The Tip O’Neill quote is real and applicable to the Louisiana-Second runoff. But the Yogi quote may have been attributed to him by a sportswriter. The New York Yankees Hall of Famer typically went along with quotes that made him seem more colorful than he really was. FYI, the late Yogi Berra had a Louisiana connection. He was a close friend of fellow Yankee great, Ron Guidry, who hails from Lafayette. There was even a book by Harvey Araton about this baseball odd couple, Driving Mr. Yogi: Yogi Berra, Ron Guidry, and Baseball’s Greatest Gift.
Enough baseball trivia. Back to one of the Gret Stet of Louisiana’s favorite sports: Politics.
I had a strong feeling of political déjà vu last Saturday. The candidates in the runoff to replace Cedric Richmond in Congress were veteran New Orleans politicians, state Sens. Troy Carter and Karen Carter Peterson ( hereinafter KCP.) In 2006, they both ran against scandal-plagued incumbent William “Dollar Bill” Jefferson.
In the 2006 primary election, Troy Carter finished fifth with 12%, while The Artist Then Known As Karen Carter captured second place and a spot in the runoff with 22%. The incumbent won a mere 30%, but went on to blow out Karen Carter 57-43. In Saturday’s runoff, KCP lost by a similar margin to Troy Carter 55-45 who was finally elected to Congress on his third try.
The estimable publisher of this estimable publication wrote an outstanding piece about the two Carters by my estimation. I’ll try not to cover the same territory other than to point out that Dollar Bill Jefferson was then a formidable incumbent with a formidable political machine. The money had been found in his freezer by that point, but he was yet to be indicted. Once that happened, he was defeated by Republican Joseph Cao in a December 2008 runoff. (Troy Carter also ran in 2008 and did poorly in the primary.) Cao returned to obscurity after being beaten like a drum by Cedric Richmond in 2010.
In both the 2006 and 2021 elections, the national media and outside political groups missed the proverbial boat. In 2006, it was characterized as a race between corruption and reform. Ironically, The Artist Then Known As Karen Carter was a cosplay reformer. She was herself a machine politician. Her father, Ken, was one of the founders of the Central City based organization, BOLD. I gave her an unflattering nickname during that campaign, which I no longer use: Princess BOLD.
In 2021, it was characterized as a race between moderates and progressives. In fact, there were few issues on which the two had major substantive disagreements. To those of us who closely follow New Orleans politics, KCP was as unconvincing as a progressive in 2021 as she had been as a reformer in 2006.
In 2021, Troy Carter had some GOP support as did KCP in 2006. It had nothing to do with ideology: Orleans Parish is a one-party state, so Republicans have to land somewhere. This led to fatal overreach by Team KCP in comparing Troy Carter to Donald Trump. Say what? Troy Carter has long been a champion of LGBTQ rights as well as the sponsor of a $15 minimum wage bill in the state senate. Doesn’t sound Trumpy to me, y’all.
New Orleans politics is factional, not ideological. Both Troy Carter and KCP are machine politicians. Troy Carter is a close ally of former Congressman Cedric Richmond who leads one powerful faction in local politics, which is nameless, so l’ll call it the Group With No Name or GWNN. KCP and BOLD typically stand opposed to Richmond. This time the GWNN won but their candidate lost the last Mayor’s election; one reason Mayor Cantrell backed KCP. There’s also a shadow war between Richmond and Cantrell over control of local Democratic politics. Cedric Richmond left Congress but not New Orleans politics. Stay tuned.
After being endorsed by third-place finisher, Gary Chambers, KCP hoped to harness the power of what I call the Hipster Twitter Left. Once again, it turned out to be a paper tiger.
In the interest of transparency, since New Orleans is the world’s largest small town, I’m acquainted with both Carters. I doubt if either remembers me but I never forget chatting with a politician. The two Carters made differing impressions on me. I’ve taken to calling them the Nice Hack and the Nasty Hack. The nice one is going to Washington. The nasty one stays in the state senate. Hopefully, she’ll make more than 15% of the votes this time around.
2006 was also a memorable year in local New Orleans politics. It was my first election as an internet pundit, so I’ll never forget it.
Citywide elections were delayed because of Katrina and the Federal Flood. In the primary, there were 23 Mayoral candidates; including Troy Carter (he was busy that year.) Incumbent C Ray Nagin defeated Mitch Landrieu in the runoff. C Ray promised an exploding economic pie but feathered his own nest instead and landed in jail after leaving office.
The council races were jam packed with new faces. I was then the president of my neighborhood association and involved in organizing a forum for District B candidates. The incumbent, Renee Gill Pratt, was a foot soldier in the Jefferson Machine who I nicknamed Gill Pratfall. She was a terrible councilmember whose staff never returned phone calls or responded to email or even snail mail. Constituent service was not in their repetoire.
My wife and I were deeply involved in that council campaign and befriended several of Gill Pratfall’s challengers. It led to what we called the Garden of Signs:
Gill Pratfall was defeated in a runoff by political neophyte Stacy Head. Head became known for her sharp-tongue and even sharper elbows while serving on the council for 11 years.
Gill Pratfall was later convicted in the corruption trial that helped destroy the Jefferson Machine. Ironically, despite being the highest-ranking public official on trial, she was the stooge of Dollar Bill’s brother Mose, who was also convicted but died before serving his jail sentence.
I knew and liked Mose Jefferson. He was one of the ablest political organizers I’ve ever met as well as a helluva raconteur. Unfortunately, like brother Bill, he was greedy and corrupt. That’s why Dutch Morial dubbed his brother Dollar Bill. He came by that nickname honestly; make that dishonestly.
The story of the fallen Jefferson machine is laden with ironies. It was called the Progressive Democrats. I am not making this up. It’s one reason I’m skeptical of the label progressive when slapped on New Orleans politics.
2006 was also the year of reform. Orleans Parish used to have 444 tax assessors, sheriffs, and clerks of court. I, of course, exaggerate: the number was 7 tax assessors, 2 sheriffs, and 2 clerks of court. In each case, the number was reduced to one. Unfortunately, political hacks were subsequently elected to the newly created posts so, instead of efficiency, we’re still TFC: This Fucking City. It’s why I’m skeptical of the reformer label when affixed to New Orleans politics. Been there, done that.
A few words about the column title. John Fogerty borrowed the Yogism for a 2004 anti-Iraq War anthem: Déjà Vu (All Over Again.) In that instance, it was Bushes, not Carters who gave Fogerty déjà vu. I only steal from the best.
Louisiana state Rep. Ray Garofalo greets President Donald Trump on the tarmac of Louis Armstrong International Airport on Jan. 13, 2020, shortly after he arrives for the College Football Playoff National Championship game between the LSU Tigers and the Clemson Tigers at the Louisiana Superdome. Image credit: Bayou Brief.
During Tuesday’s nearly four-hour long discussion by members of the Louisiana state House Education Committee about a bill that sought to prohibit the teaching of Critical Race Theory (the academic discourse informed by a mountain of scholarship on the cultural, sociological, and legal implications of white privilege, systemic and institutional racism, and the patriarchy), the bill’s author, state Rep. Ray Garofalo of Mereaux in St. Bernard Parish, attempted to explain the legislation’s pedagogical merit after a series of pointed questions from one of his conservative colleagues, state Rep. Stephanie Hilferty of New Orleans.
“If you’re having a discussion on whatever the case may be, on slavery, then you can talk about everything dealing with slavery,” Garofalo said. “The good, the bad, the ugly, the whole….”
“There’s no good to slavery though,” responded Hilferty.
The room erupted into laughter, and Garofalo recognized his humiliating mistake. “Well, then whatever the case may be,” he said, as the cackles continued. “You’re right. You’re right. I didn’t mean to imply that and I don’t believe that and I know that that’s the case. But I’m using that ‘good, bad, and ugly’ as a generic way of saying that you can teach any facts, any factually-based anything, regardless.”
Hilferty then engaged him in an epistemological conversation about how history is defined, and for a brief moment, it appeared as if she was close to unraveling the central mistake of Garofalo’s entire premise: His fundamental failure to recognize the ways in which our understanding of history is both constructed by and contingent on who we empower with its retelling.
Garofalo’s bill, HB 564, is one of several similar bills that have been introduced by Republican legislators in states across the country. Ostensibly intended to depoliticize the teaching of certain “divisive concepts,” these bills are, in actuality, a rather brazen effort either to marginalize or to simply ban Critical Race Theory from the American curriculum.
Specifically, HB 564 would require elementary and schools as well as colleges and universities, both public and private, to impose sanctions against those who teach, among other things, any of the following:
That either the United States of America or the state of Louisiana is fundamentally, institutionally, or systemically racist or sexist.
That an individual, by virtue of the individual’s race or sex, is inherently or systemically racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously, or has negative or positive characteristics that inhere in the individual’s DNA.
That an individual should be discriminated against, favored, or receive differential treatment solely or partly because of the individual’s race or sex.
That an individual, by virtue of the individual’s race or sex, bears responsibility or is to be held accountable for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex.
That any individual should feel or be made to feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological or emotional distress on account of that individual’s race or sex.
That the concept of meritocracy or traits such as a strong work ethic are racist or sexist or were created by a particular race or sex to oppress another race or sex.
That the concepts of capitalism, free markets, or working for a private party in exchange for wages are racist and sexist or oppress a given race or sex.
That the concepts of racial equity and gender equity, meaning the unequal treatment of individuals because of their race, sex, or national origin, should be given preference in education and advocacy over the concepts of racial equality and gender equality, meaning the equal treatment of individuals regardless of their race, sex, or national origin.
Garofalo repeatedly attempted to reassure his fellow committee members that he simply wanted to prevent the teaching of “opinions” as “fact.” It’s a claim that seems especially rich coming from a member of the political party that has consistently refused to repeal two state laws, one of which was already struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court, that allows for the teaching of new earth creationism as “science.” But it’s also fairly obvious that Ray Garofalo’s “ban” would actually serve to enshrine into law Ray Garofalo’s opinions—really, his entire worldview—to the exclusion of any education that recognizes the counterfactual.
Incidentally, the rhetoric employed by Garofalo—one that emphasizes an unquestionable belief in American exceptionalism, uses the language of “equality” to deny the historical and present-day realities of racism, and diminishes the dignity of those victimized by the brutalities and cruelties of racism, while excusing the culpability of its beneficiaries—is strikingly similar to the positions trotted out by the Republican candidate in the 1991 Louisiana governor’s race.
Not long after his defeat, David Duke would return to openly embracing and promoting unquestionably racist ideology, but when he ran for governor, he used issues like opposition to affirmative action and complaints about so-called “reverse discrimination.” He didn’t want to completely repudiate his racist past; he primarily wanted voters to know that his persona was more telegenic and mainstream than it was when he was an LSU student spewing venom in Free Speech Alley.
Louisiana state Rep. Stephanie Hilferty (R- New Orleans) thought carefully while questioning her colleague state Rep. Ray Garofalo about his proposal to ban the teaching of critical race theory during a meeting of the House Education Committee on April 27, 2021.
Earlier this year, Republicans lawmakers in Iowa passed a proposal to prohibit the teaching of systemic or institutional racism in so-called “diversity training” programs (the proposal originally applied to all educational programs but was scaled back once it reached the state Senate).
“This bill is a denial of history,” state Rep. Marti Anderson of Des Moines said. “The bill doesn’t want our next generations to receive complete American history education that includes the facts of our darkest hours.”
An effort considered by the New Hampshire General Court—the Granite State’s name for its 424-member bicameral legislature— appears headed toward defeat after swift public backlash and criticism from business leaders.
In addition to Garofalo’s bill in Louisiana and the apparently doomed bill in New Hampshire, similar legislation is currently under consideration in Arkansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Rhode Island, West Virginia, and Washington state and is expected to be introduced in Texas.
As legislators in Louisiana discussed HB 564, a nearly identical proposal in Idaho, HB 377, won passage in their state Senate and now awaits the signature of Gov. Brad Little. Notably, only Montana and Wyoming have fewer Black residents, per capita, than Idaho. According to the most recently available data from the American Community Survey, approximately 0.9% of Idahoans are Black. In Louisiana, on the other hand, Blacks comprise 32.8% of the population, eclipsing everywhere but neighboring Mississippi, with a 37.8% Black population. I bring this up not to “explain,” as it were, the ignorance of the Idaho state legislature but to call attention to the context in which these bills were introduced.
The proliferation of proposed legislation in state Capitols represents the latest part of a coordinated attack against Critical Race Theory first launched by former president Donald J. Trump, a man whose rise in politics began with his promotion of the racist conspiracy theory that the birth certificate of his Black predecessor, Barack Obama, was fraudulent.
That said, it’s hardly the first provocative and ill-intentioned bill in recent years to insult the perspectives of Black people.
In 2016, Louisiana state Rep. Lance Harris, a Republican from Alexandria, won passage for what he promoted as the nation’s first-ever “Blue Lives Matter” law, an almost certainly unconstitutional state statute that expands the definition of “hate crimes” to include criminal acts committed against members of law enforcement. Because existing law already provides for enhanced sentencing in those cases, Harris’ Blue Lives Matter bill was purely symbolic. As its title suggests, the bill was designed as a way to both trivialize the then-nascent Black Lives Matter movement while also undermining the legal status of Blacks as members of a “protected class,” manufacturing a narrative about the police as victims at the very moment in which a mass movement of Americans began demanding accountability for police killings and started to confront the realities of institutional racism.
But while Harris’ legislation was a crass response to a burgeoning social and political movement, the proposed bans against the teaching of Critical Race Theory are primarily driven by a desire to silence a critique about and quash dissent against a political leader.
One thing is for certain about Tuesday’s marathon committee hearing: It provided state Rep. Garofalo with a lot to consider. By the end of the day, he decided to pull his legislation.
The votes simply weren’t there. It was, he realized, a lost cause.
Update: I may have given him too muchcredit. Although he had repeatedly suggested he would not be tabling the legislation, there were reports late Tuesday that he haddecided to defer on the bill this year but expected to re-file another bill during next year’s session. However, it’s not clear that ever was the case.As soon as there is clarification on whether Garofalo understands that reality bites and has learned the truth about cats and dogs (sorry, wrong Garofalo) will continue pushing for this legislation, I will let readers know.
For several years in a row, the best annual show of the Louisiana legislative session was when the state Senate Education Committee performed its hilarious routine on the theory of evolution. Clips from those meetings have been viewed online more times than anything else that’s occurred inside the House that Huey Built. This includes Hurricane Chris’ 2009 live performance of “Halle Berry (She’s Fine),” the Shreveport rapper’s crudely misogynistic tribute to the Academy Award-winning actress, from the floor of the House chambers after his aunt, former state Rep. Barbara Norton, took a point of personal privilege and then handed him the mic.
The business of the legislature usually doesn’t make for compelling, must-see TV, so breakaway stars and viral videos are rare.
The annual discussion about evolution involved one of two proposals. On at least two occasions, state Sen. Dan Claitor, a moderate Republican from Baton Rouge, tried to convince his colleagues to finally repeal—officially— the so-called “Balanced Treatment for Creation-Science and Evolution-Science in Public School Instruction Act,” a law enacted in 1981 during the administration of Republican Gov. Dave Treen and struck down as unconstitutional six years later by the U.S. Supreme Court in the landmark case Edwards v. Aguillard. But nearly three decades after the decision, Claitor’s fellow Republicans were still unwilling to acknowledge the fact that the Balanced Treatment Act was, in fact, dead-letter law. As the Court reminded Louisiana in 1987, the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment “forbids the enactment of any law ‘respecting an establishment of religion.'”
More ambitiously, state Sen. Karen Carter-Peterson, a liberal Democrat from New Orleans, made multiple attempts to repeal a more recent law, the Orwellian-titled “Louisiana Science Education Act,” that allows for the teaching of new earth creationism (rebranded as “intelligent design”) in the science classroom. The committee hearings on Carter-Peterson’s bills were especially ripe with material.
One year, former state Sen. Elbert Guillory explained his support for the law by sharing a bizarre story about receiving a medical diagnosis from a “half-naked” witch doctor he met while traveling abroad. His “logic,” if you can even call it that, was that when students are taught to distinguish between actual science and religious mythology— witchcraft, for example—they are less likely to trust healthcare advice from a guy in a loincloth throwing animal bones on the ground. And that would be such a shame, Guillory claimed, because it’s a really fun experience.
But the real star of the education committee’s adaptation of Inherit the Wind was former state Sen. Mike Walsworth, a veteran Republican legislator from West Monroe.
In 2012, while Darlene Reaves, a high school science teacher from St. Francisville, testified about the importance of teaching science in science class, Walsworth, apparently believing that he had a “gotcha” question, asked her whether there were classroom experiments that could be conducted in support of evolution. As a matter of fact, Reaves told him, there’s an experiment involving the observation of E. coli bacteria.
After freezing the bacteria in different intervals, Reaves explained, “you can take all of them over time and compare them. You can see how the E. coli have changed over time and how they’ve evolved.”
“They evolved into a person?” Walsworth deadpanned.
One of the main reasons the committee’s discussions about evolution and creationism made for great theater was because of how completely outmatched the law’s defenders were by its opponents, led by then-17-year-old Zack Kopplin. As a part of his senior project at Baton Rouge Magnet, Kopplin launched a campaign to repeal the law, collecting endorsements from over 80 Nobel laureate scientists, more Nobel Prize winners than any other campaign has amassed since the first medals were awarded in 1901. Kopplin, by the way, is also responsible for making Mike Walsworth into a viral video star. Nearly a year after the committee meeting, he uploaded a clip of the state senator’s exchange with Darlene Reaves onto YouTube. It quickly racked up more than a half of a million views.
By then, the amiable but frequently befuddled Walsworth had been elevated to committee chairman. He may have been unconvinced by the evidence of evolution, but proof of the Peter Principle was indisputable.
