Originally posted by EB
I do not mean to be nasty towards Louisiana politics. After all what the republicans did to Max Cleland in Georgia, my home state, was nasty. But when I saw the debates over C-SPAN, I looked at the campaign as a normal Louisiana political campaign.
Dirty deeds abounded in elections
12/12/02
By Bill Walsh
Washington bureau/The Times-Picayune
WASHINGTON -- Dirty tricks are as old as politics itself, and the recent elections in Louisiana had a fair share of skullduggery, mostly anonymous efforts aimed at smearing candidates and confusing or discouraging voters.
Much of what surfaced in the U.S. Senate primary and runoff was aimed at disrupting the usual racial and ideological voting patterns in the election: either suppressing the liberal black vote for Democrat Mary Landrieu or peeling conservative white voters from Republican Suzanne Haik Terrell.
One of the
most blatant attempts to keep African-Americans from voting was an unsigned pamphlet that the Landrieu campaign said was circulated in New Orleans public housing complexes just before the runoff. The document said: "Vote!!! Bad Weather? No problem!!! If the weather is uncomfortable on election day (Saturday December 7th) Remember you can wait and cast your ballot on Tuesday December 10th." Anyone who waited past Saturday, however, missed the chance to vote.
One sign posted around New Orleans on election day sought to exploit Landrieu's problems with some black leaders who complained that the white senator had ignored them during the six years of her first term. The signs said:
"Mary, if you don't respect us, don't expect us."
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One man waving a sign on the Carrollton Avenue neutral ground said he got $75. He said he felt bad about it because he voted for Landrieu
The signs were paid for by the Louisiana Republican Party, who also hired black men to wave them on street corners. GOP officials defended the slogan as an accurate reflection of how many black voters felt about Landrieu. Landrieu said it was an underhanded attempt to persuade black voters to stay away from the polls.
The Terrell campaign said it, too, was victimized by anonymous attacks, including "sample ballots" circulated before the Nov. 5 primary that appeared to promote a ticket of Terrell, a white Republican, and Rep. William Jefferson and district attorney candidate Dale Atkins, both black Democrats. The ballots were devious in a number of ways: Jefferson backed Landrieu, not Terrell, and he supported Atkins' opponent, Eddie Jordan.
In the primary, the campaign signs also showed up along streets in New Orleans linking Terrell and Jefferson politically, a message that would play badly in each of their constituencies.
Those signs reappeared during the runoff, Terrell aide Bill Kearney said. He said some were posted in white neighborhoods in Jefferson and St. Bernard parishes just before the runoff election and evidently were designed to cause confusion by linking Terrell with Jefferson.
"They put them in some suburban white areas to trick people," Kearney said.
Terrell may have been the beneficiary of a separate effort in Baton Rouge. A handbill purporting to be a "coalition ballot" circulated in African-American neighborhoods in the days leading up to the Dec. 7 runoff suggested that Terrell had the backing of 17 civic groups, some of them African-American. The ballots carried the signature of community activist Tonya Pollard-Gosa, who later signed an affidavit for the Louisiana Democratic Party saying it was a forgery. Terrell's camp said it had nothing to do with the fake ballot.
"Thousands of these things had hit the streets," Democratic Party Chairman Ben Jeffers said. "This election cycle had more games than I've seen in a while. They were really trying to mislead African-Americans to vote for Suzie Terrell."
But not all of the shenanigans appealed to race. In the nasty 5th Congressional District election, the dirty tricks appealed to a tried-and-true election topic: sex.
The Republican candidate, Lee Fletcher, said that on election eve, a recorded phone message went out to voters in Pointe Coupee, Allen, Rapides and Richland parishes claiming he is gay. Fletcher said he didn't hear the message himself but cobbled together an accounting of it from supporters who did.
According to his notes, it said: "Lee Fletcher is 40 years old, never had a date and doesn't know what it is like to wake up in the middle of the night and change a diaper or take care of a hungry baby. He never married. This draws one to the conclusion that he must be homosexual."
Fletcher said he doesn't know the source of the message, but he said it was clearly aimed at conservative voters who would not vote for a gay candidate.
"I'm more of a man than anyone who did that," he said.
Fletcher's opponent, Democrat Rodney Alexander, said he also was a target of a recorded phone message, which, according to a Democratic Party official who heard it, claimed that Alexander had been married before, even though he hadn't.
Fletcher said he had nothing to do with the calls. He narrowly lost to Alexander.
