Jason Berry is a New Orleans writer and independent producer. His books include Render unto Rome: The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church, and Last of the Red Hot Poppas, a novel about Louisiana politics.

And then there was Mitch. “The stupidity of throwing Mary under the bus is sending a message about the Democratic Party—we’re defeated,” stewed Raymond Strother, a retired political consultant who previously worked in one of her campaigns.

Many African-Americans saw Cassidy’s TV ads as a primer in race-baiting. The spots evoked the primal myth of the Old South in which white womanhood must be defended. In ads that ran around the clock, viewers saw Landrieu’s face pictured cheek-to-jowl with the black president like uneasy lovers in a Valentine.


“They’re pandering to the lowest common denominator,” bristled Stanley Taylor, a retired African-American member of the National Association of Letter Carriers, speaking by cell phone as he canvassed voters before the election. “Those spots are racist and totally dismissive of people’s ability to figure out their own self-interest.”

The blowback of racial politics marks the end of an era that began in 1970 when the senator’s father, Moon Landrieu, as the newly-elected mayor of New Orleans ushered African-Americans into local government, while guiding an era of dramatic urban growth. New Orleans had a white voting majority at the time; today it is about 60% African-American.

“Rather than suggest some policy objectives, it’s been easier for the Cassidy campaign to enflame racial fear to motivate Republican voters,” brooded community organizer Jacques Morial, whose father Dutch was the first African-American mayor of New Orleans, succeeding Moon in 1978. His brother Marc later served two terms as mayor and is today president of the Urban League.

Landrieu’s loss showed yet again that the great power in American politics is to make people believe that something false is true. Cassidy’s campaign recast the three-term senator as a projection of the black president largely reviled by the majority of white voters here, as in the rest of the South.

As Republicans swept the Senate in November, Landrieu drew 42%, against Cassidy and a second GOP opponent, heading into the open primary with a 16,000-vote lead. An uphill slog to be sure; but she lost any chance when the national party pulled money for media buys to counter the fusillade of Cassidy’s attack ads that came down to four words: Mary Landrieu, Barack Obama. Despite Senator Landrieu’s outward optimism in recent days, Saturday’s election seemed a foregone conclusion after the primary election a month ago.

Yet Mary Landrieu, to a certain extent, never gave in. Unlike the losing Kentucky senatorial candidate Alison Lundergan Grimes, who refused to even say if she voted for Obama, Landrieu ran true to her roots. She defended her vote for the Affordable Care Act, averring only that the law needed some retooling. Landrieu was a centrist Democrat whose impact on infrastructure, buildings and major revenue streams to the state was obliterated by the racial messaging that tied her to Obama.

“To paraphrase Tip O’Neill, no politics is local in Louisiana,” says Rich Masters, a former communications advisor for the senator and now executive vice-president for global public relations for MSL Group in Washington, D.C. “The knee-jerk reaction is that if I’m not feeling the recovery, there’s something massively broken. Had they voted in their own local best interests, Mary Landrieu would have been elected by a landslide.”

The racial politics that ended Landrieu’s senatorial career augurs the sunset of an era of a state congressional delegation delivering major capital projects from big bad Washington. Given the Tea Party impact on Republican politics, it taxes credulity to imagine Cassidy delivering capital projects as Landrieu and the old line of Democrats did. He opposed most of what she supported.

The chasm between Landrieu’s record and Cassidy’s is a vexing point for Gambit Newsweekly columnist Clancy DuBos, who is also a political commentator on WWL-TV, the CBS affiliate.

“Louisiana is a mendicant state,” DuBos says. “We have to beg for everything we get. Mary Landrieu brought home a lot of bacon and worked well by reaching across the aisle. David Vitter [the junior senator] doesn’t do that. Cassidy didn’t do that in the House and certainly didn’t campaign on doing so.”

DuBos runs down a list of Landrieu’s major bacon slices.

“She all but single-handedly bailed out a swath of south Louisiana by getting FEMA to forgive dozens of post-Katrina recovery loans to local parishes—St. Bernard, St. Tammany, Placquemines, Jefferson. These places are governed today by locally elected Republicans in most cases. Their local tax rates would have escalated, significantly, in order to repay FEMA. This was hundreds of millions of dollars for which she got a write-off,” he explains. “She led the fight in the Senate to keep federally subsidized flood insurance rates affordable, too.”

Landrieu’s legacy will register in a stream of federal dollars ear-marked for restoring the eroded wetlands along the Gulf of Mexico coastline, which is disappearing at a rate of a football field per hour.

In 2006, she sponsored a bill with then-Sen. Pete Domenici, a New Mexico Republican, that changed the way states share in tax revenues from offshore oil production near their borders. Louisiana will receive phased-in payments starting in 2017 expected reach well into the billions.

“Mary Landrieu follows in the great tradition of Russell Long, John Breaux, J. Bennett Johnston and Lindy Boggs by bringing home the bacon,” Jacques Morial says.

***

Reminders of Louisiana’s dynastic politics are visible everywhere. Drivers cross the Huey P. Long Bridge over the Mississippi River outside New Orleans. U.N.O. students borrow books from the Earl K. Long Library. Dr. Cassidy delivered babies in the Earl K. Long hospital in Baton Rouge before it closed in Gov. Bobby Jindal’s privatization plan for public health care in the state.

Lawyers and federal workers stream through the Hale Boggs building in downtown New Orleans. The Lindy Boggs Hospital, named for his wife and successor in Congress, has been closed since Katrina, but Tulane University has a building named for the late congresswoman. And the massive Ernest N. Morial Convention Center is named for Jacque’s dad, the first African-American mayor, who succeeded Moon in 1978.