In this year’s legislative session, which convened on April 12 and is set to adjourn “no later than 6:00 p.m. on Thursday, June 10, 2021,” although the routine on evolution is no longer in rotation, there’s no shortage of opportunities for legislators interested in becoming the star of a humiliating viral video.
Today, while the rest of the country continues to take inventory of the collateral damage inflicted by a former president who made more than 30,000 false or misleading claims during his four years in office and who unapologetically operated in the parallel dystopia of “alternative facts,” those of us in Louisiana have long been accustomed to a political landscape dominated by denialism and dominionism.
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal prepares to take the stage at the controversial prayer rally his campaign hosted at LSU’s Pete Maravich Assembly Center. Original photograph by Robin May.
Bobby Jindal’s Political Extinction
Bobby Jindal, the fast-talking former wunderkind who spent his undergraduate years performing unsanctioned exorcisms and studying biology at Brown University, ultimately deserves blame for the creationism law that garnered international ridicule, earned the opprobrium of the entire scientific community, and gave far-right Christian dominionists a green light to violate the Establishment Clause and commit educational malpractice against an entire generation of public school students.
Fortunately, the LSEA has since been removed from state curricula guidelines, and although there have been isolated reports about the teaching of creationism (which, in and of itself, is perfectly fine, provided it’s not taught as science), Louisiana public school science teachers respected their students far more than the right-wing grifters who sold the Book of Genesis for campaign cash.
Following Barack Obama’s victory over Mitt Romney, the same Bobby Jindal had some tough words for his fellow Republicans: “We must stop looking backward,” he said in January 2013, during his keynote address at the Republican National Committee’s winter meeting. “Nostalgia about the good old days is heart-warming, but the battle of ideas must be waged in the future.” To be sure, there wasn’t anything especially innovative about Jindal’s proposed arsenal for the back to the future brawl, just the typical tropes about states being the laboratories of democracy and a handful of edits he recommended making to the standard talking points (“We must not become the party of austerity. We must be the party of growth”).
He also included at least one serving of his signature dish, whitewashed word salad dressed with a confusing condemnation of any politics that recognizes racial identity. “We must reject the notion that demography is destiny, the pathetic and simplistic notion that skin pigmentation dictates voter behavior,” Jindal declared. Translation: We must accept the fact that demography is destiny and do a better job of appealing to minorities and younger voters.
Jindal’s vision of a post-racial America skips the chapters on truth and reconciliation and jumps directly to absolution. But this opens up an entirely new can of worms, and as I learned a few years ago, sometimes, a picture of a portrait is worth a thousand words.
This portrait of Jindal was prominently displayed at the entrance of his office on the fourth floor of the Louisiana state Capitol for seven of his eight years as governor. After I tweeted this picture, Kyle Plotkin, then serving as Jindal’s communications director, accused me of “race-baiting” and claimed that this was not Jindal’s “official portrait.” He included a photograph of a rose-tinted portrait of Jindal that hung in the Governor’s Mansion, which he labeled as the actual “official portrait.” The truth, however, is that Jindal did not have an “official portrait.” This tweet generated international news coverage and spawned the hashtag #BobbyJindalissowhite. Kyle Plotkin is currently the chief of staff for U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley.
More than anything else, Jindal’s speech to the RNC was a repudiation of Mitt Romney, who, in Jindal’s estimation, lost the 2012 presidential election by running as a wealthy elitist willing to ignore “47%” of voters.
But Jindal’s most memorable line wasn’t directed toward Romney. It was instead intended as a coded criticism of candidates like Todd Akin, the one-term, virulently anti-abortion Missouri congressman who self-sabotaged his campaign for the Senate in a single sentence. “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down,” Akin said, arguing that victims of “legitimate rape” are less likely to get pregnant.
“We must stop being the ‘stupid party,'” Jindal urged in response.
****
During his final year as Louisiana governor, after announcing a campaign for the White House in a bizarre digital ad that featured secretly-recorded footage of him revealing his plans to his three kids, who were far more interested in the turtle they spotted in the backyard of the Governor’s Mansion, the historically unpopular Jindal packed up and moved to Iowa. It ended up being a perfect metaphor for his lackluster campaign: No one was listening to Bobby Jindal.
“Donald Trump is an unstable narcissist,” Jindal said, accurately. “You know why he hasn’t read the Bible? Because he’s not in it.”
But Bobby Jindal’s campaign fizzled out before the Iowa caucuses, and the Stupid Party nominated a wealthy, out-of-touch elitist with a habit of making outrageously offensive and racist remarks and who, only a few years before, had been recorded boasting that “when you’re a star,” women will “let you” sexually assault them. “You can do anything,” he said. “Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.”
Despite warning Republican primary voters that Donald Trump was uniquely unqualified for the presidency, Jindal voted for him. It was a decision that neatly encapsulates the cautionary tale of the political prodigy who debuted in Louisiana as a 24-year-old boy wonder promising bold disruptions as he led the state’s healthcare and education systems into the new millennium. Indeed, Jindal’s mere presence—the Indian-American son of immigrants—had once been heralded as a powerful message about the future of a party that only four years before his arrival had been led by David Duke.
Jindal owes his extraordinary rise in Louisiana politics to the unrealized promise he once represented, but make no mistake: his eventual downfall and his subsequent irrelevance were entirely of his own making. Despite his indignant bluster about the failures of the Republican Party, Jindal didn’t just fail to confront the most retrograde and divisive aspects of radical right, he empowered them.
The Stupid Party became the scaffolding that surrounded the peculiar brand of “conservatism” he constructed.
More than five years after Jindal’s departure from office, his legacy remains in tatters, and his political brand continues to be toxic, even among Republicans. Last year, during the runoff campaign for the Fifth Congressional District between Republican state Rep. Lance Harris and the eventual victor, Republican Luke Letlow (who sadly lost his life to Covid-19 before being sworn into office), Harris attacked Letlow for, among other things, previously working for Bobby Jindal.
Obviously, the attack didn’t work, but the fact that it was made at all—particularly by a politician who served as chair of the Republican legislative caucus during Jindal’s second term—is remarkable nonetheless. It also highlights a disconnect over accountability that persists as the most important animating force in state politics: The same white Republicans who enabled and promoted and, in many ways, defined Jindal’s failures as governor have not only avoided scrutiny, they’ve nurtured an even more virulent and extreme brand of factionalism—one that was doubtlessly accelerated by the presidency of Donald Trump— that now possesses an even tighter grip on the state legislature.
But to understand how we have arrived at this particularly perilous moment, it’s important to distinguish between the truth about the origins of the Louisiana Republican Party and the creation myth that is told on the campaign trail.
****
Shakedown 1979
And the Creation Myth of the Louisiana Republican Party
In Louisiana, the Grand Old Party is neither especially grand nor particularly old. While it’s understandable that Louisiana Republicans occasionally attempt to trace their party’s provenance back to Honest Abe, the Party of Lincoln left Louisiana around the same time President Rutherford B. Hayes recalled federal troops from the state, officially signaling the end of Reconstruction. April 24, 1877, to be precise.
Aside from the name, today’s Louisiana Republican Party doesn’t have much in common with the party that championed civil rights and promoted newly-emancipated slaves into positions of prominence.
For most of the 20th century, Louisiana was a one-party state. “From 1900 to the 1950s the Louisiana Republicans did not offer even token opposition to the entrenched Democrats,” Philip Uzee, the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts at Nicholls State University, wrote in his 1971 essay “The Beginnings of the Louisiana Republican Party.” Uzee had reason to believe that after decades of irrelevance, the party was poised for a comeback. In 1971, out of the hundreds of elected offices in Louisiana, he noted, a total of 15 were occupied by a registered Republican, a sign he considered promising.
The Louisiana Republican Party is still a relatively new phenomenon, whereas the iteration that operated in Louisiana after the Civil War was a relatively brief phenomenon. “The Republicans were in power for eight years,” Uzee wrote. “The stormy era was characterized by some progress in education and civil and political rights for Negroes, some economic rehabilitation for the state as well as fraud, corruption and violence. The party’s control of Louisiana was buttressed by the favor of the Grant administration and the presence of federal troops. When these essential props were removed there followed the events of April 24, 1877, and the collapse of the Republican regime.”
Image credit: Lamar White, Jr.
Uzee’s instincts would prove to be prescient. In 1972, only months after losing his campaign for Louisiana governor to then-Congressman Edwin Edwards, Dave Treen, a lawyer from suburban New Orleans who had made three unsuccessful bids for Congress in 1962, 1964, and 1968, became the state’s first Republican elected to the U.S. House of Representatives since Reconstruction, winning the seat for the Third District by defeating Democrat Louis Watkins, Jr., 54% to 46%.
Two years later, Treen breezed into another term, along with Republican Henson Moore, whose narrow, 14-vote win over Democrat Jeff LaCaze had to be held a second time, thanks to malfunctioning equipment. The rematch wasn’t even close. Moore won the seat for the Sixth Congressional District by slightly more than 10,000 votes, and a couple of years after that, Republican Bob Livingston beat Democrat Ron Faucheux in the state’s First Congressional District. Within the span of only five years, Louisiana’s federal delegation had tripled its Republican membership. By the end of the decade and with Edwin Edwards constitutionally prohibited from running for a third conservative term, Congressman Treen’s eyes were once again on the state’s biggest prize.
The 1979 Louisiana gubernatorial election was a classic, and it’s a story worth telling. It’s also a seminal moment in the history of the Louisiana Republican Party that helps to explain some of the issues it would use and the divisions it would exploit in becoming a competitive, credible political institution.
Nine candidates qualified in total, but because three of them were either obscure or perennial candidates, it was, for all intents and purposes, a six-person race, featuring Sonny Mouton, president pro-tem of the state Senate; Speaker of the state House Bubba Henry; Louis Lambert, chairman of the state’s powerful Public Service Commission; the 37-year-old Secretary of State, Paul Hardy; the outgoing Lieutenant Governor, Jimmy Fitzmorris, and the Republican congressman, Dave Treen.
The first and arguably the most important thing to understand about the 1979 election is that it was only the second gubernatorial contest under the state’s now-legendary jungle primary system and the first to be decided in a runoff. For those unfamiliar, the jungle primary (or majority-vote primary) requires that all candidates, regardless of their party affiliation, compete against one another; political parties in Louisiana do not select nominees in separate elections. If no candidate receives more than 50% of the vote, then the first and second place finishers face one another in a runoff.
In 1975, during the first of his four terms in office, Democratic Gov. Edwin Edwards enacted the new system, believing that it was not only more elegant and democratic (lower case d), but also that it would only further marginalize candidates who belonged to the already marginal and severely outnumbered Republican Party. As an added benefit, the system promised to save the state money, because Democrats (upper case D) were so dominant that general elections rarely, if ever, were actually competitive.
The 1979 race featured another x-factor, because that year, in an attempt to catch the reputed New Orleans Mafia boss Carlos Marcello engaging in some good ol’ fashioned political corruption, two FBI agents and an informant named Joseph Hauser, a recently convicted insurance fraudster, flew down to Louisiana and pretended to be big-shot insurance brokers who wanted to partner with Marcello on a plan they claimed would save the state a ton of money. With Edwards on his way out, the FBI instead began sending sizable campaign donations to the men running to take his place, hoping that at least one of them would agree to sign a portion of the state’s insurance business over to them as a gesture of their gratitude.
Image credit: Lamar White, Jr.
Somehow, they’d gotten Charles Roemer, the outgoing Commissioner of Administration, father of future Louisiana Gov. Buddy Roemer, and campaign treasurer for Sonny Mouton, stupidly wrapped into their scheme. Roemer wouldn’t make any commitments, but he was happy to accept the $25,000 donation to the Mouton campaign, seemingly unbeknownst to the candidate and, at least initially, nowhere to be found on his campaign finance reports. Roemer ended up spending time in jail for his role in the conspiracy. Louis Lambert outsmarted the agents; their contribution to his campaign was actually for the purchase of tickets, keeping him in compliance with financial disclosure requirements and ensuring that Uncle Sam knew he had received something of value in consideration for the cash. And while they never pursued any charges against him, the FBI was breathing down Jimmy Fitzmorris’ neck for months.
At the time, the 1979 Louisiana gubernatorial election was the most expensive non-presidential contest in American history, “a $20 million extravaganza that is keeping advertisements for car dealers and deodorants off the television stations,” the New York Times reported. Fittingly, the Federal Bureau of Investigations was one of the year’s most generous campaign donors.
Perhaps it’s not too surprising that the results of the Oct. 27 jungle primary were challenged in court and plagued by a cloud of suspicion. There was never much doubt over whether Dave Treen would survive the first round; polls showed he was “unquestionably” the frontrunner. The real battle, as is often the case in Louisiana, was for second place.
Initially, it appeared that Lt. Gov. Fitzmorris, who had been polling in a “strong second” to Treen and who boasted the endorsement of Ernest N. “Dutch” Morial, New Orleans’ first Black mayor, had survived the jungle, but three days after polls closed, “major changes in voting returns” showed that Lambert had captured the second place spot, besting Fitzmorris by a margin of only 2,296 votes.
Things quickly got even uglier. Fitzmorris filed suit, citing “widespread allegations of election irregularities, including vote buying, voting machine manipulation and polling commissioners entering voting machines illegally with voters.” Machines in at least three parishes had not been sealed prior to the official count, as required by law, and in a sworn affidavit, one witness claimed that there were 1,670 more votes in the governor’s race in East Baton Rouge Parish than there were voters who signed the precinct books on Election Day. But Fitzmorris’ lawsuit was quickly dismissed, largely due to the state Election Code’s requirement that a challenge be filed within five days of an election and prohibiting the introduction of any evidence not specifically alleged in the written pleadings.
Lambert failed to receive the endorsements of any of his Democratic primary opponents. In fact, Fitzmorris and the three other leading Democrats would publicly announce their support for Treen, who had already made his commitment to personal integrity and honesty the centerpiece of his campaign. Shortly thereafter, the Louisiana Democratic Party narrowly passed resolutions to censure both state Sen. Sonny Mouton and state Rep. Bubba Henry.
“To hell with them all,” Mouton said in response. “I’ve spent half my life being a staunch Democrat. And those sons-of-bitches censured me? I’ll put Treen’s integrity and credibility over Lambert’s any day of the week. It’s like telling me I have to endorse Lucifer over God because Lucifer’s a Democrat.”
(Lambert suspected that his four fellow Democrats who endorsed Dave Treen had each been promised something in return, an allegation that Treen denied at the time. But once in office, Treen found jobs for all four men in his administration. Henry was named Commissioner of Administration, the second-most powerful position in state government. Mouton became Treen’s Executive Counsel. Hardy was his Secretary of Transportation, and Fitzmorris was given the title of Special Assistant for Industrial Development).
Even though all of the stars seemed to be aligning for Dave Treen, his victory was by no means a foregone conclusion. In the days leading up to the election, his campaign prepared themselves and the public for the very real possibility of a contested election, suggesting that if Lambert were to win, it would probably be the result of some sort of mischief or manipulation. Ultimately though, Treen prevailed in the Dec. 8 runoff by fewer than 10,000 votes, becoming the state’s first Republican governor in 102 years.
There had been some speculation that Treen, once in office, would move to dismantle the jungle primary, but the election had persuaded him against messing with his success. Because Lambert faced stiff opposition from other Democrats—opposition that only grew after he made the runoff— he could not claim to be his party’s de facto nominee, whereas Treen, as the sole Republican in the race, could. Because of the jungle primary, Republicans, as long as they were disciplined and well-organized, could use the fact that they were vastly outnumbered to their advantage.
For this reason, Edwin Edwards is sometimes facetiously referred to as “the father of the Louisiana Republican Party.”
But make no mistake: Things didn’t change overnight, and it’d take awhile before Republicans were convinced the jungle primary was a good thing. Four years after Treen’s historic victory, Edwin Edwards would return to the Governor’s Mansion, beating Treen (for the second time) in a landslide, and Democrats continued to dominate Louisiana for the next quarter century. It would take another lawyer from Metairie named Dave to usher in the era of Republican dominance.
As a state representative, David Vitter championed the passage of a law creating legislative term limits, which promised to deprive Democrats across the state the advantage of incumbency. For Democrats who weren’t at risk due to term limits, particularly those representing competitive districts, Vitter found another way to threaten their political futures, launching a new organization, the Louisiana Committee for a Republican Majority, to pressure members to either switch parties or take their chances against a well-funded Republican opponent. The one-two punch of term limits and the LCRM delivered the final devastating blow.
In 2004, 32 years after Dave Treen became the state’s first Republican elected to the U.S. House of Representatives since Reconstruction, Louisiana finally elected a Republican to the U.S. Senate. His name? David Bruce Vitter.
The “new” Louisiana Republican Party, however, wasn’t born in 1972 or 1979 or even 2004; it was born on May 17, 1954, the day the United States Supreme Court unanimously ruled that segregation of public schools on the basis of race was unconstitutional, thereby overturning more than a half of a century of precedent established in Plessy v. Ferguson.
To be sure, there are legitimate arguments that the party was actually born in the aftermath of the 1948 Democratic National Convention, which featured an impassioned speech on civil rights by an LSU graduate named Hubert Horatio Humphrey, Jr., prompting delegates from Alabama and Mississippi to walk out in protest. 1948 was also the year President Truman ordered the integration of the military, and the year that Strom Thurmond, the right-wing, white supremacist Democratic governor of South Carolina, would challenge Truman’s reelection from a new “segregationist” political party, the States’ Rights Democratic Party, supporters of which became better known as Dixiecrats. Thurmond carried four states: South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Newspaper reports of Dewey’s win over Truman were greatly exaggerated.
