Jefferson goes down

REPUBLICANS notched a pair of wins this weekend in Louisiana’s runoff House races, as previewed by my colleague in Washington last week and mentioned below. The result in the 4th District was to be expected, but the 2nd District was a nice semi-surprise. They dispatched a “corruptocrat” in heavily Democratic New Orleans. And their candidate, Joseph Cao, is the first Vietnamese-American elected to Congress—he came as a child fleeing the war, no less. Unfortunately for the Republicans Americans aren’t paying much attention to these dribs and drabs of run-off elections, so Mr Jefferson, “Cold Cash” or “Dollar Bill” as he is sometimes known, can slip away without having captured the public imagination like Mark Foley. And, as discussed below, the Republicans have the problem of holding the seat in 2010.

Sun yue

Mr Cao is the inheritor of a grand political tradition—the accidental candidate elected by voters no longer able to stomach the incumbent without Alka Seltzer. No doubt he also benefited from the election’s hurricane-related delay, which meant he didn’t have to overcome a wave of black voters who would have probably cast perfunctory votes for Mr Jefferson. In many ways, Mr Cao is in the same position that Michael Flanagan, an obscure Chicago lawyer, found himself in 14 years ago. Mr Flanagan defeated Dan Rostenkowski, the iconic head of the House Ways and Means Committee, only because Mr Rostenkowski had been using congressional funds to buy gifts for friends, and stubbornly believed that voters would forgive him. At the next election, Mr Flanagan lost the Chicago-based seat by 28 points.

But Mr Cao is still around for two years, and it seems like the Republicans should be talking him up. He’s a young guy with an interesting personal story, who built his public reputation through his work in New Orleans post-Katrina and just took on a corrupt nine-term download movies incumbent. I’m slightly curious about Bobby Jindal’s role in all this. Josh Kraushaar at Politico notes that the governor endorsed Mr Cao only two days before the election, and thinks that this shows Republicans gained confidence in the final days of the race: “He wouldn’t have put his political credibility on the line if he thought Cao had no chance of winning.” In an interview with the National Review Mr Cao said that Mr Jindal had “not really Viagra been active” in supporting the campaign, though he had endorsed him. The governor is probably busy with his trips to Iowa these days, but there can’t have been much risk in endorsing Mr Cao a few weeks ago. If nothing else, it would have called attention to Democratic corruption and an interesting Republican. Any Louisianans want to weigh in on this?

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