In 2002, a public hospital physician named Bill Cassidy donated to Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu’s first re-election campaign. A year later, he used a newspaper letter to the editor to criticize Republican gubernatorial candidate Bobby Jindal as a disaster for Louisiana’s health care system.
As The Associated Press reports in a new feature on what kind of Senator Cassidy might be should he win Saturday’s runoff election against Sen. Mary Landrieu, that should come as no surprise from a liver specialist who once backed Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis for president. Cassidy argued in a 1988 newspaper letter that then-Vice President George H.W. Bush would protect a bloated military budget, while Dukakis would have wider and better priorities.
Now the 57-year-old Cassidy is a Republican congressman who rejects his more liberal history and directs his critiques at President Barack Obama. And that may be enough for Cassidy to win against Landrieu, the Democratic senator he once supported.
An expected, a Cassidy victory would give Republicans 54 seats when the Senate convenes in January. Yet voters are left to wonder just what kind of senator Cassidy would be. He touts his tenure working and teaching in Louisiana State University’s academic hospitals, saying in a recent debate that his political career is a “continuation of that service.” But Republicans and Democrats agree he’s made his campaign more about Obama than about his own vision.
“I’m not sure most people know much about him other than that he’s a congressman and a doctor,” says Thibodaux Mayor Tommy Eschete, a nonpartisan elected official who describes both Landrieu and Cassidy as effective and accessible.
A Cassidy spokesman did not respond to a request for an interview with the congressman. Read the full feature.