Others claim July 2, 1964, the day President Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act and, upon doing so, reportedly quipped, “There goes the South for a generation.” And yes, it is also true that Charlie and Virginia deGravelles, the husband/wife duo who are sometimes credited as being the “founders of the modern Louisiana Republican Party,” joined the GOP in 1941, becoming the first two white Republicans registered in Lafayette Parish. But LBJ was merely acknowledging a foregone conclusion. (1964 was also the year that U.S. Sen. Strom Thurmond left the Democratic Party for good and became a Republican). And while the deGravelles, who were well-respected organizational leaders, were indeed two of the first members of a “modern” Louisiana Republican Party, they were also two of the last members of Wendell Willkie’s Republican Party.
Brown v. Board of Education signaled the beginning of the end of the so-called “Solid South” and the moment that Southern Democrats understood that their party was irreparably split. The Court’s decision would also serve as the animating force that drove whites—down Eisenhower’s newly-paved interstate highways—into the red-lined cul-de-sacs of suburbia, turning the capital and the commerce of downtowns into the windowless colossus of the shopping mall and constructing brand-new schools where white students wouldn’t have to confront the dismantling of the Jim Crow order that their parents and grandparents had fought to preserve.
In a sign of the times, during the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education, members of the Louisiana Democratic Party’s Central Committee voted to oust their National Committeeman, Alexandria lawyer Camille Gravel, after Gravel publicly declared his support for the nascent civil rights movement, arguing that “segregation is immoral.” The Democratic National Committee overruled their white supremacist members down in Louisiana and promptly reinstated Gravel. The story made headlines across the planet, earning Gravel, a devout Catholic, induction into the Order of St. Gregory by Pope Pius XII. (Incidentally, 20 years later, Gravel would serve as the Executive Counsel to Gov. Edwin Edwards, who tasked him with drafting the state statute creating the jungle primary).
In most respects, the story of the Louisiana Republican Party isn’t any different than the story of the GOP in any other Southern state, except that the concentration of Blacks in New Orleans provided Democrats with a more durable firewall than they had in other, more rural states.
No doubt, there will be Louisiana Republicans who vehemently disagree with the notion that theirs is the party of segregation, not the party of Lincoln. But this assessment does not deny the existence of those whose affiliation with the party is informed by a principled belief in traditional American conservatism: Limited, decentralized government, a libertarian approach toward most social issues, an emphasis on the private-sector, and a preference for judicial restraint. I may personally find some of these beliefs to be objectionable or specious, yet there’s no denying that the dialectic between liberalism and conservatism or federalism and anti-federalism has defined American government since the very beginning.
But it’d be inapt to characterize today’s Louisiana Republican Party and the Trumpian faction of the national party as “conservatives,” even if they pay lip-service to conservatism. They are instead the latest incarnation of another persistent presence in our politics: An isolationist, protectionist, and ethnonationalist ideology that governs by chaos and occasionally displays a proclivity for proto-fascism. And that’s why its origins in the politics of racial segregation remain relevant.
Edwin Edwards once said that one of his biggest regrets in life was making Dave Treen, who he came to deeply admire and respect, the punchline of his classic zinger, “He’s so slow he takes an hour and a half to watch 60 Minutes.” But for all of Treen’s virtues, the truth is that he got his start in politics in 1959 after joining Louisiana’s segregationist States’ Rights Party and then striking up an alliance with the state’s most notorious white supremacists, Willie Rainach and Leander Perez. Later, Treen would attempt to distance himself from the brazenly racist movement, arguing, unconvincingly, that he had been “motivated by constitutional principle, not race,” repeating the same tired line many other Republicans of his era used to excuse their opposition to integration, as if they were merely engaging in a thought exercise or an abstract philosophical debate (one that is premised, by the way, on the notion that Black lives don’t matter).
Republican apologists continue to claim that their parry’s exponential growth in the Deep South has nothing to do with race. Instead, they say, voters gravitated toward the party because of its positions on economic issues. But in a 2018 paper in The American Economic Review by Princeton University’s Ilyana Kuziemko and Yale University’s Ebonya Washington, “Why Did the Democrats Lose the South? Bringing New Data to an Old Debate,” the claim is thoroughly debunked.
“The exodus of Southern whites from the Democratic Party is one of the most transformative, and controversial, political developments in twentieth-century American history,” they write. “Using newly available data, we conclude that defection among racially conservative whites just after Democrats introduce sweeping Civil Rights legislation explains virtually all of the party’s losses in the region. We find essentially no role for either income growth in the region or (non-race-related) policy preferences in explaining why Democrats ‘lost’ the South” (emphasis added).
For what it’s worth, Kuziemko and Washington posit a different date for the pivotal shift:
“[A]nalyzing contemporaneous media and survey data, we identify instead the Spring of 1963, when Democratic President John F. Kennedy first proposed legislation barring discrimination in public accommodations, as the critical moment when Civil Rights is, for the first time, an issue of great salience to the majority of Americans and an issue clearly associated with the Democratic Party.”
There are several state lawmakers who could illustrate how this dynamic continues to operate in Louisiana, but few are as transparently Machiavellian and or as mendacious as Republican state Sen. Sharon Hewitt of Slidell. And perhaps more than anyone else, Hewitt also unwittingly provides insight into the future of the Louisiana Republican Party.
The Grand Marshal of the Parade of Fools
The day before the Capitol Insurrection, Louisiana state Sens. Beth Mizell, Heather Cloud, and Sharon Hewitt decided to coordinate their outfits for a photograph that would accompany their letter to the Republican men who represent Louisiana on Capitol Hill. In complementary black and herringbone-patterned businesswear, the three stand shoulder-to-shoulder, maskless during a pandemic that was still awaiting the rollout of vaccines. Mizell and Cloud awkwardly hold up a print-out of the letter in front of Hewitt, who appears limbless in between her two colleagues.
Maybe it was inadvertent, but the Southern Republicans, in their matching gray suits, seem to be making a subtle nod to the Confederate gray uniforms of the Civil War.
The three women definitely believe that they are fighting a battle.
“Dear Senators and Congressmen,” they write. “In the United States, the lifeblood of our Republic is our free and fair elections. Today, that bedrock off our society faces challenges like never before. We contend that if the American people lose faith and hope in our election process, our freedom, way of life and collective future will suffer.”
They then quote from Ronald Reagan’s 1967 inaugural speech as California governor. “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction,” he famously said at a time in which the Cold War was a daily reality of American life.
“It is for this reason that we are writing to urge you to stand firm and call into question the electors from the states of Arizona, Michigan, Georgia, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin when congress meets on January 6, 2021,” they explain.
They’re full of shit, all three of them, amplifying the dangerous, delusional, and discredited Big Lie that would, less than 24 hours later, incite a mob of Trump-supporting seditionists, white supremacists, militia members, Qanon conspiracists, and right-wing extremists to storm the Capitol in an act of insurrection, murdering a police officer, injuring more than 100 other members of law enforcement, and resulting in the deaths of at least four others.
Mizell, Cloud, and Hewitt dressed their letter up in the hyperbole and vapid consultant-speak of phony outrage and even phonier patriotism. They probably didn’t write the letter. Last year, during the beginning of the pandemic, the Bayou Brief published a talking points memo that Hewitt had been circulating among her fellow Republicans. It attempted to redefine the public health crisis as nothing more than an act of economic sabotage committed by the state’s Democratic governor. The memo was written by Jay Connaughton, a Republican political consultant from Mandeville who had previously worked for Trump.
None of the three state lawmakers have acknowledged their complicity in spreading a baseless and fraudulent scam that aimed to disenfranchise millions of legal votes only in swing states that were carried by President Joe Biden. Among the men in the state’s federal delegation to whom they addressed their letter, only one, Louisiana’s senior U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy, refused to play along with the Big Liars. Even U.S. Rep. Garret Graves, who had previously exhibited signs of living in the “reality-based community,” voted against ratifying the already-certified electoral votes from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, though, given the tortuous, 1,100-word explanation he sent to constituents, it was clear he immediately regretted his decision.
Actually, that’s selling Sharon short. She wants to do a few things this year.
After single-handedly sabotaging the state’s contract to purchase new and badly-needed voting machines from Dominion Voting Systems (gee, I wonder why), only to ensure that the state continues to use the outmoded machines manufactured by ::checks notes:: Dominion Voting Systems, Hewitt is now proposing the creation of a convoluted bureaucracy of “experts” responsible for ensuring the quality control of voting machine procurement practices, which she has christened as “the Voting System Technology Commission.” (It’s reminiscent of the former office of the Commissioner of Voting Machines, which Governing Magazine once described as “the most ridiculous elective office in American state government”).
The legislation is not only a solution in search of a problem that only delusional conspiracy theorists believed to exist, it also reads like a ham-handed effort to prove her newly-found expertise on the subject of voting machine procurement by copying and pasting the language from the existing Request for Proposals document. (Again, legislators like Hewitt aren’t guided by conservatism; the only thing consistent about their political ideology is its chaotic appeals to the radical fringe).
On Tuesday, the bill advanced out of the Senate Committee on Senate and Governmental Affairs, but not before being subjected to a nearly two-hour long discussion by a parade of white Republicans who came armed with conspiracy theories and complaints about not being already named to Hewitt’s hypothetical commission. Former state Rep. Lenar Whitney, who served as the Louisiana Republican Party’s National Committeewoman at the 2020 RNC, fought back tears while expressing her opposition to the bill, primarily because she wanted to stack the proposed commission with like-minded people from the “grassroots.” The lunatics would like to run the asylum, thank you very much. (The 2020 election was the most secure election in American history, by the way. That’s not the opinion of liberal journalists or Democratic operatives; it’s the conclusion reached by the Trump administration’s own officials).
Hewitt’s most potentially consequential and revealing proposal this yearis her bill to end the jungle primary system for congressional elections, an experiment Louisiana already tried out less than a decade ago. Hewitt has pretended for at least a year to be officially studying the idea of doing away with the jungle primary, and even though the current proposal only calls for changing the way the state conducts congressional elections, it’s obvious the ultimate aim is to overhaul state contests as well, something that sounds appealing to another far-right extremist, state attorney general Jeff Landry.
Already, it appears as if the proposal is dead on arrival. Why? Well, for one thing, it has revealed significant divisions between moderate Republicans and those on the far-right, divisions that could threaten the durability and sustainability of the party itself. Moderates recognize that they benefit from a system that incentivizes candidates with “crossover appeal.” The zealots would prefer that voters allow members of their club the ability to sort out their differences with those who think ideologically impure thoughts.
But there’s another, more fundamental concern. While the number of registered Republicans in Louisiana now exceeds one million voters, lagging behind the number of registered Democrats by approximately 224,000 (or 7% of the total electorate), the Louisiana Republican Party is nearly 94% white. Put another way, in a state in which Blacks make up slightly more than 32% of the population, only 2% of registered Republicans are Black.
Reverting back to a closed primary system would effectively be a return to the whites-only primary system that persisted in various iterations across the South until at least 1948.
It would put into stark relief the disconnect between the composition of the state and the composition of the political party that controls every statewide office with the exception of governor and commands a super-majority in one legislative chamber and a near-super-majority in the other. And it would also prominently illustrate the unsettling truth about a party founded on and animated by the politics of racial segregation.
When you type “1301 Kentucky St.” in Google Maps, a pretty nondescript white-painted warehouse pops up in a pretty average looking neighborhood – average for New Orleans, anyway. People may walk by, and likely not give it another look, if they looked at it in the first place. But, like most places in this city – haunted or otherwise – 1301 Kentucky St. holds a special spirit within.
It was the filmmaking home (and sometimes actual home) of local filmmaker “Little” Joe Catalanotto, a many times over behind-the-scenes crewman and director of the hyper-regional creature-feature Nutria Man – and now the base of operations for 9th Ward Studios. I first came across his name through a Facebook ad for an outdoor event screening of the movie by the now-defunct Indywood. Of course, as an area critic first and foremost, I was attracted to this most specific to Louisiana monster movie gimmick, and wondered why more of these hadn’t been made over the years. Why not?
From Cassie: Let’s go get ‘em.
It wasn’t until recently that I had begun research on the history of what would become known as “Hollywood South,” which meant going over projects from the silent Tarzan flicks to Belizaire the Cajun, give or take. What I’ve learned thus far is that a majority of these films were, by and large, pretty independent, to varying degrees, from tightened crews to tighter budgets. The common thread here is looking to be one of resourcefulness.
Joe Catalanotto’s name has popped up a few times in my search of credits and, while our industry here has been host to many creators from auteurs to cast to crew, I found his resume to be of special interest. After all, he made a movie about a human swamp rat – our Creature from the Black Lagoon. Joe’s a man after my own heart, really.
I put out a request on Facebook for anyone who knows or knew him, in a hunt for stories and anecdotes on various film sets. Immediately, someone tagged into the comments a name: Cassie Days. She also goes by Catalanotto. She’s Joe’s daughter, and she was open to a chat – even inviting me to a crawfish boil. While my shellfish allergies wouldn’t mix well with that offer (I know, I know – it’s a heartbreak for this cajun/creole boy), I just jumped at the chance to pick her brain.
We went on for about an hour, discussing things from the Boggy Creek films to the actor Slim Pickens (that’s a tale for another day). But again, the one consistent and common thread I found was in resourcefulness. Her father Joe had some serendipitous “right place, right time” moments in his career, but took to them with such humility and gung-ho spirit.
Again, spirit.
That’s what comes with being independent. That’s what comes with New Orleans.
From Cassie: On the set of French Quarter Undercover, Joe directing with a megaphone, star Billie Holiday smoking a cigarette.
Bill: What do you think of Hollywood South as it has existed in the last few years?
Cassie: From my perspective, the big thing that stands out is how it’s grown so much. It seems so big now from the point of view of watching it when it started, when it was born, just the first early seeds of it, because even though I’m a little bit young-ish being 40, I got to see the town when we were just one film crew deep and my dad is the person who trained the people in that one film crew.
So it used to be, for many years, for decades, those of us who worked in film all knew each other. And then it quickly got a little bit bigger and it was a lot of people that maybe you knew, maybe you didn’t work with them that much, but someone would say, “Oh I knew so-and-so, they work on films,” or, “Yeah I knew them.” And then now you bump into someone and they say, “Oh, my cousin works on films, this is their name. Do you know them?” And you go, “No,” and they go, “Oh they’ve been doing it 10 years.” You go, “Never encountered them.” So it went from a family to a whole economic level in the city of middle-class people. Making a decent living.
Bill: How did things begin for your father’s career?
Cassie: Going back a long time ago, he was born in 1939. He lived in the projects that were behind the French Quarter, it was the Iberville projects. He noticed this funny air conditioner duct making a turn. Instead of going right to the building, it made a couple turns before it went in, and he was like, “Why does that air conditioner duct make those turns, that’s extra?” He was a sandwich delivery boy at times and he delivered sandwiches to that place, and he found out it was a recording studio.
It was Cosimo Matassa’s recording studio, and that air conditioner ductwork was so that you wouldn’t hear the air blowing right in, or the compressor. It would be a little bit muffled so you could be recording sound and music while the cool air conditioning was running.
That’s where early rock and roll was recorded. Some people say Fats Domino singing “They Call Me the Fat Man” is the first rock and roll song, some people say. But definitely all the early… all the Fats Domino songs were recorded there. Little Richard recorded all of his songs there like “Tutti Frutti”, “Good Golly Miss Molly”. And Irma Thomas, and the Neville Brothers, and Professor Longhair all recorded their stuff there, and my dad was the microphone and cable boy.
My dad was just a teenager, like 14, 15, and I think for him seeing something like “Tutti Frutti” get recorded and then make it to number one on the charts – and he was in the room when it happened – that it was really eye-opening. It sounds like, from how my dad retells it, maybe he realized that he could be part of bigger things even though he was seen as a poor kid whose father had abandoned his family.
He learned the skills in there, recording skills, and worked in the entertainment industry beyond that, just kind of grew from that. He worked at movie theaters, he went to Jamaica and worked on films and built movie studios, and all along the way picked up crafts of the different trades of doing camera work, or doing sound work, projection work, editing, grew from there. So that’s the early days of how he got involved.
From Cassie: Dad at Cosimo Matassa’s recording studio, late 1950’s.
Bill: What big breaks did your father get early on in the film industry? Who did he work with?
Cassie: In the early 70s, my dad had been working in the entertainment industry audio recording. He had been to Jamaica and worked on several films there, built a studio in Jamaica for these guys called The Sages Brothers, so he had some film chops. He was in New Orleans and would work on a film if it came to town. Like Live and Let Die, he worked on that, whatever year that was made. And Mandingo. It was so small at the time, the film industry, any film… oh, Easy Rider, that was one from 1969, so my dad worked on that.
So Charlie Pierce. He had an advertising agency in Texarkana. I think, I would imagine part of that was filming commercials, [for his] ad agency. Okay, so not films but familiarity with how you do a production, lights, camera, actors, all that stuff. So dad met Charlie Pierce in New Orleans on some job and he was like, “I like your work ethic and I’m thinking about expanding and making films.” My dad and his family were still recovering from Hurricane Betsy, and my dad said, “Well I got some family obligations.” My dad had all these little half brothers and sisters, four little half brothers and sisters that he was helping take care of, that were much younger. He’s like, “Well how much money would help you get on your feet where you could come with me to Texarkana?” And he said, “1,500,” and Charlie gave it to him, the $1,500.
So dad went with him to work on films and from his first film, Charlie’s children told me my dad was his right-hand man. And to me, it sounds like really together they were able to make the movies happen. My dad did everything right next to who was the writer, producer, director. That was Charlie – writer, producer, director. So dad helped everything along the way – casting, locations, special effects, camera, props, sound, to editing, score, and distribution.
Bill: He sounds like a film industry jack of all trades.
Cassie: Yeah, and pretty neat to get to see it go from A to Z like that. And they did that for seven films in about five years.
My dad had a friend, Cherie, who was painting faces in the French Quarter for like Mardi Gras and I guess other times on Bourbon Street doing fancy face painting. And he was like, “Hey, you want to come work on movies and do makeup?” And she was only 19 but her parents were like, “It sounds like the opportunity of a lifetime, you can go.” So she went to Texarkana and Montana, and she would dress up the Native Americans in the paint on their faces, and give them their props and stuff. She told me that, she said she would do this from the back of her little station wagon, give them spears and stuff.