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Republicans play role of Monday morning QB
After Landrieu's re-election, GOP tries to figure what went wrong
12/10/02
By Bruce Alpert and Robert Travis Scott
Staff writers/The Times-Picayune
While much of the post-election talk Monday was about the impact of get-out-the-vote efforts and a possible backlash against negative ads, the simplest analysis of Louisiana's U.S. Senate election shows that Democrat Mary Landrieu won with a swing of almost 76,000 votes between the Nov. 5 primary and Saturday's runoff.
Landrieu increased the total Democratic vote from 596,900 in the primary to 643,400 in the runoff for a gain of 46,500 votes. Republican candidate Suzanne Haik Terrell, meanwhile, saw the GOP total drop from 632,702 in the primary to 603,386 Saturday, a loss of 29,316 votes.
Political analysts say Landrieu was able to survive a strong Republican assault, and an opponent backed by a popular president, by stressing local issues, pushing turnout in the state's biggest population centers and energizing her base.
National Democrats see the Louisiana turnaround as a possible life preserver against a Republican wave that helped the GOP regain control of the Senate and build its majority in the House of Representatives.
"We have a bounce in our step this morning," Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle said Monday. He said Landrieu's victory and that of South Dakota Democrat Tim Johnson in November can serve as models for future Democratic campaigns.
Landrieu and Johnson campaigned against well-financed GOP opponents who were backed by President Bush. Both ran on campaign themes that they would make serving their states their No. 1 priority, not national parties or national political leaders.
"I think that's generally what Democrats are trying to do: put their states first, put the working people, the people that they represent out there every time these issues come up," Daschle said.
Because the GOP holds only a 51-49 majority in the Senate, Daschle said he and Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., the incoming majority leader, have agreed the GOP will hold only a one-seat advantage on committees. Party officials said that means Landrieu will keep her seat on the Appropriations Committee, but some Democratic aides said it's possible she could lose her seat on the Armed Services Committee if Republicans insist on reducing the size of key committees.
Both panels are considered "A" committees, and if membership is reduced, as proposed by Lott, it's possible many Democrats will be limited to one such powerful committee each.
Going negative
U.S. Rep. John Cooksey, R-Monroe, who ran third in the Senate primary behind Landrieu and Terrell, said he had heard from quite a few Republican voters who were
turned off by "the negative tone" of the Terrell campaign leading up to Saturday's runoff.
Much of it, he said,
was orchestrated by the National Republican Senatorial Committee, with ads designed and written by national political operatives whom he described as people "with coarse, crude personalities, who didn't have the sensitivity to see that the barrage of negative ads offended the sensitivities of many Louisiana voters."
He said the volume of negative ads was a clear case of overkill at a time when voters were looking for positive reasons to support Terrell. He also suggested Terrell herself needed to offer voters more reasons to support her.
"I said that during the debates,
with two women from New Orleans, that it looked as if Mary went to the more effective New Orleans charm school than Suzie did," Cooksey said.
Louisiana Republican Party Chairman Pat Brister said she understands that Cooksey is reflecting the views of some political observers that the Republican campaign was too negative. But she said she doesn't buy that.
"I know people say that they don't like negative campaigning, but it is effective in some cases," Brister said. "I'm not saying it was the most effective in this campaign, but I don't know any campaign these days that isn't without its share of negatives."
Any effort, she said, to defeat an incumbent must include some ads criticizing that person's record. "That's what we tried to do here, and in some cases it was effective in showing the differences between the two candidates," Brister said.
In hindsight
In the final analysis, Brister said, Landrieu and the Democrats did a better job getting out their core voters than Republicans had expected.
"We were pretty encouraged earlier on Saturday that we were doing the better job, but they got their vote late in the day," Brister said.
She said there's plenty of time to assess what worked well and what didn't. One area, she said, that the state GOP definitely needs to work on is with so-called "robo calls" from GOP celebrities, automated telephone messages urging people to go to the polls.
Terrell said some voters complained to her that they had received multiple calls from everyone from President Bush to Iran Contra figure Oliver North, Gov. Foster and U.S. Rep. David Vitter, R-Metairie.
In the future, Brister said, such calling should be better coordinated, but she also said, "I doubt very much that someone voted for Mary because she got too many calls from Suzie supporters."
Vitter said that, like Cooksey, he received complaints that the GOP ran too many negative ads. But he said it's impossible to assess whether they impacted Terrell's final vote tally, or even sent some voters to Landrieu's side.
One problem, he said, is that ads from independent groups supporting Terrell were added to the already heavy mix of ads from the Terrell campaign and Republican Party. It made it seem that there were more negative ads than Republicans had put out on their own, he said.
From his perspective, Vitter said, the Landrieu campaign and Democrats deserve credit for doing a good job getting out critical African-American voters.
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