Ranting On...the Truth of Mary Landrieu

Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA)

This Tuesday is going to be a rough one for me, as no matter who ends up with the Senate, the Democrats are going to suffer some pretty bleak losses.  I am a team player when it comes to politics, and while I am obviously aware of the real world ramifications that affect elections that don't, say, a sports game, Election Night is the equivalent of cheering for my school in March Madness or my team in the Super Bowl.  I like to win, and I don't just care about my home state or specific races, but all of them, and I cheer when we win and get royally bummed out when we lose (I go into election night with both champagne and whiskey on-hand, so I'm prepared for both outcomes of the evening).

That being said, Mary Landrieu (D-LA) has always been one of my favorite senators.  Landrieu has a special place in my personal history with politics-watching.  While I had always been involved in politics, my focus, like most young people's, was typically on the White House.  I watched the returns on Bill Clinton's elections, and watched in horror at what happened in Bush v. Gore, one of those elections that I don't think Democrats will ever actually get over.  However, when Jim Jeffords switched parties in 2001, handing the Democrats the Senate, I suddenly became obsessed with knowing as much about the U.S. Senate as possible.  Landrieu was a unique case for me because she was from a seemingly conservative state, but managed to have relatively progressive views, with a couple of exceptions around the environment.  In 2002, the first Midterms I was really invested in, the Democrats suffered an extremely rough night, losing incumbent senators in Missouri and Georgia, and I watched former Vice President Walter Mondale lose in the first election I ever got to vote in.  Landrieu was pushed to a runoff, and wasn't expected to win, but I didn't care-I needed a victory, so I, for the first time, decided to do something more than just be an armchair political analyst-I wrote a $25 check (which for me was a big deal, considering that I was working for minimum wage and not full-time at that juncture, as I was still in high school) and sent it to the Landrieu campaign.  I got a nice note back from the campaign that I have somewhere in my filing cabinet, and then watched as Landrieu managed to pull off the politically impossible and won the runoff.  I was elated-it felt a bit like a victory for me too, even if my contribution had been small.  When my local paper had me write my favorite moment of senior year, "I wrote, "Mary Landrieu winning reelection."  In the years since, I have followed Landrieu's career pretty closely.  After that election, while other people had posters of N Sync and Destiny's Child hanging on their wall, I made a sign of all of my favorite senators and hung it on my wall and of course Landrieu was on it (I cannot find it right now, but it's also somewhere in my filing cabinet-for the curious, I know Barbara Boxer, Frank Lautenberg, Fritz Hollings, Tom Harkin, and Joe Biden were all on there somewhere).  Sen. Landrieu and I have occasionally disagreed on things through the years-the environment and gay marriage being principle amongst them-but I've always rooted the hardest for her in political fights, and was cheering particularly hard for her in 2008.  With the odds stacked against Mary this year, to the point that I don't see a way that she can win, I'm having a bittersweet pull back to that 2002 election, and was wondering a bit why this particular politician enthralled me so much.  And then, yesterday, I remembered.

For those who don't read daily about the comments and lives of senators (read: for those of you who have lives), you may have missed the uproar that happened when Sen. Mary Landrieu stated a cold, hard fact yesterday (facts have become the most dangerous thing in politics, something that should scare the crap out of everyone).  Landrieu, in an interview with Chuck Todd, was asked why President Obama was so unpopular in Louisiana (a decent question, and an actual substantive spin on the "do you support the President?" gotcha questions that have highlighted so many debates).  Landrieu, true to form, gave a strong answer, talking specifically about energy policy and how the administration's views doesn't match up with Louisiana's or her own, particularly surrounding the moratorium that was put in place in the wake of the BP oil spill on all drilling.  Then, she went on to say, "I'll be very, very honest with you; the South has not always been the friendliest place for African-Americans.  It's been a difficult time for the president to present himself in a very positive light as a leader."