So Charlie was a huge break in himself and dad helped him build the film crew and he didn’t pay them very much, but he told them after five years he would give them a piece of the company. And it didn’t quite work out so after five years that crew kind of disbanded. But it was a great run for them all.
Bill: Tell me about Nutria Man.
Terror in the Swamp (aka Nutria Man) on Youtube
Cassie: Yeah, so let’s see. Okay, so the nutria fur in real life is known for being very soft, but doesn’t look great. It’s brown and it looks kind of ratty, shaggy, but is desired for fur coats. So in Nutria Man, some scientists are plotting to make a very large nutria to get one fur coat out of one pelt, and they combine human DNA with the nutria and it goes haywire and they make a monster, a nutria-man combination. And the nutria man has a bloodlust even though nutria themselves are really vegetarian, and it goes on a killing spree in the swamps.
Bill: It got retitled at a point, right? To Terror in the Swamp?
Cassie: Yeah. It was made and going to distribution, and my dad said I guess the distributors called and said, “People don’t know what a nutria is, you got to change the name to Terror in the Swamp.”
Bill: So how did the project come about for your father?
Cassie: Martin Folse wrote the script, and he was a very young man living in Houma. Had this film set in Houma, his area, and somehow heard of my dad and probably looked him up in the phone book and came to New Orleans to meet him. And my dad at this point has built a film studio and has a little array of equipment, enough to do one small film. He came to my dad and said, “I have this script, I have money to make this movie.” My dad said, “Okay, when you’re directing it…,” and he said, “No, I can’t direct it, I don’t know how to direct it, you direct it.” “Okay.”
It’s very rare that you have the script, the money, and someone else to pay you. Often times it was the script but there’s usually not the money.
Bill: So it kind of just fell into place. It was almost like serendipity.
Cassie: Yeah. I think though that you had the existence of the equipment and the existence of money and script, and desire to do it. There’s a little bit of yahoo craziness that they also both had. Like if you’d seen the movie and you remember the scene where the local guys in their boats have the guns and beer, and they’re running their boats around, and they get dusted with stuff from the plane, they’ve fallen out of the boat. Well, the people I know from New Orleans who worked on it said that they were of course real Houma people using their own boats, friends of Martin Folse, neighborhood people, and they really got drunk. It took hours to film it as things do, it took all day. And they were like, “Yep, by the end when the boats are crisscrossing and the guys are falling out,” they were like, “That was pretty much really happening. They were so drunk, almost crashing their boats into each other.”
Bill: Getting their courage up!
Cassie: So I think Martin Folse was a little crazy, I think of course the kind of Cajun mentality is a little crazy, and my dad has a little bit of that crazy too, and he’s half Cajun also. But my dad is very crazy, he would do lots of things to risk his life, and if it’s funny or it’s going to be a good shot he would climb things and ride on the outside of vehicles, dangle from things.
Bill: In a previous chat we had, you mentioned this really great story of Joe welding a piece of metal to a car to get a particular shot. Could you maybe go through that story one more time?
Cassie: A guy who was working as a detail cop on it just relayed that story to me. So my dad was there, they couldn’t get the shot, they didn’t have the right tow vehicle able to get the camera the right way. And my dad said, “Oh I got this. I got welding equipment.” And he comes and he welds a rod, bends it into a U shape, welds the other end, and then attaches a little piece of plywood, and then he’s like, “Yeah, I’m going to stand on this and hold the camera.” And the officer said, “I can’t sign off on this being the only officer here. This is not safe, you can’t drive down the road like this.” And my dad says, “Okay, hang on a minute,” and he goes, “Hey big fella, give me your belt.”
Trailer for French Quarter Undercover
And this heavy man gave him his belt, and my dad took off his own belt, and my dad wrapped his own belt underneath his arms, he wrapped the bigger belt to that belt and up to some rigging that was up above the car, so then he could dangle if he needed to, but his feet were on this little platform, and then he had two hands-free to hold the camera. And he goes, “Is this safe enough for you officer?”
And I think the officer just admired the effort and the ingenuity. He said, “Yes, that’s good, you can go with that,” and my dad got the shot. But he wasn’t the director and he wasn’t the cameraman, and at that point he was just renting equipment and was standing back a little bit, not doing hands-on stuff.
And I said, “Why did he film it?” And [the officer] said, “Oh, no one else would get on the platform.”
My dad was probably 50 years old, not doing camera anymore, but he’s like, “Oh yeah, I’ll do it.” And then the officer made this metaphor and he said, “And it was a passion like that, that allowed your dad to bring the film industry here.” He said, “It took somebody who was that driven to tame the beast of the film industry,” and he said, “A lot of people like film, want to work in film, like making money.” He’s like, “But are they willing to strap themselves to the side of the vehicle?”
And he goes, “I haven’t seen anybody else with dedication like that.” Beautiful metaphor.
Bill: You mentioned the studio that he built in New Orleans. What was the name of it?
Cassie: Independent Studios, and the name is Independent because when he was doing Charlie Pierce movies, Charlie Pierce is credited with being one of the first independent filmmakers at all, in the country, when these were made by the studios. So my dad was like, “Okay, yeah, we’re independent film,” which is kind of amazing. The whole category of independent film started somewhere and maybe it was a handful of people but Charlie Pierce was one of them, and my dad was right there next to him.
My dad’s always been really dedicated to New Orleans, and he would see that they would film some exteriors here, do some stuff in the French Quarter, and then go back to California to shoot interiors on a soundstage throughout the years. And he was like, “Well they could just film more stuff here. They could film interiors here if they had a big enough space.”
This is a town full of warehouses, being a port city, but they’re all occupied with something. It’s coffee, or it’s lead, this or that. They’re all full. So my dad had this empty warehouse, people would come, and he had enough of a network that people heard about it and things would come. So commercials, lots of music videos, movies, would come and film at our place.
From Cassie: A Popeyes commercial in our studio.
Some of the things we had at the studio were Bobby Brown and Whitney Houston, and Journey, and AC/DC practiced at our studio for a month before starting the North American world tour. And the Budweiser frogs – Bud, Weis, Er – was filmed at our studio. I have the artist sketch of that set.
And then I was talking with my husband a couple of weeks ago and he goes, “Well, I know from a Folgers Crystals commercial that people can’t tell the difference. If you know anything about that.” He was being sassy and being funny,”If you’ve ever heard of the Folgers Crystals commercial.” I said, “Heard of it?” I go, “It dominated my life for a little while.“ It was filmed at Court of Two Sisters in New Orleans and we had to build a gazebo above it with a lattice in the courtyard, and the lattice got painted in my backyard.
Bill: Did your father do any teaching? Like film teaching to any students or even just to people wanting to learn on the job?
Cassie Catalanotto, on the left, showing her self-made mobile hand washing station for film productions – such ingenuity must run in her family.
Cassie: He was known for being a good teacher on the job. He never did any official teaching in a school setting and he wasn’t a big school person himself, he was a little bit too active for school as I was too. So I think that’s why film works good for him because it’s out in the world. And he was always teaching, I mean his friends credit him with that very much, that he taught that first film crew and then many people beyond that, for years beyond that. There are guys who work together now as grips and electricians, and they’ll send me pictures together of themselves out on set meeting for the first time, because it’ll be a guy who trained with Joe in the early ’80s and a guy who trained with Joe in the early ’90s, and so they didn’t know each other but they’re now working together as men in their 50s on a production. So this ongoing cycle of people who were trained to be… A lot of grips and electricians largely, a little bit of other stuff too.
Bill: A lot of the production crew.
Cassie: Yeah.
Bill: How would you sum up Joe Catallanotto’s place in the local film culture?
Cassie: I just talked to a friend, Batou Chandler, who’s a locations’ manager yesterday, and she has a friend who has some footage of my dad from just before the hurricane, which flooded our place. She was asking the friend to get the footage to me because I’m working with someone who’s working on a film of my dad.
She was impressing upon Ruth, who has the footage, “You know we all wouldn’t be working, film wouldn’t exist, if it wasn’t because of Joe creating all of this.“ It’s all descended from him, it’s all an offshoot from his work, from him strapping himself to the sides of moving vehicles.
What we witnessed on Jan. 6th was no fluke. Far from it. While there were plenty of people in the crowd that day who attended just to be at Trump’s last hoorah, there were many others who have been eyeing this moment for years. Chief among them were two groups known as the Three Percenters and the Oath Keepers. Before Jan. 6, they were little known but for their extremist adherents like Congressman Clay Higgins (R- LA-03), who has openly associated with both groups.
In 2017, only a month after claiming his name was mistakenly listed alongside white supremacist Richard Spencer and the anti-Semitic, neo-Nazi online personality known as “Baked Alaska” (Tim Gionet) as a speaker at the “Rally for Free Speech,” Higgins delivered a 15-minute long speech at a different rally held by the Oath Keepers.
A year later, at an LNG (liquified natural gas) industry event back home in Louisiana, Higgins boasted about his affiliation with the Three Percenters, explaining the group’s ideology to a room full of industry representatives. “Some of us refer to ourselves as ‘Three Percenters,’” he said. “You, ladies and gentlemen, are the Three Percenters of the modern era… Together, as the Three Percenters, we represent everything that’s right about this world, and we stand against everything that’s wrong. Welcome to the war for the future of our planet. My role as your representative is to be not just your ally, but your warrior.” He failed to mention the movement’s ties to white supremacists.
Perhaps it should be no surprise that on Jan. 6, Clay did not see insurrectionists. On that fateful day, he saw “fellow patriots.”
In 2017, Higgins was listed as a speaker at a “free speech” rally, alongside two of the country’s most notorious white supremacists. His office claimed he had never agreed to participate in the event and that his name was listed in error, but only a month later, he appeared as a keynote speaker at a similar event held by the anti-government militia group the Oath Keepers.
I find it hard to believe that I need to make this point, but there is nothing patriotic about killing a law enforcement officer in the name of overthrowing the U.S. government. Clay, who often says he would rather be identified as a cop than a congressman, should be the first to acknowledge that.
And yet, to this day he has never made any public statements honoring Brian Sicknick or the others who put their bodies and souls between his “patriots” and our democracy.
You may wonder what Clay and his motley band of so-called “patriots” mean by Three-Percenters. What that refers to is the belief that all it takes is three percent of a country’s population to overthrow that country’s government, based on “the dubious historical claim that only three percent of American colonists took up arms in the Revolutionary War.” This is what the three-percenters are about, and by extension, this is what Clay Higgins is all about. A chilling thought to most normal Americans is a rallying cry for Clay and “his people.” Something to put on his gun. Something to put on his t-shirts.
In 2018, Higgins’ campaign sold t-shirts featuring the logo of the Three Percenters, an anti-government movement with strong ties to white supremacists.
As President of Blackthorn PAC, I have committed myself to the defense of our democracy from those like Clay and others like Sen. John Neely Kennedy, who, while not being as blatant in his support for the insurrection, utterly failed to put his country over his personal political opportunism.
We must show the nation and the world that there is no political gain to be hard in turning your back on our constitution and our democracy. Those who did and do in the future must be kicked out of office. No Ifs, Ands, or Buts. This is the centerpiece of Blackthorn’s mission.
Beyond this, Blackthorn is mobilizing for a frontline stand against the disinformation and propaganda machine that is fervently engaged, on a minute-by-minute basis, in a War on Truth. The disinformation and propaganda spewing from the internet and AM radio, including by such charlatans as Louisiana’s own Moon Griffon, is a virus not unlike Covid-19. And Blackthorn will be engaging the fight against it in much the same way by working with specialists in communications, sociology, and other relevant fields to devise a strategy for beating back those who spread the Big Lie and thousands of Little Lies daily in the name of unraveling the fabric of our democracy.
Truth is the lifeblood of a functioning government by the people and for the people. Those who have declared war on truth know this well and have created a powerful network for its dissemination. The good news is that history (and the present) teaches us that with focus, perseverance, enterprise, and creativity, networks can be disrupted and viruses can be defeated.
People often ask me, why the name Blackthorn and not something with a more political bent to it. There are a few reasons. The most simple is that it is a play on my company’s name, the BlackRose Group. But aside from that, I believe our mission goes beyond the purely political and is more akin to a defense against those who are determined to harm our democracy much as thorns exist to protect the flower.It must protect itself this way, and so must we.
I am asking you to look deep, dig deep, and join this cause. Each and everyone of you who believes in it has something to give, so I encourage you to go to our website at Blackthornpac.com and sign-up. I haven’t talked to a single person who hasn’t said our mission will be easy, but neither have I spoken to a single person who doesn’t believe it is necessary. That is why I started Blackthorn, and it’s why I hope you will join us.
Louisiana state Sens. Karen Carter-Peterson (left) and Troy Carter (right) face one another in the April 24 runoff election for the Second Congressional District.
In early December of 2020, Miami lawyer Howard Srebnick told his client that if they took their chances at trial, then he could likely get the felony weapons possession charge kicked out.
No, there wasn’t any dispute that the gold-plated Remington 1911 pistol that police found while searching the luggage of a chartered plane from Los Angeles to Miami belonged to his client. It was, admittedly, a Father’s Day gift.
It was also true that because of a decade-old felony conviction, his client was prohibited from owning a firearm, as well as the six rounds of ammunition he’d packed alongside the fancy new weapon. Presumably, they would need to deal with that before worrying about the small amounts of cocaine, ecstasy, marijuana, heroin, and prescription-strength cough syrup the cops also found buried on board.
But Srebnick believed all of the evidence was inadmissible; the search, he said, was illegal. Fruit of the poisonous tree.
Despite this, however, and despite the fact that he faced up to ten years behind bars if convicted, his client, Dwayne Michael Carter, Jr., pleaded guilty, telling the judge about his tumultuous childhood in New Orleans, about how he dropped out of high school in the tenth grade but eventually earned a GED and was later admitted into the University of Houston, about how he had methodically pieced his life back together.
He was to have been sentenced on Jan. 28, but Dwayne Michael Carter, Jr., better known as Lil Wayne, had an ace up his sleeve. Well, actually, he had a Trump card.
In one of his final official acts, only hours before he and his wife would meet up with the moving vans outside of Mar-a-Lago, President Donald J. Trump issued a pardon for the musical megastar and the pride of New Orleans’ Hollygrove neighborhood. During his four years in the White House, Trump used his singular power to issue pardons and commutations in all sorts of ways that seemed to violate basic principles of justice and due process and were, at times, flagrantly nepotistic and transparently corrupt. But perhaps the most astonishing aspect of his pardon for Lil Wayne wasn’t the cavalier manner in which the rap artist had sought the reprieve but the fact that it ranks as one of the least controversial decisions of the Trump presidency.
Make no mistake: There are legitimate constitutional and legal, not to mention moral, arguments in support of the pardon. Carter has been an outspoken advocate for criminal justice reform, and his case illustrates how the machinery of mass incarceration entraps people, particularly African American men, for life. In a country in which it is often more difficult to register to vote than it is to buy a semi-automatic weapon, what is accomplished by locking up someone like Dwayne Michael Carter, Jr. for as long as a decade simply because he fessed up to owning a $15,000 pistol that, as far as we know, may have never been fired a single time?
As Van Jones recently observed in a documentary about a similar and even more egregious case involving the rapper Meek Mill, the American system of mass supervision—that is, the often onerous restrictions placed on people while on probation or parole—is critical in perpetuating mass incarceration.
At the same time, however, it would be foolish to believe that Trump’s decision to pardon Lil Wayne was, in any way, a sincere recognition of a broken system or to ignore what it really was: a political transaction between two incredibly wealthy and powerful men, notwithstanding Carter’s earnest and well-supported opinions on criminal justice reform.
I mention all of this for a reason.
Former president Donald J. Trump and Lil Wayne. Source:Twitter
On March 20, two other New Orleans natives, who also happened to be named Carter, state Sens. Troy Carter and Karen Carter-Peterson (no relation to one another or to Lil Wayne), both secured spots in the April 24 runoff election to determine who will represent the state’s second congressional district, the seat recently vacated after six-term incumbent Cedric Richmond took a job as a senior aide to President Joe Biden (Technically, Richmond was elected to a sixth term but only served a few days before the new administration was inaugurated).
During the crowded jungle primary, the battle between the two Carters, both of whom are longtime politicos, was often defined less by their ideological differences and more by their personal relationships with those either in power or in proximity to power.
Troy Carter presented himself as a reluctant recruit, someone who had no interest in campaigning for the job until Richmond personally asked him to consider it. Elect me, he says, and, thanks to my friendship with your former congressman, you’ll have a representative with a direct line to the White House.
Carter-Peterson, on the other hand, is the opposite of reluctant. Her campaign website was live within minutes of Bloomberg reporting that Richmond would be stepping down to join the Biden administration. She came prepared with her own slate of endorsements, including one from Stacey Abrams of Georgia, and with a response to her rival’s claim of having the ear of Richmond, who had the ear of the new president, telling the New York Times that she did “not need to have the ear of the ear of the ear of the toe of the thumb of someone.”
Both Carter and Carter-Peterson have run for the seat before, losing to then-eight-term incumbent William Jefferson in 2006, a year after Jefferson became the target of a federal investigation into public corruption but a year before he was criminally indicted. In that race, Carter-Peterson (then known as Karen Carter) managed to muscle her way into the runoff, while the other Carter finished in a disappointing fifth place.
One thing is for certain: Neither of them are as close to the current president as Dwayne Michael Carter, Jr. was with the former president.
