Last night, my desi-Yankee parents and I discussed our upcoming vote. When Louisiana came up, there was talk of Mary Landrieu and, no, John Neely Kennedy is not related to the Chappaquiddick Kennedys (Oxford, Mississippi ≠ Oxford, Massachusetts and all that). Then arrived the topic of dread and despair, Representative William Jefferson. With a huge sigh, I said, “D finally convinced me that abstaining from voting for congressional representative is not the responsible thing to do, while registering our dissatisfaction with Jefferson is, even if the contender is Metairie Barbie.”
“How could your district put people that useless up for election?” (Uh, Liddy Dole, anyone?) So, I gave the folks a long-winded explanation of why Jefferson can run until he’s proven guilty, how our non-Jefferson and non-Moreno votes were diluted among three decent candidates, for which we should have arranged some sort of informal pre-primary to pick one who would have flushed the two current picks out of the pool, and how Moreno has done nothing to reach out to the majority of her Orleans Parish constituents, which is why Jefferson will end up winning. Plus, he has the support of God.
My dad said, “You should turn your explanation into a post,” but Schroeder beat me to it, along with those ever-important things called numbers, maps and graphs:
… The answer we need to give people is that we didn’t, in fact, demonstrate a desire to re-elect Jefferson. In fact, 51,701 of us voted for someone else in the Democratic primary. Three out of every four voters in the primary voted for someone besides Jefferson. Unfortunately, there were so many other African-American candidates in the primary who split the vote, that Jefferson made the run-off against Helena Moreno with a slim plurality of the vote.
Second of all, one always feels obliged to mention that an analysis of the 2nd Congressional District based upon race dynamics is an unfortunate reality of the way the district operates historically. That reality will play out again this season since Helena Moreno doesn’t appear to have made much effort to make inroads and build trust in the African-American community. She talks the talk like a television reporter, but that doesn’t necessarily mean she’s done her homework.
Like I said, Schroeder’s got spreadsheets and maps, so go read his post in full. My mother, who never misses an opportunity to conflate South Indian (specifically, those of the state of Tamil Nadu) and Louisiana politics, foresees that, once he is re-elected, William Jefferson will not be convicted. Either way, the federal pen is not enough for the likes of Jefferson and Stevens.
