve you as your congressman, let me know.”
Cassidy is not a career politician, and he takes flak from the right for not being conservative enough. In 1988, he supported Michael Dukakis over George H. W. Bush, and in 2002 he donated $500 to Landrieu, something she will surely throw at him in forthcoming debates. (The same year, Cassidy’s wife donated $1,000 to Landrieu’s runoff opponent, Suzie Terrell.) The Senate Conservatives Fund has endorsed Cassidy’s tea-party opponent, Air Force veteran Rob Maness, who has yet to gain ground in public polls.
The congressman tells me he’s gotten increasingly conservative over the years. “The facts of life are conservative,” he says.
Anticipating some of these attacks, Cassidy has gone out of his way to buck the party establishment. He lost his role on the GOP whip team earlier this month after opposing House leadership’s stance, and wasn’t shy about broadcasting it. He also resisted House speaker John Boehner’s attempt to put the issue of immigration on the table this year (Landrieu voted for the Senate’s comprehensive immigration bill last year).
At this early stage in the campaign, Cassidy seems to be getting traction. The most recent poll by the Democratic firm Public Policy Polling has him essentially tied with Landrieu. He is among the top five fundraisers on the Republican side in this election cycle — indeed, he’s raised nearly as much money so far as Landrieu herself (Landrieu has more cash on hand, though, $5.8 million to Cassidy’s $3.5).
Louisiana’s jungle primary, which goes to a runoff if no candidate gets 50 percent of the vote, takes place this November 4, general-election day in the rest of the country. If Landrieu and Cassidy finish as the top two, the runoff would be December 6 — and Cassidy could literally be the candidate who takes back the Senate for the GOP.
— Eliana Johnson is media editor of National Review Online.
I recall Mary’s first Senate win. Woody Jenkins was leading her until right before the polls closed, so Mary shopped for a New Orleans judge who kept the polls open long enough, only in Orleans Parish, to round up some more voters who were bussed to the polls.
All of La used to be like this until Jindal came into power.
Now the Landrieus are the bastions of corruption remaining
During any debates, she should be asked two questions;
1. Did you vote for Obamacare?
2. Did you read the bill before voting?
Game, set, match!
if she is not ousted this round, she will be in that seat until she decomposes...
Woody Jenkins won 53 of the 54 LA Parishes.
She won Orleans parish. By winning that one, she had more votes than Jenkins. They weren’t shy about that then. The rat tv media ran stories about homeless bums who were upset that they were promised $50 for each time they voted for Mary and at the end of the day, they only got $50.
Landrieu will win or lose based on if she is still supported by Acorn and the bosses in NOLA and BRLA.
"When is President Obama coming to campaign for you?"
Then watch her fall apart....
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ALL TOGETHER, NOW----LET'S ALL HUM THE THEME FROM "JAWS"
White House chief of staff Denis McDonough held an unpublicized meeting with Sen. Michael Bennet (DIMWIT-Colo), chairman of the Senate Democrats’ campaign arm, amid anger and anxiety that ObamaCare’s botched rollout could cost the party its majority next year.
In the meeting, requested by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC), McDonough and Bennet discussed what the White House could do to help vulnerable Senate Democrats and “talked about developing a stronger relationship with the White House.”
(That cockamamie idea was quickly discarded. After all, Democrats reasoned, who would believe a ditzy story like that.....other than the brain dead MSM media.)
Democratic senators fear the White House is not sympathetic enough to their plight. After the government shutdown, they were confident they would retain the Senate, maybe even retake the House; but Dem optimism vanished as problems with the healthcare law mounted.
(The buzz is Speaker-wannabe Pelosi disconsolately went back to sucking up everything in sight.)
“I know these guys are nervous as hell. I mean, all of their jobs are on the line because Obamacare is the thing making the biggest political waves lately. It’s a nightmare,” Denis whined.
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WATTA RELIEF--DEMOCRATS COME UP WITH THE ONLY WORKABLE SOLUTION Obama recently announced the White House's 2014 Senate strategy: "Keep Obama away." The extensive midterm campaign strategy is built around one unavoidable fact: Hardly any candidates in the most competitive states want President Barack Obama anywhere near them on the campaign trail.
WHAT SHE WANTS VOTERS TO BELIEVE Landrieu is airing a TV ad showing her at numerous public settings sternly telling Obama to "keep his promise to let people keep their current health plans if they want to" — w/ Landrieu taking credit, knowing full well it could never happen. Landrieu's vote for Obama/care effectively decimated existing affordable plans.
REALITY CHECK:
(1) Landrieu is caught on-tape, in the well of the Senate, parroting Obama's infamous lie, "If you like your plan, you can keep your plan."