But is there any reason to believe that voters actually care about which Carter is closer to which proxy for the president? Troy Carter can boast about once playing a round of golf with President Biden, way back when he was former Vice President Biden and on a nationwide book tour for Promise Me, Dad, his tribute to his late son Beau, a tour, by the way, that conveniently allowed him the test the waters for a third run for the White House and that began in each city he visited with a poignant and slickly-produced video refresher on Biden’s biography. (I also met Biden during his stop in New Orleans, and although I wasn’t invited to the golf game, I did manage to elicit a vintage Biden response after addressing him as “Mr. President.” “Not yet,” he said. “I dunno. Not yet.”).
Karen Carter-Peterson can likewise boast about her connections to an entire roster of high-level political appointees, which she nurtured during her two terms as chair of the Louisiana Democratic Party and as a vice chair of the Democratic National Committee.
Louisiana state Senator Karen Carter-Peterson announces the vote total of the state’s Democratic presidential delegates at the 2016 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. Carter-Peterson, who is currently running for the congressional seat vacated by Cedric Richmond, narrowly secured a spot in the runoff on April 24 against fellow Democratic state Sen. Troy Carter after a surprisingly strong third place finish by Baton Rouge activist Gary Chambers. Photo by the Bayou Brief.
Ultimately, though, their competing claims of presidential access are distinctions without much of a difference, and as Peter Athas pointed out in his most recent installment of his column, the 13rd Ward Rambler, regardless of which Carter wins on April 24, the next U.S. representative from Louisiana’s second congressional district will be the most junior member of the House.
Put another way, he or she will arrive with less seniority than Marjorie Taylor Greene, the delusional QAnon enthusiast from Georgia who, after being banished from serving on committees earlier this year, has used her skills as a professional troll to build bipartisan support for her inevitable removal from office. The next member of Louisiana’s federal delegation will also have less seniority than Lauren Boebert, the gun fetishist and seditionist sympathizer from Colorado who somehow became famous for taking a day off from her “gun-themed restaurant” in order to make an eight-hour roundtrip drive just so she could tell Beto O’Rourke that there was “no way” he would be taking her precious AR-15s as part of the hypothetical gun buyback program he pitched during his short-lived presidential campaign.
Of course, seniority doesn’t automatically translate into influence, especially for members of the minority, and no matter which Carter ends up on Capitol Hill, Louisiana’s second congressional district will be represented by someone with vastly more influence than Captain Clay of Louisiana’s 3% 3rd District or any of the novelty acts that voters in other states sent to Congress for the amusement of Fox News’ primetime audience. Indeed, there’s a legitimate argument that, no matter who wins, Louisiana’s newest member of Congress will also immediately become more powerful than any other member of its delegation except Steve Scalise, whose position as House Minority Whip provides him with a seat at some of the most exclusive tables in American government. This is not only because both candidates belong to the party that currently controls the House, the Senate, and the Oval Office, it’s also because the second district stretches, improbably, all the way from Baton Rouge to New Orleans.
It helps too that Joe Biden has long held a special affection for New Orleans. His daughter Ashley is a Tulane graduate, and during her time in the Big Easy, her parents would sometimes sneak away for an extended weekend. They cultivated friendships here and over the years have championed many of the people and the causes that were vital to the city’s recovery. They never once promised to build Louisiana’s tallest building or paraded around with renderings of a Biden Tower, nor did they ever install a sign promoting an eponymous skyscraper or forget to remove the sign until years after quietly abandoning their grandiose plans. Similarly, the Bidens also never attempted to sweet talk their way into a casino license or file a lawsuit demanding that Louisiana change its rules because they missed the deadline for submitting a proposal for the Biden Princess Casino. Consequently, their affection for the city has been largely reciprocated by the people of New Orleans.
President Joe Biden, then former Vice President, in New Orleans in 2019. Photo credit: Cayman Clevenger, Bayou Brief.
None of this is to suggest that there aren’t meaningful differences between the two Carters or that residents of the second congressional district should believe that they would vote the same way on all of the issues. Troy Carter gravitates toward the political center more often than Karen Carter-Peterson. Although they both have been involved in politics for their entire professional careers, they take vastly different approaches.
KCP, as she is known among fellow Democrats, is a disrupter. She is controversial, unapologetic, willing to be provocative and confrontational, particularly if it means exposing the hypocrisies of those on the political right or advancing the principles and values held by those on the left. More than 20 years ago, as a member of the state House, she championed a bill to ensure workforce protections for transgender employees. The reaction by her opponents was viciously cruel, and she likely understood her bill was doomed from the start. After former Gov. Bobby Jindal signed the deceptively-titled Louisiana Science Education Act into law, providing a backdoor for creationists to present religious mythology as “science,” Carter-Peterson filed a bill to repeal the law. Predictably, it failed. She came back with the same bill the next year and the year after that and the year after that. The statute may still be on the books, but the hearings proved to be so embarrassing to the state Department of Education, they quietly scrubbed any mention of the law from the guidelines they provide to schools, effectively removing it from the state curricula.
Not surprisingly, her approach hasn’t always made her endearing to her predominately white conservative colleagues in the legislature, nor has it always settled well with the more moderate members of her own party, who point in particular to two different decisions she made to illustrate their criticism. The Advocate has repeatedly reported on a 2015 meeting Carter-Peterson attended at the New Orleans airport with then-state Rep. John Bel Edwards during which Carter-Peterson allegedly attempted to convince Edwards to step aside in the race for governor and run instead for state attorney general. The fact of Edwards’ eventual victory would later become evidence to her critics of not only Carter-Peterson’s poor political acumen but also framed as a betrayal of the very political party she led as state chair. But there are serious deficiencies in the version of the story that has been told and retold in The Advocate. For one, it’s a version that was originally relayed by a former Edwards campaign staffer who didn’t actually attend the meeting.
There’s no question that the meeting took place and that, understandably, Edwards left feeling insulted and ambushed by the apparent subterfuge. But Carter-Peterson wasn’t the only other person in attendance that day; Cedric Richmond and Mary Landrieu were also present, as well as Edwards’ campaign manager Linda Day. Although she helped arrange the meeting, there’s no reason to believe that Carter-Peterson was at the center of some sort of nefarious plot to have the candidate who had already received her endorsement drop out of the race at the top of the ticket. How can I be so certain?
Because Mary Landrieu has openly acknowledged that she was the one who floated the idea. “I have never been so happy to be wrong,” she later said. (Remember, at the time, the conventional wisdom was that David Vitter would breeze into office easily. There’s a reason veteran Louisiana political journalists Tyler Bridges and Jeremy Alford titled their book about Edwards’ election “Long Shot”).
It’s worth noting that shortly after the meeting, Richmond apparently made it clear to Edwards that he disagreed with Landrieu’s suggestion. Carter-Peterson’s mistake, it seems, wasn’t arranging the meeting; it was in allowing her deference to the former three-term U.S. Senator to create, at least momentarily, an impression of tacit approval.
Carter-Peterson’s critics also point to her more recent and less understandable decision to use an arcane state law to prevent Edwards from reappointing several people to various boards and commissions. Most notably, she blocked the reappointment of Ronnie Jones as chairman of the state’s Gaming Control Board. Jones contends Carter-Peterson falsely believed that he leaked a story involving her struggle with gambling addiction. She claims, somewhat unconvincingly, that she was merely motivated by a desire to ensure that the fox wasn’t guarding the hen house, pointing to Jones’ decision to work for a casino consortium after she effectively fired him from his job with the state. Perhaps even more bafflingly, she also blocked the reappointment of her former colleague and ally, Walt Leger III, from the Ernest Morial Convention Center in New Orleans.
In Carter-Peterson’s defense, she claims that her main motivation was a desire to increase the diversity of appointees and that she had repeatedly raised those concerns, both publicly and privately, in the past. Although in the grand scheme of things, her decision to block an all-white slate of appointees hardly qualifies as the kind of outrageous abuse of power the editorial board of The Advocate breathlessly claimed it to be, it’s the kind of thing that in a low-turnout election could make a difference.
L-R, Joshua, Troy Sr., Ana, Troy Jr., Milo (feline), Millie (canine: dachshund), Beaux (canine: standard poodle). Courtesy of the Carter campaign.
Troy Carter isn’t the kind of politician who actively courts controversy, though he occasionally finds it. He’s less of a firebrand and more of a smooth operator. In the family portrait provided by his campaign, Troy’s the one holding Milo, the family cat. One gets the impression that he tells a lot of dad jokes.
For someone whose career in politics has spanned more than 30 years, beginning as an assistant to New Orleans Mayor Sidney Barthelemy and whose name has appeared on the ballot nearly a dozen times, including successful campaigns for the state House, the New Orleans City Council, and the state Senate and not as successful bids for New Orleans Mayor and Congress, the extent to which he has stayed out of the news, at least the statewide news, seems even more remarkable than the occasions on which he has been in it.
This explains, in part, why despite finishing the primary as the clear frontrunner, with 36% to KCP’s 23%, he managed to come in a distant third place in East Baton Rouge Parish, trailing Carter-Peterson by nine points and Baton Rouge native Gary Chambers by seven. A well-timed endorsement from Baton Rouge Mayor-President Sharon Weston Broome certainly won’t hurt his chances, but it’s difficult to know whether it will help either, particularly considering Chambers’ decision to endorse Carter-Peterson.
Outside of New Orleans, Carter may not be as well-known as his rival (though he did post solid numbers in the rural and sparsely-populated parts of the district), and depending on who you ask, that may be an advantage. Still, with only two weeks before the primary election, Carter appeared to be in a position to potentially score an outright win, but a series of strategic blunders, like skipping out on the one and only televised forum, and a convoluted attack against Carter-Peterson, falsely suggesting she was responsible for laying off 7,000 public school teachers after Hurricane Katrina and implying that she somehow orchestrated the hiring of her future husband at the Recovery School District years before they began a relationship, may have weakened support for both of them.
Like KCP, Troy Carter was an early supporter of LGBTQ rights. In 1993, as a freshman state legislator, Carter introduced the state’s first significant gay rights bill. “(Louisiana) should not be discriminating against people for what they do in the privacy of their own homes,” Carter said at the time. The Alexandria Daily Town Talk worried Carter’s bill was nothing more than “forced acceptance.” “What would (the bill’s passage) mean?” the paper’s editorial board wondered. “Affirmative action and quotas for gays? Legalization of same-sex marriage? Forced granting of spousal benefits to homosexual couples?” (If only one could travel back in time to warn them that their prophecy would come to pass, except for the gay quotas prediction, thanks to a majority-conservative U.S. Supreme Court). In the event that you are confused by the paper’s position on Carter’s proposal, its slippery slope quickly takes a vertical plunge. “And how long would it be before others with differing sexual leanings—pedophiles, for example—would demand similar protection?”
That year, Carter would also introduce a bill that sought to prohibit people from purchasing more than 12 guns a year (As it turns out, the same people who feared gay quotas were also opposed to gun quotas).
Carter spent only one term in the state House before graduating to the New Orleans City Council, where his two terms coincided with the administration of Mayor Marc Morial. In 2002, he made a bid for the Mayor’s Office, but finished in fourth place against the eventual winner, a promising and successful business executive named Clarence Ray Nagin.
Carter made his way back to Baton Rouge, this time as a member of the upper chamber, in the same 2015 election that brought a former Army Ranger and country lawyer from Amite into the Governor’s Mansion and ended the political career of Louisiana’s first Republican U.S. Senator since Reconstruction, David Bruce Vitter.
Prior to this year’s election, the criticism against Carter had been largely parochial, which may be at least partially attributable to his decision to take a significant break from elective politics after falling short in his 2006 campaign against “Dollar Bill” Jefferson. He’s been accused of being a “shitty landlord.” Through his political action committee, he’s made some problematic endorsements in local races, including an inexplicable decision to support the reelection of school board member who was best-known for being an outspoken homophobe. His PAC has also had issues with the state Ethics Board. The criticism may very well be valid, but it’s difficult to imagine that it’d carry much weight with anyone who doesn’t keep up with the inside baseball of Orleans Parish politics.
The larger issue he faces is the perception that his politics are now increasingly more moderate than the district he seeks to represent. His candidacy has been quietly and sometimes not so quietly supported by Republicans, like Jefferson Parish President Cynthia Lee Sheng, daughter of the parish’s legendary former sheriff, Harry Lee, as well as an outside PAC funded by Republican operatives. In the state’s other five congressional districts, Carter’s “cross-over” appeal would be an advantage; in the second district, however, it could be the kiss of death.
There is also at least some concern that Cedric Richmond’s decision to essentially recruit him to run for his old seat would somehow obligate him to the former congressman and allow Richmond to further consolidate his power over state Democratic politics from his office at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and while Richmond continues to be broadly popular among the district’s voters, there were signs that his support may have not necessarily been as deep as it was always perceived to be. Today, the district is much more progressive than it was when he was first elected, a little over a decade ago. Back then, his less-than-adversarial relationship with the petrochemical industry and Big Oil and his famous friendship with Steve Scalise were touted as signs of the kind of pragmatic approach necessary for a district that needed all the help it could get from a GOP-led Congress. That’s not the case any more.
In fairness, some of this criticism is objectively unfair to Richmond, who deserves credit for his early and steadfast support of a president proving to be one of the most progressive in the nation’s history. It’s also not entirely fair to Carter either, nor is it necessarily a bad thing that a senior aide to the President of the United States and a former six-term congressman recruited and encouraged him to enter the race. It also deserves mention that while Carter’s attack ad against KCP fell flat, so too did an ad by the progressive, pro-choice organization EMILY’s List, which is supporting Carter-Peterson and for some reason decided to attack Carter for attending a star-studded party in Los Angeles back in the 1990s while on a junket to promote New Orleans during his stint on the city council.
So, who will win on April 24?
After the jungle primary, political observers and pollsters couldn’t help but point out that Gary Chambers, the Baton Rouge activist and outspoken progressive who assembled a truly impressive operation practically overnight, had actually earned more votes than Karen Carter-Peterson did in her own district. (Carter-Peterson bested Chambers in his backyard as well, but that was less surprising than what he was able to do in Orleans Parish). Chambers’ solid numbers in Orleans were almost entirely framed as a rejection of Carter-Peterson, a facile but logical conclusion that nonetheless entirely misapprehends the electorate. Gary Chambers ran to the left of Karen Carter-Peterson, who is running to the left of Troy Carter. Chambers may have narrowly missed making the runoff, but his campaign proved a hugely important point about the appetite for progressive disruption. In that respect, the fact that a relatively unknown leftist candidate from Baton Rouge far exceeded everyone’s expectations in Orleans Parish, where the plurality of the district’s voters live, doesn’t say nearly as much about dislike for Karen Carter-Peterson’s politics than it does about an electorate looking for a candidate to the left of their former congressperson.
Of all of the seemingly endless endorsements that have been made in this race, Chambers’ decision to throw his support behind Carter-Peterson may prove to be the most consequential, though one gets the sense that the majority of his voters would have migrated to Team KCP regardless of any formal declaration of support.
A couple of years ago, after the entire slate of the Bayou Brief‘s endorsed candidates lost their races, we decided to get out of the endorsement business. Personally, I think endorsements matter far less than people imagine. When Donald Trump won the White House in 2016, he carried the endorsement of only one major newspaper in the United States, which, incidentally, was the only major newspaper in the United States also owned by casino magnate and GOP megadonor, the late Sheldon Adelson.
That said, I do have one final note of caution to voters in this district: Despite what some may claim, Troy Carter is, in fact, a capital-D Democrat, and no, Karen Carter-Peterson did not support Bobby Jindal, unless by “support,” you mean that she agreed with his decision to suspend his campaign for the White House and sell off the spare parts of his electoral machine to Rick Scott and Josh Hawley.
In my opinion, either Carter would serve Louisiana and her people far better than any of the seven Republicans the state is currently sending to Capitol Hill. I like both Carters.
Actually, I like all three Carters, including Lil Wayne (not for his chummy relationship with Trump but for figuring out how to work Frank Minyard’s name into one of his songs).
Clarification: An earlier version of this story misspelled the surname of former New Orleans Mayor Sidney Barthelemy, which the author attributes to his own admiration of the acclaimed virtuoso of the American short story, the late Donald Barthelme of Houston, Texas.
I know that LSU played well in the NCAA hoops tournament before losing to Michigan but teevee sports is one of the things I’ve learned to live without during the pandemic. I don’t miss it. I didn’t even watch that many Tiger football games last fall. One of the reasons was the lingering stench around the program. I’ll get back to that in our second act.
My preferred method as a pundit is to get people to think by making them laugh. I’m not feeling funny as I write this. I’m not rabidly angry but I’m vexed by what’s going on in New Orleans and the Gret Stet of Louisiana right now. In short, I’m bringing a bit of mad to my March musings. I guess I still feel a bit funny. It’s my nature.
I usually polish the hell out of my 13th Ward Rambler columns. I’m trying a different approach this month, writing from the gut instead of the head. Hopefully, it will still be digestible.
SWB Blues: As I write this, we’re in a second day of torrential rain. Heavy rains bring fear to New Orleanians of flooded streets and houses. My house has never flooded, but we’ve lost a car to flood waters.
The Sewerage & Water Board’s system is ancient. While I like old houses, movies, and music, I like my pipes and pumps as new as possible. Our system fails frequently, so every time there’s a storm (not just tropical systems) there’s fear in the air. This has to stop.
I’ll give credit to Mayor Cantrell and the current SWB management: They’re more transparent than their predecessors. The Landrieu administration brought classic TFC management techniques to bear on the SWB. A reminder that TFC stands for This Fucking City. Team Landrieu’s approach to our infrastructure issues was to kick the can down the road. That’s left us in a ditch, a drainage ditch full of murky water. This has to stop.
I was frustrated by the recent Congressional primary. The Second District’s boundaries are a bad joke brought to us by Gerrymandering. It’s preposterous for vast swaths of Baton Rouge and New Orleans to be in the same district. I’ve lived in both cities and they have little in common. It’s why I ruled out voting for Gary Chambers. He seems like a good guy, but I want our next Congresscritter to focus on infrastructure issues unique to New Orleans.
