Yet as he spoke, it seemed to me that radical wasn’t the correct word for it. He was simply describing himself as an effective centrist, one who gets results. The sad thing is that in a time of national intransigence, gridlock and hyper-partisanship, effectiveness is radical.

But the problem facing Landrieu is that being any kind of centrist Democrat when the party’s progressives are ascendant would be perilous.

The other issue is, ironically, Landrieu’s noble quest to be a racial healer.

As he told me: “The thing I’m most excited about is, I’m leading an initiative to try to knit the South back together across race and class.” He says it’s called the E Pluribus Unum Fund, and its primary funder is Laurene Powell Jobs’s Emerson Collective.

He continues, “We’re in the planning period to see if there is a need to or a desire to actually build an institute for racial reconciliation in the South somewhere.”

But he recognizes the conundrum the all-important black Democratic primary voters in the South would be in when faced with a white man from the region and black candidates from beyond it.

As he put it:

“You don’t know how African-Americans in the South are going to perform if a white Democrat from the South is running against three really good African-American candidates. We’ve never had that before. You could have it this time. You could have Kamala Harris, Cory Booker and Deval Patrick. So, that theory has never been tested before.”

It would be a hard debate stage to manage without looking like a white savior, coming to fix America’s race problem and saying that he was a better choice to do so than the women and minorities in the race.