(2) Mary told TV viewers: “If you like the insurance that you have, you’ll be able to keep it.” (Landrieu on MSNBC’s Hardball, 12/16/09)
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As far back as 2008, at the presidential debate in Nashville, Democrat candidate Obama advanced his signature healthcare plan---ultimately enacted, by an historic straight Democrat party-line vote, into the "Affordable Care Act"
QUOTING 2008 OBAMA: "No. 1, let me just repeat, if you’ve got a health care plan that you like, you can keep it. All I’m going to do is help you to lower the premiums on it. You’ll still have choice of doctor.” Repeated over and over ---- with the promise that every American family would be saving $2500.00 on healthcare costs.
Significantly, Obamba NEVER corrected lock-stepping Democrats, all reading from the same Democrat talking points, all of them repeating the same Democrat promises---over and over again.
LOCK-STEPPING PARTY LOYALTY NOT SEEN SINCE 1930-40's ERA EUROPE Obama And The Dems marched in lockstep. The persistent Dumbocrat drumbeat ---- in obeisance to Obama ---- kept ringing reassuringly in our ears: "If you like your plan, you can keep your plan."
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THE LANDRIEU PAPER TRAIL IS HUGE Landrieu sold her aye vote in what Forbes Magazine dubbed "The 'Louisiana Purchase" that included a massive $4.3 Billion to Landrieu.
FORBES REPORTED the Democrats’ nailed Landrieu’s support for Obamacare w/ a greenback bribe. Landrieu, critics believe, pledged her vote in exchange for some $200 million more additional federal funds for Louisiana. Except that, due to a drafting error, the law ended up giving Louisiana $4.3 billion: more than twenty times the assigned amount. MORE HERE http://www.forbes.com/fdc/welcome_mjx.shtml
How $4.3 billion to Landrieu was attached to the Obamacare bill, and how Obama and Reid failed to catch and fix it, is yet annother indictment of the Obamacare atrocity. The payoff to Landrieu should be investigated as an indication of how EVERY Democrat came to vote for Obamacare.
<><> Where's the $4.3 billion, Mary?
BACKSTORY In the fall of 2009, Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) was trying to get the necessary 60 Dimocrat votes to pass the Affordable Care Act. He needed every Dim on board, which gave waffling senators a great deal of leverage. In Landrieu's case, she connivingly saw that selling her aye vote could get her maybe $200 million federal dollars. Obama complied--- Reid chalked up another vote for Obamacare---and the $4.3 Landrieu giveaway was attached to the Obamacare bill.
<><> Where's the money, Mary?
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MEMO TO LOUISIANA VOTERS Sen Mary Landrieu (1) sold her vote; (2) voted for throwing you off your affordable health plans, (3) voted for burdening you with ruinous deductibles, (4) voted for nationalizing 1/16 of the US economy, (5) voted for decimating intergenerational transfers of wealth, (6) voted for abandoning seniors and the chronically ill, (7) voted for IPAB's (Death Panels).
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Ominous cogs in the Obamacare meat grinder----the inexorable forcing of Grandma/pa onto Medicaid--(like cattle herded single-file onto the narrow ramp---knowing the bolt is coming---but not able to do a thing about it).
Medicaid conveniently groups together the sick and elderly---as Obama's IPAB board of radical Boobamba worshippers sit in judgment. Boobamba's Orwellian-speak---the progressive way of saying "Obamacare keeps costs down."
The infamous "Death Panels---are alive and well----but they're not called death panels......for obvious reasons. The treacherous Obama euphemistically calls his death panel "I-PAB----Individual Payment Advisory Board." I-PAB decides what to pay and who to pay---thus rationing medical care to sick oldsters. Obamacare "allows" states to expand their Medicaid recipients pool. Under Obamacare, Washington now covers about 1/2 the cost of Medicaid enrollees.
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What is I-PAB?
When you find out about IPAB, you will not believe it - but it’s r-e-a-l.... a new type of government agency. IPAB (Independent Payment Advisory Board) is the first agency of the “fifth branch” of govt.
1) It will make all important health care decisions by authorizing payment or not.
2) It is not funded by Congress and cannot have its budget reviewed or changed.
3) Its membership cannot be changed by future Presidents,
4) It cannot be repealed by Congress, except for a six month window in 2017.
5) Its decisions are not subject to judicial review.
6) It is not authorized by the Constitution, and is therefore immune to Constitutional processes.
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Why is Obamacre herding seniors WITH ASSETS onto Medicaid---a program structured for the poor? Can you say redistribution of wealth? Herding the elderly with assets into Medicaid has ominous consequences that are intriguing to the left. B/c assets, perhaps a home owned free and clear, securities, annuities, investment property, can be seized to pay for govt treatment.