We’re down to two experienced candidates from New Orleans in the runoff. Unfortunately, both of them are trying to convince us that they can single-handedly pass Medicare for all despite being the most junior member of the House. Yeah, right.
I urge the two Carters to focus instead on infrastructure issues. New Orleans needs federal money to rebuild our antiquated drainage system. Pipes and pumps may not be the sexiest issue in the world but they’re important. This has to stop.
I’m tired of being nervous about going anywhere when it rains. It’s every bit as abnormal as the pandemic. When it rains, I’d prefer that it rain Pennies From Heaven instead of bringing fear to the citizens of TFC. I hope the candidates will listen.
The last word of this segment goes to Louis Armstrong:
The Shame Of LSU: While I’m frustrated by the SWB Blues, I’m downright angry about the ongoing sex scandals in the LSU Athletic Department.
The most recent development took place across the country. Former LSU President King Alexander was forced to resign from his job as Oregon State University’s honcho because of his pathetic mishandling of allegations involving Les Miles.
Alexander attempted to blame everything on Louisiana’s “backwards culture” instead of his own failings as a leader. University presidents are supposed to show leadership instead stepping back and letting things happen. Shame on him.
It’s long been a joke that LSU football should have a university it can be proud of. It should be the opposite: The football program should reflect the values of the university community, not drive the train into a ditch. I used that image in the first segment, but it fits here as well.
I don’t shock easily but I must admit to being shocked by the allegations involving Les Miles. I’d always thought of him as an amiable dunce whose personal qualities overrode his ineptitude as a game coach. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
When I was a French Quarter merchant, Tyrann Mathieu’s father, Tyrone, was my UPS man. He praised the way Miles handled his son’s problems even though Tyrann was thrown off the team for smoking pot. If only Miles had been as sternly paternal with players accused of sexual misconduct. Shame on him.
An investigation found that the Mad Hatter couldn’t be trusted around female students. Instead of firing his ass, Miles was allowed to keep his job because football is the most important thing at LSU. It sends a chilling message to students, staff, faculty, and alumni that women don’t matter. Shame on LSU.
Winning may be everything in professional sports, but it should not be in college sports. There’s a “win at all costs” mentality that pervades the SEC and LSU football. I get it: Winning beats the hell out of losing but winning at all costs is soul destroying. It’s what caused the shame of LSU.
Money is the root of all evil in big-time college sports. The NCAA and SEC have massive television contracts that fuel the mania for winning at all costs. Again, I get it: Money makes the world go ’round. It should not, however, result in academic values that are so corrupted as to be unrecognizable. Shame on LSU.
There’s another thing about the Miles scandal that perturbs me. Bobby Jindal was Governor at the time of the scandal. Miles was a Jindal supporter and Jindal was known to intervene on his behalf. What did Jindal know about the Miles scandal and what, if anything, did he do about it? I’d say shame on him, but we all know that PBJ is shameless.
None of this is new. Football has long been the most important thing at LSU and there have been cover-ups in the past. There’s also a double standard at work: When then women’s basketball coach Pokey Chatman was accused of sexual improprieties with a student in 2007, she was forced to resign. Of course, women’s basketball is not a huge moneymaker and Coach Chatman is a lesbian so, of course, she was treated differently than grass-eating Republican he-man, Les Miles. Shame on LSU.
If LSU doesn’t clean up its act, the only thing this Tiger alum is going to hold is my nose.
Louisiana state senator and congressional candidate Troy Carter
By Barbara Major and Dr. Brobson Lutz
For the first time in more than a decade, the second congressional district of Louisiana will have a new representative in Congress. The voters of the second congressional district are fortunate to have more than a dozen of their fellow citizens offer themselves for public office. Such a variety of candidates has stimulated debate around issues and engaged voters across the district. Some of the candidates have offered thoughtful ideas, and we look forward to hearing more from them in the future.
But at this uniquely critical moment in our nation’s history, we are convinced the people of the second congressional district will be best served by an experienced legislator with sound progressive values shared by most of the residents of the district, and a record of standing up for marginalized communities.
We can’t squander time with on-the-job training, nor can we risk electing a representative who may engage in the fiery rhetoric of advocacy, but without a proven record of doing the difficult work of lawmaking: respectfully listening to constituents, developing legislation to address their needs, showing up, building relationships and brokering consensus to turn good ideas into progressive public policies to address the needs of people.
We’ve reviewed the records and platforms of the candidates, and Troy Carter is the only candidate who has the sound values, well-earned experience, even temperament and unfailing commitment to people to make a difference on day one for the people of southeast Louisiana.
Troy Carter stands apart from his opponents by his pragmatic and persistent advocacy for expanding access to quality, affordable healthcare.
When it comes to healthcare, rigid ideology does next to nothing to improve people’s lives or health outcomes. The banner of “Medicare for all” has been advanced as a strict litmus test for whether you care for people’s healthcare needs. For most, it simply means universal single payer health insurance. In Congress, Troy Carter will co-sponsor the current Medicare for all legislation and when it is brought to the floor Troy will speak out strongly in support of it, and proudly cast a vote in favor of it. The difference between Karen Carter Peterson and Troy Carter is that Troy understands that saying you are for a slogan does nothing to actually provide healthcare to people.
It is simply a fact that there are not enough votes in the House or Senate to pass single payer health insurance and that many in America are satisfied with their current health care options.
So, what do we do? Do we throw up our hands and stop showing up to work hoping everyone will wake up one morning and change their minds, or do we roll up our sleeves and try to make improvements that build on what has already been accomplished? Troy is going to do the work, just as he has in his more than 15 years as a legislator on the state and local level.
Louisiana state Sen. Troy Carter and President Joe Biden. Courtesy of the Carter campaign.
President Obama fought for the Affordable Care Act to include a public option. When Sen. Joe Lieberman refused to vote for Obamacare with a public option did President Obama give up and move on? No, he took what he could get and passed landmark legislation that gave everyone access to insurance and enabled thousands of Louisianians to enroll in Medicaid.
As President Obama explained at the time, to serve the people best, we cannot let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Was insurance available on the Obamacare exchanges too expensive? Of course, it was. That is why it was so important that the recently passed American Recovery Act contained subsidies that will, at least temporarily, make insurance on the Obamacare exchanges free for many and cost as little as $50 per month for the vast majority of middle-class Americans. This is a huge win for all of us!
President Biden has proposed adding a public option to Obamacare so that there will be a government health plan that stands alongside private sector options. That way everyone satisfied with their current health care options can keep them, but there will be affordable coverage provided by the government for all of us. Troy supports this and will work with President Biden to make it a reality.
During the Trump administration, Obamacare was saved by the slimmest of possible margins. Now, with a new administration and Congress, it is time to improve upon the hard-fought benefits for millions and work towards true universal coverage.
Troy Carter is best qualified to represent the people of southeast Louisiana in the fight to improve Obamacare to achieve universal coverage for all.
Barbara Major, former director of the St. Thomas health clinic and a co-founder of the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond, is a veteran community organizer and was the lead plaintiff in Major v. Treen, the successful voting rights lawsuit that created Louisiana’s second congressional district.
Dr. Brobson Lutz, a practicing physician and public health advocate, served as Director of Health for the City of New Orleans for 13 years.
Asya Howlette has spent the past decade working in schools to provide academic and social emotional access to students. After graduating from Hampton University, Asya began her journey as a math teacher in rural Louisiana and soon after earned a Master of Education from Johns Hopkins University. With her continued love for educating students and her depth of knowledge about child development and academic expectations she took on the position of being the upper middle school principal and director of mathematics and science for a k-8 school here in New Orleans. Having context for teaching in schools, working directly with curricula, and leading teacher development within Orleans Parish and across the United States, Asya has been influenced to pursue her next phase of leadership. This has not only included running for public office, but now working to support political candidates and supporting all of New Orleans having access to election information.
Dismantling systems that propagate voter suppression has produced unprecedented outcomes for our country, and, for that, we thank powerhouse women like Stacey Abrams and the countless Black people and allies that have contributed to reforming a broken system. What we often fail to address is the voter suppression that starts long before election day, including the silencing and mischaracterization of women of color who dare to enter the political arena.
I offer this perspective as a Black woman and former candidate who values voters getting the information they need to make informed decisions and to build a progressive Louisiana that equitably serves all members of our community. I offer this perspective in service of a community that is desperately working to change the narrative of who holds, exercises, and maintains power that disproportionately harms BIPOC (Black, indigenous, and people of color) communities — my community.
For the past 30 years, we have known who was going to fill this congressional seat in each election cycle— a problematic truth in our local political landscape. Going into this election, I was looking for a new candidate who would be beholden solely to the community and our interests, as well as a candidate with a vision for what could be true for Louisiana and a clear pathway to actualizing that vision. Equally important was a candidate with shared personal experiences navigating a system that is relentlessly oppressive to the economically disadvantaged and BIPOC citizens of this country. I was pleasantly surprised to see so many candidates step up to fill this seat, signaling that I was not alone in my desire for a change, for new energy.
I found Desiree Ontiveros to be a candidate in whom the above characteristics were not just hopes, but a reality. Desiree is explicit in naming the impact of racist economics that underpin the disparity in opportunities we see in our region and across the country, because she is constantly navigating them herself. In fact, her clear and candid statements in the early forums reshaped the central narrative as one of local economics and small business recovery. She is intentional in her policy priorities, which focus on dismantling root causes of poverty and discrimination. She has a unique ability to follow through on those priorities because she has been and remains the only major candidate unbought and unbeholden to funders, PACs, and politicians who live well off our community’s continued suffering.
Asya Howlette (left) and Desiree Ontiveros (right). Photos courtesy of the Ontiveros campaign.
From the moment Desiree stepped up to serve and made herself vulnerable, she has faced the same silencing and mischaracterization of candidates (especially women of color) that I believe is the beginning of voter suppression. While our careers and livelihoods are being threatened and we’re told to “wait our turn,” we are met with a press that is able to cherry pick which candidates to highlight and to spew inaccurate information to the community. Despite — or perhaps because of — running a formidable campaign and breaking through a field of 15 to become a top candidate, Desiree has been left off of local network debate invites and elsewhere labeled an “opportunist” for building a successful business.
This is not just absurd, it is white-dominant culture in action. It is eerily reminiscent of ideology that discourages people of color and women from moving beyond their “station”. What’s worse is that these entities are diminishing the critical knowledge she has gained from being a Latina business owner that are directly related to her ability to enact meaningful economic recovery as a congresswoman. Her experience is what makes her a truly viable candidate.
The bottom line is that our system will continue to replicate the same self-serving politics if we don’t make accurate and insightful information about the candidates widely accessible.
On March 20th, I ask that you vote for Desiree Ontiveros — a progressive candidate with a clear plan for actualizing the vision of what could and should be for Louisiana. We cannot let the current political establishment silence new voices seeking to serve our community in much needed ways. We know what we get if we elect the same old, tired politicians… nothing. And, nothing for BIPOC communities means increased food and housing insecurity, barriers to opportunity, and inequitable justice systems. Have political courage and take a stand against those that would silence us so that we can have true change in Louisiana.
Editor’s Note: The Bayou Brief will not be making any endorsements in the uncommonly crowded Special Election for Louisiana’s Second Congressional District. This column by supporters of state Sen. Karen Carter-Peterson is the first in a series. Tomorrow, we will be publishing a column by supporters of Desiresee Ontiveros, and the following day, we will hear from supporters of state Sen. Troy Carter. If you would like to include a letter of support for a candidate not mentioned, please send a 1,000-word+ draft, with your name and a two-sentence biography, along with original photographs of the candidate to lw@bayoubrief.com.
Deadline is Thursday at 1PM CST.
Co-authored by Thomas J. Adams and Dr. Adolph L. Reed, Jr.
It’s election time again. Early voting has begun for the March 20 primary in the special election to replace Cedric Richmond in the 2nd Congressional District, which means chatter evaluating the candidates has intensified. It’s a crowded field with 15 candidates in the race.
We thought it could be useful to reflect on considerations that go into voters’ candidate selection. As is common in New Orleans and the various parts of other Parishes gerrymandered into the District, questions of personality or character so often rise to the fore. These often pivot on the search for, or charges of, “scandal,” broadly defined. And that approach is often frustrating, both because allegations of taint easily can be exaggerated by partisans for one or another camp and because there’s a broad gray area between what counts as generally accepted horse-trading, back-scratching and quid-pro-quo exchange of favors on the one hand and corruption or misfeasance on the other.
Political assessment that rests on personality or character can be demoralizing because any candidate can be made to appear deficient, bereft, or inconsistent and because that focus tends to crowd out consideration of what different candidates actually stand for. Or perhaps more to the point, what they can be made to stand for. That is, not necessarily what lies in their heart of hearts but what interests they feel the need to represent—whether because of their deep underlying commitment or because of their own calculation of self-interest is relatively unimportant. We believe this is the most important basis for differentiating them. That’s especially the case for Congressional candidates, as the winner will be tasked with representing the district’s interest in law-making at the highest and broadest level.
The other main consideration should be whether the candidate can win. Although protest candidacies can make sense at least sometimes, for the candidate to be able to represent constituents’ interests he or she must first win election. In the case of the Louisiana 2nd, where it’s quite possible that the winner of the race will be in a position to stay in the seat as long as they like, these calculations become especially paramount.
That said, let’s look at the field in the race that is before us now. Of the 15 candidates, only three have any serious chance of qualifying for an April 24 runoff, and one of those, Gary Chambers, is a long shot. The other twelve are essentially vanity candidates. Any one of them approaching even ten percent of the vote would qualify as a massive upset. The other two serious contenders are State Senator Troy Carter and fellow State Senator Karen Carter Peterson. Both are seasoned politicians and experienced elected officials. Carter was executive assistant to New Orleans Mayor Sidney Barthelemy, served in the state House of Representatives, and on the New Orleans City Council before being elected to the Louisiana Senate, where he has been Minority Leader. Carter Peterson served in the state House of Representatives for more than a decade and was House Speaker Pro Tempore in her last two years. She has served in the State Senate since then and has been chair of the Louisiana Democratic Party and remains a Vice-Chair of the Democratic National Committee.
Both Carter and Carter Peterson are well-connected with significant constituencies and have demonstrated capabilities that would facilitate transition to functioning in the U.S. Congress. For critics of the two—and there are plenty of them—their insider backgrounds are essentially undifferentiated and suggest that there is little meaningful distinction between the two of them.
As Antigravity’s always well-researched voter guide concluded its analysis of Carter: “Overall, it’s hard to trust Carter’s positions or his ability to get things done in a timely manner…We have concerns about his funding sources. He seems content enough with the slow pace of governmental inaction, and has yet to put forth an aggressive stance or plan to change anything.”
That same voter guide ended its recap of Carter Peterson with these words: “Ultimately, Peterson is an establishment politician through and through. She’s saying all the right things now, but her money, legacy, and record are littered with self-serving governance and contradictions.”
Essentially, six of one, half dozen of the other.
Indeed, we suspect many voters in the district feel similarly. Here are two mainstream, career Democratic New Orleans lawmakers, both deeply connected to various rival factions of the state’s minority party—who by virtue of the party’s overwhelmingly minority status, have had little opportunity to do much other than try to make horrid legislation slightly better. Like pretty much anyone who’s been deeply embedded in Louisiana politics for as long as both Carter and Carter Peterson, it’s not hard to find rumors of scandal and corruption as well. From this perspective, on March 20, choose your favorite longshot or protest candidate. If—as seems overwhelmingly likely—it comes to a runoff on April 24 between Carter and Carter Peterson, then it doesn’t really matter. Vote or don’t vote, but certainly don’t give it more than a fleeting thought—and most definitely don’t get involved beyond showing up on election day.
We want to suggest though, that there’s a good deal more to it than that. That, in a somewhat veiled way, the choice between Carter and Carter Peterson strikes at some of the central issues in contemporary American and Louisiana political life, especially as they relate to the issues that overwhelmingly affect those of us that have to work for a living.
Let’s start by asking a question taken from Antigravity’s guide: what, if any, is the significance of Carter Peterson “saying all the right things now?” We think, in fact, there’s a lot. What’s in her platform and priorities matter. Not because they’re necessarily a reflection of her deepest held beliefs—and to be clear, we have no suggestion they’re not a reflection, only that we could care less about the question. Rather, they matter because a) she felt the need to adopt them b) they suggest very specifically where she’ll fall on key pieces of congressional legislation and fights within the Democratic Party, and c) they’re a clear roadmap to holding her accountable should she not honor them.
Carter Peterson’s platform is striking and not just because she—in contrast to Carter—has actually published one on her website. It is, by far, the most ambitious and transformative political platform for working people offered by a realistic candidate for federal office in modern Louisiana history. Her priorities and advertisements lead with her support for Medicare for All. This is especially significant in the Deep South and within the Congressional Black Caucus. Cedric Richmond, the outgoing chair of the CBC and South Carolina Congressman and House Majority Whip James Clyburn have tried to put the full weight of the CBC and the machinery of the Democratic Party in the Deep South against Medicare for All candidates elsewhere. This despite the fact that poll after poll shows that African Americans overwhelmingly support single-payer health care. For his part, Troy Carter has made clear that he stands with Richmond and Clyburn in standing against the vast majority of Black voters—as well as large majorities of white and Latino voters as well. In Louisiana of course, the valence of the issue is even more pronounced given our state legislature and the real possibility of a Republican replacing John Bel Edwards in two years. It’s well within the realm of possibility that even the meaningful if tepid Medicaid expansion that Edwards pushed through could be repealed once he leaves office. Guaranteeing Medicare for All at the national level takes the decision of the health care of District 2 residents out of the hands of people like Jeff Landry, Clay Higgins, and Sharon Hewitt. That alone should demonstrate the particular importance of the district’s representative robustly supporting single-payer.
