CAJUN POLITICS. Last week came the rumor that former Democratic Senator John Breaux may come out of retirement to run for governor, because incumbent Democratic Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco is in a danger of losing re-election. I�ve got a new Salon piece out on the Democrats� declining fortunes in Louisiana. A few key excerpts for the non-subscribers:
It was not long ago that Louisiana, like a soothing balm applied to an injury, was the state that gave bruised and battered Democrats some small measure of post-election relief. In December 2002, a month after Republicans secured a sufficient number of U.S. Senate seats to forge a Jim Jeffords-defection-proof majority, Democrats were buoyed when Landrieu eked out a four-point runoff win to retain her Senate seat. A year later, just 11 days after Democrats lost the only two other gubernatorial races of the 2003 off-year cycle, in Kentucky and Mississippi, Blanco's victory over Jindal prevented a GOP sweep�
If Louisiana once provided the Democrats' silver lining in cloudier moments, it is perhaps fitting that this most contrarian of states is now trending away from Democrats at the very moment they have regained majorities in both chambers of Congress, among governors and in the state legislatures. What's more, it is ironic that Hurricane Katrina -- the event that finally demolished the claims of governing competence long advanced by George W. Bush and national Republicans -- has accelerated the collapse of the state's Democrats.
As Gallup's latest survey of partisan self-identification reveals, largely because of Katrina Louisiana is the only state in which Democrats lost ground relative to Republicans since 2005, reclassifying it from a Democratic-leaning state to "competitive."
--Tom Schaller