Thus intergenerational transfers of wealth (a longtime progressive bugaboo)----are decimated (grandma/pa's holdings go to the govt---not to you).
DRUM ROLL, PLEASE a (gasp) Republican won the San Diego Mayor's race by a hefty margin.
THAT SUCKING SOUND YOU HEARD Democrats Feinstein, Boxer AND pres Obama all endorsed the San Diego Democrat loser Alvarez. An omen of things to come? Could this be the reason why (cackle)?
As far back as 2008, at the presidential debate in Nashville, Democrat candidate Obama advanced his signature healthcare plan---ultimately enacted, by an historic straight Democrat party-line vote, into the "Affordable Care Act"
QUOTING 2008 OBAMA: "No. 1, let me just repeat, if you’ve got a health care plan that you like, you can keep it. All I’m going to do is help you to lower the premiums on it. You’ll still have choice of doctor.”
Repeated over and over again---- with his promise that every American family would be saving $2500.00 on healthcare costs.
Significantly, Obamba NEVER corrected lock-stepping Democrats, all reading from the same Democrat talking points, all of them repeating the same Democrat promises---over and over again.
LOCK-STEPPING PARTY LOYALTY NOT SEEN SINCE 1930-40's ERA EUROPE Obama And the Dems marched in lockstep.....the persistent Dumbocrat drumbeat ---- in obeisance to Obama ---- kept ringing reassuringly in our ears: "If you like your plan, you can keep your plan."
SEN. BARBARA BOXER (D-CALIF): “So we Democrats want people to be able to keep the health care they have. And the answer to that is choice of plans. And in the state exchange, we’re going to have lots of different plans, and people will be able to keep the health care coverage they need and they want.” (Sen. Boxer, Press Release, 2/8/11)
SEN DIANNE FEINSTEIN (D-CALI): “I listened to the president and I believed him when he said, 'if you like your plan, you can keep your plan.' I believed he was correct. I didn't realize there were all these codicils attached to it. President Obama should never have promised that people would be able to keep their health plans. I think he was done a disservice. Someone should have stopped him and said – on his staff. There's this condition and that condition."
SEN. MARY LANDRIEU (D-La): “If you like the insurance that you have, you’ll be able to keep it.” (MSNBC’s Hardball, 12/16/09)
THEN-HOUSE MAJORITY LEADER NANCY PELOSI (D-CALIF): "We must pass the O-care bill so we can find out what’s in it." Tick, tock, tick tock,......we must now wait 1-2 decades for its "goodness" to rollout.
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UT OH Democrat lab specimens keep swearing the Dems are gonna run and win on the (gag) "glories" of Obamacare....but a PAC associated with Nancy Pelosi financed a TV ad for a candidate who slams the White House for “the disastrous healthcare.gov website”.....then boasts that the candidate “voted to let you keep your existing health plan.”
REALITY CHECK Obama's "Keep Your Plan promise" has been cited as The Lie Of The Year." Obamacare was also going to create thousands of jobs......as health industry spox announce thousands of jobs lost based on ACA's medical devices tax.
In 2004, Harry Reid won reelection with 61 percent of the vote, gaining the endorsement of several Republicans. He ran against a unknown Republican stalwart named Richard Ziser. I met the guy during the campaign and he came across as a conservative - which is why the GOP-e threw him under the bus, as they never campaigned for him then.
When Jim Gibbons was a Congressman, he was cool in that once a month he had a rep set up office in our small town city hall to hear any grievances. I showed up each month with some agenda, and once, I told the nice lady that after Reid's election and the lame opposition the GOP-e put up, they didn't deserve to be in power. MAJOR deer-in-headlights reaction. Gibbon soon ran for Governor and that was the end of the rep showing up.
It was Marc Morial’s LIFE Machine that used fraud to get her just enough votes in Orleans Parish. If the GOP had had any balls back then, she never should’ve been seated.
I absolutely believe there was collusion between Reid and Gibbons. Gibbons could’ve defeated Reid in 2004 if he was the nominee. In exchange for not challenging him, Reid would give him a “freebie” on running for Governor in 2006. I blasted him at the time on that, and of course, Gibbons self-destructed during his single term in office, revealing himself to be a total sleazebag.
I don’t doubt his reaction at your question, as you may have gotten a bit too close to the truth.
Yeah, like so many, he was a major disappointment. When he was a Congressman, I sat not six feet from him at his Town Hall meeting and we spoke at length on the various crap going on in DC. He came across as a pretty decent guy and a good Conservative - or as least as not as squishy as many others. I left the state soon after and didn't follow things in Nevada as closely as before.
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