In Landrieu Races, Obama Helps and Hinders

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In Landrieu Races, Obama Helps and Hinders
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/31/us/politics/in-landrieu-races-obama-helps-and-hinders.html?_r=0

On a recent morning, Senator Mary L. Landrieu of Louisiana woke up in her childhood bedroom, drank coffee with her parents and headed downtown to help her little brother Mitch keep his job.

Walking into a hotel ballroom for a fund-raiser for Mr. