More by a confluence of circumstances than through intent, I wrote three different pieces on Mary Landrieu last week, with her re-election race heating up and several controversies dogging her. Is it a big deal that she doesn’t have her own place, not even an apartment, in Louisiana? How big an embarrassment, or worse, is her long record of charging campaign trips to taxpayers instead of to her campaign? Also, has she found a good issue in supposedly fighting for refinery jobs in Lake Charles — or is it nonsense, or worse? Finally, what should national, right-leaning audiences understand about why she is so hard to beat?
On the twin “scandals” of her lack of Louisiana abode and the bad flight patterns, see here.
On why her Citgo stratego is a bunch of malarkey.
And, for those wondering how she has survived politically in tough environs, I explain it to NRO readers here.
For a taste of the latter:
[I]t is sheer doggedness that endears her to constituents. “Our Mary” is a fighter for Louisiana, say a number of them. She’s adept at leaving her ideology outside the Bayou State’s borders, so when an issue directly and specially involves Louisiana — energy, pork, some regulatory matters — she’s seen as utterly non-ideological, utterly relentless, and sometimes quite effective. The fact that she raises significant campaign cash for Senate colleagues who then vote against (and repeatedly defeat) her pro-energy initiatives seems to make little impression on her constituents.
Mary Landrieu, I write, is no Lindy Boggs. But she evinces “a particularly Louisianan style of political pugnacity that makes even many Republicans in the state pay her a grudging respect bordering on a form of fondness.”
Please do read all three.
