In the latest installment of its “States in Play” series, The New York Times travels to Louisiana to see the various campaign trails firsthand and reports that “voters are finding it hard to get excited about broad-scope campaigns that have left the tradition of intensely local politicking as mostly a fading memory.”
The lengthy feature—titled “Louisiana’s Rogues Yield to National Issues”—highlights the point by following 6th Congressional District candidate and former Gov. Edwin Edwards as he recently pushed his 1-year-old son in a stroller through a New Roads festival. Plenty of potential voters and glad-handers rushed up to shake his hand.
“For all his color, though, Mr. Edwards, the populist rogue who embodied Louisiana politics from the 1960s to the 1990s, charming one half of the state and mortifying the other, might as well be a ghost,” reads the feature. “The main political event this year, the Senate race, could not be further removed from the Edwards era.”
“They used to say that the biggest sin in Louisiana politics was to be boring,” R. Michael McHale, a lawyer in Lake Charles, tells the newspaper. “Now Louisiana’s become more like Washington. To a certain extent, elections aren’t even about Louisiana anymore.”
“There are reasons for this,” the Times writes. “Over the past decade, the bungled government responses to a series of hurricanes, including Katrina, and to the BP oil spill have drained the appeal of entertaining politicians; an aversion to taxes has rendered the old populism model unsustainable; and, perhaps most of all, the effects of 24-hour news channels, national political debates on television, and the Internet have left hyperlocal politicking a mostly fading memory.”