Part of actually achieving single-payer health care means building an overwhelming majority in favor of it within the Democratic Party—at this stage of American political life there is no other plausible path. It matters little the reasons for their support. When candidates who pledge to support it win—and those who oppose it lose—it’s both numerically useful within the party’s internal fight and sends a clear message to others that if they don’t join in that fight, they risk their political careers. If Carter Peterson adopted her Medicare for All pledge out of a deep-seated commitment to health care as a human right, then great. If she adopted it because she made a utilitarian political calculation that it will help her win, then also great—so long as she wins.
Beyond her support for single-payer, Carter Peterson’s priorities include a variety of other pledges to lend her support to major pieces of Congressional legislation and choose specific sides in key debates within the Democratic Party. From fully funding of the US Postal Service and the pursuit of postal banking to nationwide minimum wage increases to public transit to major climate change legislation her platform places her consistently on the side that benefits working people and against the entrenched economic powers that have so often dictated the party’s direction. And the same principle applies to these issues as it does to health care. In fact, we would argue that in most every case, winning major democratic victories around these kinds of issues requires not necessarily changing hearts and minds, but building constituencies that make adopting these issues a rational and even self-serving political calculation for a whole host of others.
And of course, outlining these priorities provides a clear roadmap to holding a politician accountable. Should a candidate explicitly renege on their pledge—by say, not signing on as a co-sponsor to the Sanders-Jayapal Medical for All Bill or not voting to repeal the USPS’s pre-funding mandate—then in two years voters and other candidates have clear license (and excellent ammunition) to remove that representative from office. Contrast this with a candidate who makes few to no pledges. Bringing that candidate to account is exceedingly difficult. They will have nothing to account for.
The position that political platforms are meaningless unless they’re proposed by true believers or those with long and demonstrable histories of unbending consistency is symptomatic of what we might understand as a broader crisis of purpose in American and Louisiana political life. There’s an old adage that politics is best defined by “who gets what, when, and how.” The question of “why” doesn’t enter into the equation because it rarely has much to do with the “who,” “what,” “when,” and “how.” In the quest to make health care a right, to guarantee living wages, and to secure public goods (the what) for all of us (the who) as soon as humanly possible (the when) via plausible democratic means in our contemporary context (the how), dwelling on the question of “why” effectively turns political life into a crappy television show we can’t stop hate-watching. To be sure, when it comes to Louisiana politics this posture is all too familiar. But when we let our often understandable suspicion of motivation elide exceedingly meaningful differences in policy commitment then politics has ceased to have a purpose at all beyond our own entertainment and sense of self.
About the Authors
Adolph L. Reed grew up in New Orleans, is a resident of the 6th Ward, and a professor specializing in studies of issues of racism and U.S. politics. He is a contributing editor to The New Republic and has been a frequent contributor to The Progressive, The Nation, and other progressive publications.
Thomas Adams is historian and professor focusing on political economy, labor, social movements, and the history of New Orleans. He is a resident of the Upper 9th Ward and co-chair of the Panel of Experts for the New Orleans Street Renaming Commission.
The Stupid Party Rages On
Inheriting the Wind
For several years in a row, the best annual show of the Louisiana legislative session was when the state Senate Education Committee performed its hilarious routine on the theory of evolution. Clips from those meetings have been viewed online more times than anything else that’s occurred inside the House that Huey Built. This includes Hurricane Chris’ 2009 live performance of “Halle Berry (She’s Fine),” the Shreveport rapper’s crudely misogynistic tribute to the Academy Award-winning actress, from the floor of the House chambers after his aunt, former state Rep. Barbara Norton, took a point of personal privilege and then handed him the mic.
Hurricane Chris, a.k.a. Christopher Jerron Dooley, was back in the news recently. He’s currently awaiting trial after being indicted for second-degree murder.
The business of the legislature usually doesn’t make for compelling, must-see TV, so breakaway stars and viral videos are rare.
The annual discussion about evolution involved one of two proposals. On at least two occasions, state Sen. Dan Claitor, a moderate Republican from Baton Rouge, tried to convince his colleagues to finally repeal—officially— the so-called “Balanced Treatment for Creation-Science and Evolution-Science in Public School Instruction Act,” a law enacted in 1981 during the administration of Republican Gov. Dave Treen and struck down as unconstitutional six years later by the U.S. Supreme Court in the landmark case Edwards v. Aguillard. But nearly three decades after the decision, Claitor’s fellow Republicans were still unwilling to acknowledge the fact that the Balanced Treatment Act was, in fact, dead-letter law. As the Court reminded Louisiana in 1987, the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment “forbids the enactment of any law ‘respecting an establishment of religion.'”
More ambitiously, state Sen. Karen Carter-Peterson, a liberal Democrat from New Orleans, made multiple attempts to repeal a more recent law, the Orwellian-titled “Louisiana Science Education Act,” that allows for the teaching of new earth creationism (rebranded as “intelligent design”) in the science classroom. The committee hearings on Carter-Peterson’s bills were especially ripe with material.
One year, former state Sen. Elbert Guillory explained his support for the law by sharing a bizarre story about receiving a medical diagnosis from a “half-naked” witch doctor he met while traveling abroad. His “logic,” if you can even call it that, was that when students are taught to distinguish between actual science and religious mythology— witchcraft, for example—they are less likely to trust healthcare advice from a guy in a loincloth throwing animal bones on the ground. And that would be such a shame, Guillory claimed, because it’s a really fun experience.
Of course, Guillory, the first and only Black Republican to serve in the legislature since Reconstruction, was already well-known for his eccentricities and comedic performances, including a memorable appearance on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, during which he promoted the sport of “chicken boxing” in response to Louisiana becoming the final state in the nation to ban cockfighting.
But the real star of the education committee’s adaptation of Inherit the Wind was former state Sen. Mike Walsworth, a veteran Republican legislator from West Monroe.
In 2012, while Darlene Reaves, a high school science teacher from St. Francisville, testified about the importance of teaching science in science class, Walsworth, apparently believing that he had a “gotcha” question, asked her whether there were classroom experiments that could be conducted in support of evolution. As a matter of fact, Reaves told him, there’s an experiment involving the observation of E. coli bacteria.
After freezing the bacteria in different intervals, Reaves explained, “you can take all of them over time and compare them. You can see how the E. coli have changed over time and how they’ve evolved.”
“They evolved into a person?” Walsworth deadpanned.
One of the main reasons the committee’s discussions about evolution and creationism made for great theater was because of how completely outmatched the law’s defenders were by its opponents, led by then-17-year-old Zack Kopplin. As a part of his senior project at Baton Rouge Magnet, Kopplin launched a campaign to repeal the law, collecting endorsements from over 80 Nobel laureate scientists, more Nobel Prize winners than any other campaign has amassed since the first medals were awarded in 1901. Kopplin, by the way, is also responsible for making Mike Walsworth into a viral video star. Nearly a year after the committee meeting, he uploaded a clip of the state senator’s exchange with Darlene Reaves onto YouTube. It quickly racked up more than a half of a million views.
By then, the amiable but frequently befuddled Walsworth had been elevated to committee chairman. He may have been unconvinced by the evidence of evolution, but proof of the Peter Principle was indisputable.
In this year’s legislative session, which convened on April 12 and is set to adjourn “no later than 6:00 p.m. on Thursday, June 10, 2021,” although the routine on evolution is no longer in rotation, there’s no shortage of opportunities for legislators interested in becoming the star of a humiliating viral video.
Today, while the rest of the country continues to take inventory of the collateral damage inflicted by a former president who made more than 30,000 false or misleading claims during his four years in office and who unapologetically operated in the parallel dystopia of “alternative facts,” those of us in Louisiana have long been accustomed to a political landscape dominated by denialism and dominionism.
Bobby Jindal’s Political Extinction
Bobby Jindal, the fast-talking former wunderkind who spent his undergraduate years performing unsanctioned exorcisms and studying biology at Brown University, ultimately deserves blame for the creationism law that garnered international ridicule, earned the opprobrium of the entire scientific community, and gave far-right Christian dominionists a green light to violate the Establishment Clause and commit educational malpractice against an entire generation of public school students.
Fortunately, the LSEA has since been removed from state curricula guidelines, and although there have been isolated reports about the teaching of creationism (which, in and of itself, is perfectly fine, provided it’s not taught as science), Louisiana public school science teachers respected their students far more than the right-wing grifters who sold the Book of Genesis for campaign cash.
Following Barack Obama’s victory over Mitt Romney, the same Bobby Jindal had some tough words for his fellow Republicans: “We must stop looking backward,” he said in January 2013, during his keynote address at the Republican National Committee’s winter meeting. “Nostalgia about the good old days is heart-warming, but the battle of ideas must be waged in the future.” To be sure, there wasn’t anything especially innovative about Jindal’s proposed arsenal for the back to the future brawl, just the typical tropes about states being the laboratories of democracy and a handful of edits he recommended making to the standard talking points (“We must not become the party of austerity. We must be the party of growth”).
He also included at least one serving of his signature dish, whitewashed word salad dressed with a confusing condemnation of any politics that recognizes racial identity. “We must reject the notion that demography is destiny, the pathetic and simplistic notion that skin pigmentation dictates voter behavior,” Jindal declared. Translation: We must accept the fact that demography is destiny and do a better job of appealing to minorities and younger voters.
Jindal’s vision of a post-racial America skips the chapters on truth and reconciliation and jumps directly to absolution. But this opens up an entirely new can of worms, and as I learned a few years ago, sometimes, a picture of a portrait is worth a thousand words.
More than anything else, Jindal’s speech to the RNC was a repudiation of Mitt Romney, who, in Jindal’s estimation, lost the 2012 presidential election by running as a wealthy elitist willing to ignore “47%” of voters.
But Jindal’s most memorable line wasn’t directed toward Romney. It was instead intended as a coded criticism of candidates like Todd Akin, the one-term, virulently anti-abortion Missouri congressman who self-sabotaged his campaign for the Senate in a single sentence. “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down,” Akin said, arguing that victims of “legitimate rape” are less likely to get pregnant.
“We must stop being the ‘stupid party,'” Jindal urged in response.
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During his final year as Louisiana governor, after announcing a campaign for the White House in a bizarre digital ad that featured secretly-recorded footage of him revealing his plans to his three kids, who were far more interested in the turtle they spotted in the backyard of the Governor’s Mansion, the historically unpopular Jindal packed up and moved to Iowa. It ended up being a perfect metaphor for his lackluster campaign: No one was listening to Bobby Jindal.
Had he not spent every last dime on a quixotic quest to recruit an army of home-school activists in Iowa, the self-styled “evangelical Catholic” may have been able to gain traction with his blistering critique of the Stupid Party’s new frontrunner.
“Donald Trump is an unstable narcissist,” Jindal said, accurately. “You know why he hasn’t read the Bible? Because he’s not in it.”
But Bobby Jindal’s campaign fizzled out before the Iowa caucuses, and the Stupid Party nominated a wealthy, out-of-touch elitist with a habit of making outrageously offensive and racist remarks and who, only a few years before, had been recorded boasting that “when you’re a star,” women will “let you” sexually assault them. “You can do anything,” he said. “Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.”
Despite warning Republican primary voters that Donald Trump was uniquely unqualified for the presidency, Jindal voted for him. It was a decision that neatly encapsulates the cautionary tale of the political prodigy who debuted in Louisiana as a 24-year-old boy wonder promising bold disruptions as he led the state’s healthcare and education systems into the new millennium. Indeed, Jindal’s mere presence—the Indian-American son of immigrants—had once been heralded as a powerful message about the future of a party that only four years before his arrival had been led by David Duke.
Jindal owes his extraordinary rise in Louisiana politics to the unrealized promise he once represented, but make no mistake: his eventual downfall and his subsequent irrelevance were entirely of his own making. Despite his indignant bluster about the failures of the Republican Party, Jindal didn’t just fail to confront the most retrograde and divisive aspects of radical right, he empowered them.
The Stupid Party became the scaffolding that surrounded the peculiar brand of “conservatism” he constructed.
More than five years after Jindal’s departure from office, his legacy remains in tatters, and his political brand continues to be toxic, even among Republicans. Last year, during the runoff campaign for the Fifth Congressional District between Republican state Rep. Lance Harris and the eventual victor, Republican Luke Letlow (who sadly lost his life to Covid-19 before being sworn into office), Harris attacked Letlow for, among other things, previously working for Bobby Jindal.
Obviously, the attack didn’t work, but the fact that it was made at all—particularly by a politician who served as chair of the Republican legislative caucus during Jindal’s second term—is remarkable nonetheless. It also highlights a disconnect over accountability that persists as the most important animating force in state politics: The same white Republicans who enabled and promoted and, in many ways, defined Jindal’s failures as governor have not only avoided scrutiny, they’ve nurtured an even more virulent and extreme brand of factionalism—one that was doubtlessly accelerated by the presidency of Donald Trump— that now possesses an even tighter grip on the state legislature.
The idiocy of creationists may appear quaint in comparison to the dangers posed by the current crop of anti-vaxxer covid and climate science deniers who continue to embrace the seditious Big Lie that resulted in the violent insurrection on Jan. 6 and who want to impose sanctions against the teaching of critical race theory, restrict and constrain the right to vote, prohibit social media companies from “discriminating” against those peddling baseless conspiracy theories or white supremacist, anti-Semitic political propaganda, and mandate the singing of the National Anthem at all sporting events, from the local Under-7 youth soccer league to the televised spectacle of Monday Night Football. This is what passes for patriotism in today’s Louisiana Republican Party.
But to understand how we have arrived at this particularly perilous moment, it’s important to distinguish between the truth about the origins of the Louisiana Republican Party and the creation myth that is told on the campaign trail.
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Shakedown 1979
And the Creation Myth of the Louisiana Republican Party
In Louisiana, the Grand Old Party is neither especially grand nor particularly old. While it’s understandable that Louisiana Republicans occasionally attempt to trace their party’s provenance back to Honest Abe, the Party of Lincoln left Louisiana around the same time President Rutherford B. Hayes recalled federal troops from the state, officially signaling the end of Reconstruction. April 24, 1877, to be precise.
Aside from the name, today’s Louisiana Republican Party doesn’t have much in common with the party that championed civil rights and promoted newly-emancipated slaves into positions of prominence.
For most of the 20th century, Louisiana was a one-party state. “From 1900 to the 1950s the Louisiana Republicans did not offer even token opposition to the entrenched Democrats,” Philip Uzee, the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts at Nicholls State University, wrote in his 1971 essay “The Beginnings of the Louisiana Republican Party.” Uzee had reason to believe that after decades of irrelevance, the party was poised for a comeback. In 1971, out of the hundreds of elected offices in Louisiana, he noted, a total of 15 were occupied by a registered Republican, a sign he considered promising.
The Louisiana Republican Party is still a relatively new phenomenon, whereas the iteration that operated in Louisiana after the Civil War was a relatively brief phenomenon. “The Republicans were in power for eight years,” Uzee wrote. “The stormy era was characterized by some progress in education and civil and political rights for Negroes, some economic rehabilitation for the state as well as fraud, corruption and violence. The party’s control of Louisiana was buttressed by the favor of the Grant administration and the presence of federal troops. When these essential props were removed there followed the events of April 24, 1877, and the collapse of the Republican regime.”
Uzee’s instincts would prove to be prescient. In 1972, only months after losing his campaign for Louisiana governor to then-Congressman Edwin Edwards, Dave Treen, a lawyer from suburban New Orleans who had made three unsuccessful bids for Congress in 1962, 1964, and 1968, became the state’s first Republican elected to the U.S. House of Representatives since Reconstruction, winning the seat for the Third District by defeating Democrat Louis Watkins, Jr., 54% to 46%.
Two years later, Treen breezed into another term, along with Republican Henson Moore, whose narrow, 14-vote win over Democrat Jeff LaCaze had to be held a second time, thanks to malfunctioning equipment. The rematch wasn’t even close. Moore won the seat for the Sixth Congressional District by slightly more than 10,000 votes, and a couple of years after that, Republican Bob Livingston beat Democrat Ron Faucheux in the state’s First Congressional District. Within the span of only five years, Louisiana’s federal delegation had tripled its Republican membership. By the end of the decade and with Edwin Edwards constitutionally prohibited from running for a third conservative term, Congressman Treen’s eyes were once again on the state’s biggest prize.
The 1979 Louisiana gubernatorial election was a classic, and it’s a story worth telling. It’s also a seminal moment in the history of the Louisiana Republican Party that helps to explain some of the issues it would use and the divisions it would exploit in becoming a competitive, credible political institution.
Nine candidates qualified in total, but because three of them were either obscure or perennial candidates, it was, for all intents and purposes, a six-person race, featuring Sonny Mouton, president pro-tem of the state Senate; Speaker of the state House Bubba Henry; Louis Lambert, chairman of the state’s powerful Public Service Commission; the 37-year-old Secretary of State, Paul Hardy; the outgoing Lieutenant Governor, Jimmy Fitzmorris, and the Republican congressman, Dave Treen.
The first and arguably the most important thing to understand about the 1979 election is that it was only the second gubernatorial contest under the state’s now-legendary jungle primary system and the first to be decided in a runoff. For those unfamiliar, the jungle primary (or majority-vote primary) requires that all candidates, regardless of their party affiliation, compete against one another; political parties in Louisiana do not select nominees in separate elections. If no candidate receives more than 50% of the vote, then the first and second place finishers face one another in a runoff.
In 1975, during the first of his four terms in office, Democratic Gov. Edwin Edwards enacted the new system, believing that it was not only more elegant and democratic (lower case d), but also that it would only further marginalize candidates who belonged to the already marginal and severely outnumbered Republican Party. As an added benefit, the system promised to save the state money, because Democrats (upper case D) were so dominant that general elections rarely, if ever, were actually competitive.