She went on to say that it was also very difficult for women, but the comments about African-Americans are what Republicans have latched onto in the wake of her statement.  Both her Republican opponent Bill Cassidy and failed presidential candidate Gov. Bobby Jindal (wait, he hasn't lost yet?- give it a couple of years and that title will be true) both attacked Landrieu for making comments that they proclaimed were wholly unfair and insulting, suggesting that she just called the entire state racist.

The reality is, though, that this isn't remotely true.  She didn't call the entire state racist, she merely insinuated that there have been struggles in the South in particular with racism that other areas of the country haven't had to the same degree.  This isn't a lie-this is a cold hard fact.  The Republican Party for decades used what was known as the "Southern Strategy," a strategy that tried to use white voters in the South who supported segregation's fears of the Civil Rights movement to get them to vote more in lock-step with the GOP.  This was used most prominently by Richard Nixon, but it continued for years after President Nixon.  The South was going through a larger political realignment at the time (it had been historically Democratic), and for many elections (including the tossup elections of 1960, 1968, and 1976), the South was the key to the eventual victor's win.

It's worth noting that this use of the "Southern Strategy" isn't particularly old history.  Ronald Reagan started his presidential campaign in the South by saying "I believe in states' rights," an allusion to past discussions about segregation.  George H.W. Bush ran the Willie Horton ads in 1988 that were deemed incredibly racist by many observers (and for those who think 1988 is long-gone, Rep. Lee Terry ran a similar ad earlier this year against his Democratic opponent).  While the 1990's saw a cultural shift over the Southern Strategy (including major overtures by the GOP to woo back the now very Democratic-leaning African-American community), to say that there hasn't been a history of racism in the South is, well, foolishness.

And I think we're being naive if we are stating that there isn't some lingering aspects of this in the South (and across America, as we witnessed in the reactions to something as recent as the incidents in Ferguson and with Trayvon Martin).  We spent years of the President's administration talking about the man's birth certificate-it's hard to imagine we would have done that for Bill Clinton.  Look at the approval ratings for President Obama in Louisiana: Louisiana white voters approve of the president only 17% (that's fifteen-points below the national average); amongst non-white voters in the state, it's 76%.  That's over a 50% margin (and again, it's hard to fathom such a wide racial divide for Bill or Hillary Clinton in the state, despite them sharing almost completely similar views with President Obama).  Looking a bit further into a study by the Journal of Public Economics, they estimated that the president lost 4 percentage points in the national popular vote in his two elections based on racial prejudice; one aspect of this study was focused on how often the "n" word is googled in different states.  The first highest incidence was in West Virginia, but in second place was Louisiana.  Again, while Landrieu wasn't insinuating the entire state was racist, she was stating that there has been a tougher road for African-Americans in the American South, and there are still barriers left to overcome there-this should not be remotely in dispute, and instead of knee-jerk reactions, I wish that politicians would come with solutions.

Sen. Mary Landrieu is probably the most battled-tested politician in the Senate (give or take Tom Harkin and Mitch McConnell), has managed to win three tough federal races in the Bayou State, and she didn't say this without thinking first.  She easily could have talked about energy policy and just left it at that.  There's surely a political aspect to her comments-Landrieu desperately needs high African-American turnout in her home state in order to get to 50% on Tuesday, something that doesn't seem possible without a motivated base (there's a reason she tagged on women in the South, as well, and that's another article that I'll save for a later date).  You can call these comments a "Hail Mary Landrieu," if you will.

However, that doesn't mean that what she said wasn't true, and it is something that I really appreciate a senator speaking out toward.  Racial inequality in America is something that almost no politician wants to discuss for fears of how it will affect their approval/electoral numbers.  The media treats any comments regarding race with the care and thoughtfulness of a jackhammer, frequently more focused on creating a brouhaha condemning the person who brought up the subject than to have a real conversation about racial inequality (it's the same thing that happens with gun control, oddly enough).  That a politician was willing to risk that media firestorm just days before an election should be something we should all be proud of, as it's proof that a politician still wants to have legitimate discussions in this country.  Mary Landrieu is using some of her potentially final moments of political relevance discussing a major issue that still affects this country.  Hopefully Louisiana will see that she's a politician of integrity worth keeping around six more years.