Ironically, no bridge or building bears the Landrieu name, apart from the Moonwalk, a pedestrian path along the Mississippi River opposite Jackson Square in the French Quarter, an oblique reference to the former mayor’s impact on the city of his birth.

“The Landrieu dynasty is unique in Louisiana because you have second generation siblings who hold high office,” says Morial, drawing a contrast with the Boggs’, Longs and even his own clan.

Despite a paucity of names on public spaces, the Landrieus’ impact on the city may be the major story of the city’s recent past.

New Orleans is a blue city in a red state. Nine years after Hurricane Katrina floodwaters submerged 80% of the city—an area several times the size of Manhattan Island—New Orleans is on a roll under Mitch Landrieu, the fifth of nine siblings and in the view of many people, the most natural politician in the family.

“Mitch is the best political speaker in the state,” says Louisiana Radio Network talk show host Jim Engster of Baton Rouge, who followed him closely during the mayor’s years as lieutenant governor. “The irony is, he might have gone farther if his name had been Mitch Jones. Landrieu fatigue has a tether on him now. But there’s nobody in his league here as a stump speaker. He’s got three years to finish out as mayor. And in 2018 the city celebrates its tri-centennial.”

New Orleans has less than 5 percent unemployment and enjoys extensive infrastructure upgrading, thanks to an array of federal programs, some of which were clogged in a pipeline under the former mayor, Ray Nagin, who is now serving a ten-year federal sentence for bribery. If Nagin’s blunders became Landrieu’s gain, Mitch in his own right has led an urban resurgence after five years in office and enjoys high approval ratings.

Before Katrina, the city faced a severe brain drain as college-educated young people left the state to pursue jobs, or left for college in other regions and never came back. New Orleans today is a city of the young, as teachers, digital economy workers, artists and Creative Class workers gravitate to a surging economy, made more attractive by the city’s culture and unique character. A booming movie industry has generated a $450 million impact, according to the city’s film office. Among workers in the age 30 to 44 cohort, New Orleans sustained 19% growth between 2007 to 2012, making it one of America’s most attractive cites, as Joel Kotkin has written.

Barring a hurricane of Katrina’s severity—or another meltdown of the national economy—Mitch Landrieu will leave office as the mayor who rescued the city that nearly drowned on global television. That could play in a statewide election several years down the road if the political climate becomes more receptive to a Democrat.

Moon and Verna Landrieu raised nine children around an Uptown dinner table where people talked issues and were expected to be polite. Their names fall off the tongue like a melody to Catholic homes in the age before birth control: Mary, Mark, Melanie, Michelle, Mitch, Madeline, Martin, Melinda and Maurice, Jr.

A third sibling, Madeline Landrieu, is a state appeals court judge—a position that Moon, 84, held in his later years of government service.

The Landrieu legacy here is long and deep.

In two mayoral terms that ended in 1978, Moon transformed a Southern backwater into a city that trumpeted its diversity in major sports events, blow-out concerts at the Dome, Mardi Gras and a fledging Jazz and Heritage Festival. The mayor was a pivotal figure in the building of the Superdome, which became a catalyst for turning Poydras Street into a downtown corridor of office and hotel towers. He also restored the decaying French Market, among other building projects.

“Moon Landrieu is one of the most impressive politicians I’ve known,” says Ray Strother, now retired in Montana.

Strother got his start in Louisiana as a consultant but made his name in Washington working for Gary Hart, Lloyd Bentsen and major Democratic candidates. Before his vault to Washington, one of Strother’s biggest clients was the Superdome Commission in New Orleans in the early 1970s.

Mayor Landrieu and Gov. John McKeithen were major forces behind legislative support on the dome’s construction and early years of operation. The Superdome, which recently sold naming rights to Mercedes-Benz, was for many years the largest building of its kind. The dome marked “a fundamental change in New Orleans psychology from the old days when the city was run by a handful of old-timers,” the historian Pierce Lewis has written. “The old, closed, conservative city was open for business.”

As mayor, Moon Landrieu oversaw Superdome contracts that would be a temptation for many politicians to reward cronies. “I was in my thirties but I’d met my share of bums in politics,” says Strother. “Here was a man who truly gave a damn. He was always asking how to make it better, save money—and slap back certain hands that wanted more. I was impressed by his integrity.”

In the late 1970s, Landrieu, after his two terms as mayor, became President Jimmy Carter’s housing and urban development secretary. “He sat in my office one day and told me there’s no better job than being mayor,” Strother recalls. “He went on rhapsodizing for an hour about how you can make things better in the way people actually live their lives, fixing streets, finding jobs for people, doing things that in Washington he didn’t have the power to do.”

Come January, Louisiana’s nine-man delegation in Washington will have one Democrat, Cedric Richmond, an African-American whose district curls like a snake along the Mississippi River from New Orleans to outlying black wards of Baton Rouge, a garden variety example of GOP map-making to concentrate black voters at the expense of white hegemony.

And the delegation will not have a Landrieu anymore. But it’s not a name that’s likely to fade into the Louisiana past just yet—taking its place alongside the past eras of the Longs and the Boggs. Says Strother, “Moon and Mitch are very protective of their city and their family. Moon is like a papa bear in front of the den not letting predators in. Mitch is like his father. We were walking together some years ago, and Mitch said to me, ‘Raymond, your sleeve’s unbuttoned—you have the button?’ I did have it. I gave it to him. He sewed the button back on for me. It said to me that he was a person who didn’t feel entitled. Mitch was always willing to work for it.”