Senate at Stake in Open Races Across South

It was jambalaya, alligator-on-a-stick, and young mothers with babies on their hip two-stepping to blistering Cajun music from hometown hero Wayne Toups at the 60th International Rice Festival here.

And then, the way they like it in Louisiana, there was time for just a taste of politics during the parade.

Dodging the candy that revelers tossed Mardi Gras-style from the floats rolling down Parkerson Avenue, Republican Woody Jenkins and Democrat Mary Landrieu got a workout Saturday as they hurried up and down the parade route, shaking every hand they could reach in the crowds that lined the sidewalks under a cloudless azure sky.

Jenkins and Landrieu are both sweating out the final three weeks of a sprint-to-the-finish race to succeed retiring Democratic Sen. J. Bennett Johnston. And, with their eyes on the battle for the Senate, both party hierarchies in Washington are sweating right along with them.

Louisiana is one of four Southern states where the retirement of longtime senators is forcing Democrats to defend difficult terrain, even as they drive to seize Republican ground elsewhere.

Facing the threat that Democrats could capture Republican seats in such states as Colorado, South Dakota, Oregon and New Hampshire, the GOP is counting on offsetting gains in these four Democratic-held seats to preserve its Senate majority.

“If Republicans can pick up two, three or four of these Senate seats, there is no way the Democrats can take back the Senate,” said Atlanta-based GOP pollster Whit Ayres, who is working in several of these races.

In the first months after their Sherman-like advance across the region in 1994, Republicans were favored to win all of these seats. Today, as the national currents have shifted, the two sides appear much more evenly matched.

Regional Rundown

The Republican prospects are strongest in Alabama, where polls show GOP Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions holding a 9-percentage-point lead over Democratic State Sen. Roger Bedford in the race to succeed Sen. Howell Heflin.

Democrats have the upper hand in Georgia, where Secretary of State Max Cleland, a disabled Vietnam War veteran, has held a steady lead over Republican businessman Guy Millner for the seat now held by Democrat Sen. Sam Nunn.

On the bubble are the races in Louisiana and in Arkansas. In Arkansas, polls show Democratic Atty. Gen. Winston Bryant clinging to a narrow lead over freshman Republican Rep. Tim Hutchinson for the right to succeed Sen. David Pryor. The latest Louisiana survey--released last week by Baton Rouge-based Southern Media & Opinion Research--showed Landrieu holding a slim 47%-41% lead over Jenkins, but with his support more firm than hers.

Drawing a Line

In all four states, the Republican candidates are portraying their opponents as soft on crime and prone to raising taxes, and finding ways to link them to Massachusetts Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, still the symbol of bloated Northern liberalism for many Southerners.

“We are trying to paint the picture that there is a clear ideological line,” said John Weaver, the campaign manager for Sessions, whose ads slam Bedford for supporting Kennedy’s 1980 presidential bid.

Democrats are trying to open a different divide, offering themselves as moderates and inevitably denouncing their opponents as extremists, often by linking them to House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.). In large measure, these Southern Democratic hopefuls are following the path forged over the last year by President Clinton: Each is trying to blunt the ideological contrast by promising to balance the federal budget, while attacking their opponents as threats to Medicare and education.

In Louisiana, these competing themes are being reduced into particularly pure form in a race between two ambitious politicians who have spent their entire adult lives in elected office.

Born to a liberal New Orleans family (her father, Moon Landrieu, served as New Orleans mayor and President Carter’s secretary of housing and urban development), Landrieu has the impatient air of a young politician in a hurry. Only 40, she has already served two terms in the state House and two as state treasurer; last year she lost a race for governor before plunging into the Senate contest.

More ‘New Democrats’

Like the other Democrats battling to hold these open Southern seats, she has positioned herself slightly to Clinton’s right. After earlier supporting Clinton’s position, she now says she would vote to override his veto on legislation banning a form of late-term abortion that critics have dubbed “partial-birth abortions.” She supports a cut in the capital gains tax and says--like all four of these Southern Democratic hopefuls--she would back the balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution that Clinton opposed.

But, like Clinton, she presents herself as a “New Democrat” defending a role for government in solving social problems, even as she calls for it to shrink and adopt less intrusive means to its ends.