The 1979 race featured another x-factor, because that year, in an attempt to catch the reputed New Orleans Mafia boss Carlos Marcello engaging in some good ol’ fashioned political corruption, two FBI agents and an informant named Joseph Hauser, a recently convicted insurance fraudster, flew down to Louisiana and pretended to be big-shot insurance brokers who wanted to partner with Marcello on a plan they claimed would save the state a ton of money. With Edwards on his way out, the FBI instead began sending sizable campaign donations to the men running to take his place, hoping that at least one of them would agree to sign a portion of the state’s insurance business over to them as a gesture of their gratitude.
Somehow, they’d gotten Charles Roemer, the outgoing Commissioner of Administration, father of future Louisiana Gov. Buddy Roemer, and campaign treasurer for Sonny Mouton, stupidly wrapped into their scheme. Roemer wouldn’t make any commitments, but he was happy to accept the $25,000 donation to the Mouton campaign, seemingly unbeknownst to the candidate and, at least initially, nowhere to be found on his campaign finance reports. Roemer ended up spending time in jail for his role in the conspiracy. Louis Lambert outsmarted the agents; their contribution to his campaign was actually for the purchase of tickets, keeping him in compliance with financial disclosure requirements and ensuring that Uncle Sam knew he had received something of value in consideration for the cash. And while they never pursued any charges against him, the FBI was breathing down Jimmy Fitzmorris’ neck for months.
At the time, the 1979 Louisiana gubernatorial election was the most expensive non-presidential contest in American history, “a $20 million extravaganza that is keeping advertisements for car dealers and deodorants off the television stations,” the New York Times reported. Fittingly, the Federal Bureau of Investigations was one of the year’s most generous campaign donors.
Perhaps it’s not too surprising that the results of the Oct. 27 jungle primary were challenged in court and plagued by a cloud of suspicion. There was never much doubt over whether Dave Treen would survive the first round; polls showed he was “unquestionably” the frontrunner. The real battle, as is often the case in Louisiana, was for second place.
Initially, it appeared that Lt. Gov. Fitzmorris, who had been polling in a “strong second” to Treen and who boasted the endorsement of Ernest N. “Dutch” Morial, New Orleans’ first Black mayor, had survived the jungle, but three days after polls closed, “major changes in voting returns” showed that Lambert had captured the second place spot, besting Fitzmorris by a margin of only 2,296 votes.
Things quickly got even uglier. Fitzmorris filed suit, citing “widespread allegations of election irregularities, including vote buying, voting machine manipulation and polling commissioners entering voting machines illegally with voters.” Machines in at least three parishes had not been sealed prior to the official count, as required by law, and in a sworn affidavit, one witness claimed that there were 1,670 more votes in the governor’s race in East Baton Rouge Parish than there were voters who signed the precinct books on Election Day. But Fitzmorris’ lawsuit was quickly dismissed, largely due to the state Election Code’s requirement that a challenge be filed within five days of an election and prohibiting the introduction of any evidence not specifically alleged in the written pleadings.
Lambert failed to receive the endorsements of any of his Democratic primary opponents. In fact, Fitzmorris and the three other leading Democrats would publicly announce their support for Treen, who had already made his commitment to personal integrity and honesty the centerpiece of his campaign. Shortly thereafter, the Louisiana Democratic Party narrowly passed resolutions to censure both state Sen. Sonny Mouton and state Rep. Bubba Henry.
“To hell with them all,” Mouton said in response. “I’ve spent half my life being a staunch Democrat. And those sons-of-bitches censured me? I’ll put Treen’s integrity and credibility over Lambert’s any day of the week. It’s like telling me I have to endorse Lucifer over God because Lucifer’s a Democrat.”
(Lambert suspected that his four fellow Democrats who endorsed Dave Treen had each been promised something in return, an allegation that Treen denied at the time. But once in office, Treen found jobs for all four men in his administration. Henry was named Commissioner of Administration, the second-most powerful position in state government. Mouton became Treen’s Executive Counsel. Hardy was his Secretary of Transportation, and Fitzmorris was given the title of Special Assistant for Industrial Development).
Even though all of the stars seemed to be aligning for Dave Treen, his victory was by no means a foregone conclusion. In the days leading up to the election, his campaign prepared themselves and the public for the very real possibility of a contested election, suggesting that if Lambert were to win, it would probably be the result of some sort of mischief or manipulation. Ultimately though, Treen prevailed in the Dec. 8 runoff by fewer than 10,000 votes, becoming the state’s first Republican governor in 102 years.
There had been some speculation that Treen, once in office, would move to dismantle the jungle primary, but the election had persuaded him against messing with his success. Because Lambert faced stiff opposition from other Democrats—opposition that only grew after he made the runoff— he could not claim to be his party’s de facto nominee, whereas Treen, as the sole Republican in the race, could. Because of the jungle primary, Republicans, as long as they were disciplined and well-organized, could use the fact that they were vastly outnumbered to their advantage.
For this reason, Edwin Edwards is sometimes facetiously referred to as “the father of the Louisiana Republican Party.”
But make no mistake: Things didn’t change overnight, and it’d take awhile before Republicans were convinced the jungle primary was a good thing. Four years after Treen’s historic victory, Edwin Edwards would return to the Governor’s Mansion, beating Treen (for the second time) in a landslide, and Democrats continued to dominate Louisiana for the next quarter century. It would take another lawyer from Metairie named Dave to usher in the era of Republican dominance.
As a state representative, David Vitter championed the passage of a law creating legislative term limits, which promised to deprive Democrats across the state the advantage of incumbency. For Democrats who weren’t at risk due to term limits, particularly those representing competitive districts, Vitter found another way to threaten their political futures, launching a new organization, the Louisiana Committee for a Republican Majority, to pressure members to either switch parties or take their chances against a well-funded Republican opponent. The one-two punch of term limits and the LCRM delivered the final devastating blow.
In 2004, 32 years after Dave Treen became the state’s first Republican elected to the U.S. House of Representatives since Reconstruction, Louisiana finally elected a Republican to the U.S. Senate. His name? David Bruce Vitter.
The “new” Louisiana Republican Party, however, wasn’t born in 1972 or 1979 or even 2004; it was born on May 17, 1954, the day the United States Supreme Court unanimously ruled that segregation of public schools on the basis of race was unconstitutional, thereby overturning more than a half of a century of precedent established in Plessy v. Ferguson.
To be sure, there are legitimate arguments that the party was actually born in the aftermath of the 1948 Democratic National Convention, which featured an impassioned speech on civil rights by an LSU graduate named Hubert Horatio Humphrey, Jr., prompting delegates from Alabama and Mississippi to walk out in protest. 1948 was also the year President Truman ordered the integration of the military, and the year that Strom Thurmond, the right-wing, white supremacist Democratic governor of South Carolina, would challenge Truman’s reelection from a new “segregationist” political party, the States’ Rights Democratic Party, supporters of which became better known as Dixiecrats. Thurmond carried four states: South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Newspaper reports of Dewey’s win over Truman were greatly exaggerated.
Others claim July 2, 1964, the day President Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act and, upon doing so, reportedly quipped, “There goes the South for a generation.” And yes, it is also true that Charlie and Virginia deGravelles, the husband/wife duo who are sometimes credited as being the “founders of the modern Louisiana Republican Party,” joined the GOP in 1941, becoming the first two white Republicans registered in Lafayette Parish. But LBJ was merely acknowledging a foregone conclusion. (1964 was also the year that U.S. Sen. Strom Thurmond left the Democratic Party for good and became a Republican). And while the deGravelles, who were well-respected organizational leaders, were indeed two of the first members of a “modern” Louisiana Republican Party, they were also two of the last members of Wendell Willkie’s Republican Party.
Brown v. Board of Education signaled the beginning of the end of the so-called “Solid South” and the moment that Southern Democrats understood that their party was irreparably split. The Court’s decision would also serve as the animating force that drove whites—down Eisenhower’s newly-paved interstate highways—into the red-lined cul-de-sacs of suburbia, turning the capital and the commerce of downtowns into the windowless colossus of the shopping mall and constructing brand-new schools where white students wouldn’t have to confront the dismantling of the Jim Crow order that their parents and grandparents had fought to preserve.
In a sign of the times, during the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education, members of the Louisiana Democratic Party’s Central Committee voted to oust their National Committeeman, Alexandria lawyer Camille Gravel, after Gravel publicly declared his support for the nascent civil rights movement, arguing that “segregation is immoral.” The Democratic National Committee overruled their white supremacist members down in Louisiana and promptly reinstated Gravel. The story made headlines across the planet, earning Gravel, a devout Catholic, induction into the Order of St. Gregory by Pope Pius XII. (Incidentally, 20 years later, Gravel would serve as the Executive Counsel to Gov. Edwin Edwards, who tasked him with drafting the state statute creating the jungle primary).
In most respects, the story of the Louisiana Republican Party isn’t any different than the story of the GOP in any other Southern state, except that the concentration of Blacks in New Orleans provided Democrats with a more durable firewall than they had in other, more rural states.
No doubt, there will be Louisiana Republicans who vehemently disagree with the notion that theirs is the party of segregation, not the party of Lincoln. But this assessment does not deny the existence of those whose affiliation with the party is informed by a principled belief in traditional American conservatism: Limited, decentralized government, a libertarian approach toward most social issues, an emphasis on the private-sector, and a preference for judicial restraint. I may personally find some of these beliefs to be objectionable or specious, yet there’s no denying that the dialectic between liberalism and conservatism or federalism and anti-federalism has defined American government since the very beginning.
But it’d be inapt to characterize today’s Louisiana Republican Party and the Trumpian faction of the national party as “conservatives,” even if they pay lip-service to conservatism. They are instead the latest incarnation of another persistent presence in our politics: An isolationist, protectionist, and ethnonationalist ideology that governs by chaos and occasionally displays a proclivity for proto-fascism. And that’s why its origins in the politics of racial segregation remain relevant.
Edwin Edwards once said that one of his biggest regrets in life was making Dave Treen, who he came to deeply admire and respect, the punchline of his classic zinger, “He’s so slow he takes an hour and a half to watch 60 Minutes.” But for all of Treen’s virtues, the truth is that he got his start in politics in 1959 after joining Louisiana’s segregationist States’ Rights Party and then striking up an alliance with the state’s most notorious white supremacists, Willie Rainach and Leander Perez. Later, Treen would attempt to distance himself from the brazenly racist movement, arguing, unconvincingly, that he had been “motivated by constitutional principle, not race,” repeating the same tired line many other Republicans of his era used to excuse their opposition to integration, as if they were merely engaging in a thought exercise or an abstract philosophical debate (one that is premised, by the way, on the notion that Black lives don’t matter).
Republican apologists continue to claim that their parry’s exponential growth in the Deep South has nothing to do with race. Instead, they say, voters gravitated toward the party because of its positions on economic issues. But in a 2018 paper in The American Economic Review by Princeton University’s Ilyana Kuziemko and Yale University’s Ebonya Washington, “Why Did the Democrats Lose the South? Bringing New Data to an Old Debate,” the claim is thoroughly debunked.
“The exodus of Southern whites from the Democratic Party is one of the most transformative, and controversial, political developments in twentieth-century American history,” they write. “Using newly available data, we conclude that defection among racially conservative whites just after Democrats introduce sweeping Civil Rights legislation explains virtually all of the party’s losses in the region. We find essentially no role for either income growth in the region or (non-race-related) policy preferences in explaining why Democrats ‘lost’ the South” (emphasis added).
For what it’s worth, Kuziemko and Washington posit a different date for the pivotal shift:
There are several state lawmakers who could illustrate how this dynamic continues to operate in Louisiana, but few are as transparently Machiavellian and or as mendacious as Republican state Sen. Sharon Hewitt of Slidell. And perhaps more than anyone else, Hewitt also unwittingly provides insight into the future of the Louisiana Republican Party.
The Grand Marshal of the Parade of Fools
The day before the Capitol Insurrection, Louisiana state Sens. Beth Mizell, Heather Cloud, and Sharon Hewitt decided to coordinate their outfits for a photograph that would accompany their letter to the Republican men who represent Louisiana on Capitol Hill. In complementary black and herringbone-patterned businesswear, the three stand shoulder-to-shoulder, maskless during a pandemic that was still awaiting the rollout of vaccines. Mizell and Cloud awkwardly hold up a print-out of the letter in front of Hewitt, who appears limbless in between her two colleagues.
Maybe it was inadvertent, but the Southern Republicans, in their matching gray suits, seem to be making a subtle nod to the Confederate gray uniforms of the Civil War.
The three women definitely believe that they are fighting a battle.
“Dear Senators and Congressmen,” they write. “In the United States, the lifeblood of our Republic is our free and fair elections. Today, that bedrock off our society faces challenges like never before. We contend that if the American people lose faith and hope in our election process, our freedom, way of life and collective future will suffer.”
They then quote from Ronald Reagan’s 1967 inaugural speech as California governor. “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction,” he famously said at a time in which the Cold War was a daily reality of American life.
“It is for this reason that we are writing to urge you to stand firm and call into question the electors from the states of Arizona, Michigan, Georgia, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin when congress meets on January 6, 2021,” they explain.
They’re full of shit, all three of them, amplifying the dangerous, delusional, and discredited Big Lie that would, less than 24 hours later, incite a mob of Trump-supporting seditionists, white supremacists, militia members, Qanon conspiracists, and right-wing extremists to storm the Capitol in an act of insurrection, murdering a police officer, injuring more than 100 other members of law enforcement, and resulting in the deaths of at least four others.
Mizell, Cloud, and Hewitt dressed their letter up in the hyperbole and vapid consultant-speak of phony outrage and even phonier patriotism. They probably didn’t write the letter. Last year, during the beginning of the pandemic, the Bayou Brief published a talking points memo that Hewitt had been circulating among her fellow Republicans. It attempted to redefine the public health crisis as nothing more than an act of economic sabotage committed by the state’s Democratic governor. The memo was written by Jay Connaughton, a Republican political consultant from Mandeville who had previously worked for Trump.
None of the three state lawmakers have acknowledged their complicity in spreading a baseless and fraudulent scam that aimed to disenfranchise millions of legal votes only in swing states that were carried by President Joe Biden. Among the men in the state’s federal delegation to whom they addressed their letter, only one, Louisiana’s senior U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy, refused to play along with the Big Liars. Even U.S. Rep. Garret Graves, who had previously exhibited signs of living in the “reality-based community,” voted against ratifying the already-certified electoral votes from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, though, given the tortuous, 1,100-word explanation he sent to constituents, it was clear he immediately regretted his decision.
During this year’s state legislative session, Heather Cloud hopes to ban the use of ballot drop boxes and allow election officials to scrub voters from the rolls based on a review of their utility bills. Beth Mizell wants to prevent transgender girls from participating in girl’s sporting competitions. Sharon Hewitt proposes making everyone sing the National Anthem, dammit.
Actually, that’s selling Sharon short. She wants to do a few things this year.
After single-handedly sabotaging the state’s contract to purchase new and badly-needed voting machines from Dominion Voting Systems (gee, I wonder why), only to ensure that the state continues to use the outmoded machines manufactured by ::checks notes:: Dominion Voting Systems, Hewitt is now proposing the creation of a convoluted bureaucracy of “experts” responsible for ensuring the quality control of voting machine procurement practices, which she has christened as “the Voting System Technology Commission.” (It’s reminiscent of the former office of the Commissioner of Voting Machines, which Governing Magazine once described as “the most ridiculous elective office in American state government”).
The legislation is not only a solution in search of a problem that only delusional conspiracy theorists believed to exist, it also reads like a ham-handed effort to prove her newly-found expertise on the subject of voting machine procurement by copying and pasting the language from the existing Request for Proposals document. (Again, legislators like Hewitt aren’t guided by conservatism; the only thing consistent about their political ideology is its chaotic appeals to the radical fringe).
On Tuesday, the bill advanced out of the Senate Committee on Senate and Governmental Affairs, but not before being subjected to a nearly two-hour long discussion by a parade of white Republicans who came armed with conspiracy theories and complaints about not being already named to Hewitt’s hypothetical commission. Former state Rep. Lenar Whitney, who served as the Louisiana Republican Party’s National Committeewoman at the 2020 RNC, fought back tears while expressing her opposition to the bill, primarily because she wanted to stack the proposed commission with like-minded people from the “grassroots.” The lunatics would like to run the asylum, thank you very much. (The 2020 election was the most secure election in American history, by the way. That’s not the opinion of liberal journalists or Democratic operatives; it’s the conclusion reached by the Trump administration’s own officials).
Hewitt’s most potentially consequential and revealing proposal this year is her bill to end the jungle primary system for congressional elections, an experiment Louisiana already tried out less than a decade ago. Hewitt has pretended for at least a year to be officially studying the idea of doing away with the jungle primary, and even though the current proposal only calls for changing the way the state conducts congressional elections, it’s obvious the ultimate aim is to overhaul state contests as well, something that sounds appealing to another far-right extremist, state attorney general Jeff Landry.
Already, it appears as if the proposal is dead on arrival. Why? Well, for one thing, it has revealed significant divisions between moderate Republicans and those on the far-right, divisions that could threaten the durability and sustainability of the party itself. Moderates recognize that they benefit from a system that incentivizes candidates with “crossover appeal.” The zealots would prefer that voters allow members of their club the ability to sort out their differences with those who think ideologically impure thoughts.
But there’s another, more fundamental concern. While the number of registered Republicans in Louisiana now exceeds one million voters, lagging behind the number of registered Democrats by approximately 224,000 (or 7% of the total electorate), the Louisiana Republican Party is nearly 94% white. Put another way, in a state in which Blacks make up slightly more than 32% of the population, only 2% of registered Republicans are Black.
Reverting back to a closed primary system would effectively be a return to the whites-only primary system that persisted in various iterations across the South until at least 1948.
It would put into stark relief the disconnect between the composition of the state and the composition of the political party that controls every statewide office with the exception of governor and commands a super-majority in one legislative chamber and a near-super-majority in the other. And it would also prominently illustrate the unsettling truth about a party founded on and animated by the politics of racial segregation.