“In my father’s generation, there was much more hope that government could solve some of these problems,” she said. “I think my generation realizes that’s not really true. Government should be involved; government plays an important role, but it shouldn’t hold itself out as the beginning and end of every solution.”

Louisiana Contrast

Silver-haired and compact, Jenkins, 49, offers a populist conservatism with echoes of Patrick J. Buchanan. Throughout his six terms as a state representative from Baton Rouge, Jenkins has been an advocate of minimal government--to the point where Landrieu says she doesn’t compare him to Gingrich because “he makes Gingrich look moderate.”

A critic of the North American Free Trade Agreement and a staunch opponent of gun control, Jenkins is renowned for routinely voting against the state budget and virtually any expansion of government’s reach: He opposed mandatory kindergarten and seat-belt laws and legislation to regulate day-care centers. He proudly declares he has never voted for a tax increase.

Jenkins, a former Democrat who switched to the GOP in 1994, is even more passionate about social causes. In their one debate, he jabbed Landrieu over her support from a gay-rights group. In 1990, he coauthored a bill that sought to ban abortion even in cases of rape and incest; he has said that providing such exemptions would encourage women to falsely claim rape in order to obtain abortions.

Despite the sharp contrast--Landrieu says abortion should remain legal--the emotional issue isn’t the fulcrum of the race. Both sides are focused on taxes.

Landrieu spends much of her time touting a Clinton-like package of targeted tax cuts and denouncing Jenkins’ proposal to eliminate the Internal Revenue Service and replace the progressive income tax with a national sales tax. He says the tax rate would be set initially at 15%, contending that the proposal would free taxpayers and business owners from intrusive IRS inspections.

But, armed with studies from Republican flat-tax advocates hostile to the sales-tax idea, Landrieu says the rate would have to be at least twice that and that the plan would punish the middle class by raising the cost of food and other necessities. She received a new weapon early this month when the New Orleans Times-Picayune newspaper revealed that the IRS had imposed nine liens on Jenkins in the last six years for delinquent payment of almost $220,000 in taxes on a television company he owns. “No wonder he’d like to get rid of the IRS,” she said wryly.

For his part, Jenkins pounds Landrieu for voting for tax increases as a legislator, particularly the $729-million tax hike that then-Gov. Edwin W. Edwards pushed through after oil revenues collapsed in 1984. After Landrieu criticized the sales-tax idea at the Rice Festival on Saturday, Jenkins, in his brief speech, responded by pointing to her own tax record: “She knows a lot about taxes,” he said, “because she has voted” for so many of them.

Those are dangerous arguments for Democrats in a region where the basic current of politics still runs toward the right. In each of the four Southern states where Democrats are defending open Senate seats, at least a plurality of voters--from a low of around 45% in Georgia, to about half in Arkansas and Alabama, to some 60% in Louisiana--describe themselves in surveys as conservative.

But across the South, the gale-force ideological and anti-Washington winds that pummeled Democrats in 1994 have plainly diminished. Polls show Clinton comfortably leading Republican nominee Bob Dole in Louisiana and Arkansas, running ahead in Georgia, and remaining competitive even in Alabama.

In this less turbulent environment, the battle between the two sides becomes more precisely focused. In each of these states, the Democratic Senate candidates can rely on large votes from African Americans, while Republicans can depend on majorities--sometimes overwhelming majorities--from white men.

That leaves white women as the key swing votes. To win, Southern Democrats running statewide now have to run even, or close to it, among white women, says Earl Black, an expert on Southern politics at Rice University.

“Republicans can win if they write off 90% of blacks,” he said, “but it becomes a lot harder if they are only winning half the votes of white women.”

Louisiana will test that arithmetic of survival for Southern Democrats. Though Landrieu has had strained relations with Democratic Rep. Cleo Fields, a local black leader, observers here expect that in the end she will benefit from a large African American turnout for Clinton. On the other hand, a Southern Media poll shows Jenkins leading among white men by just over 2-1.

In that survey, white women also preferred Jenkins, but only by 8 percentage points. If Jenkins can’t peel away more white women from Landrieu, Louisiana could send its first elected female senator to Washington--and keep alive the Democrats’ fragile hopes of seating her in the majority.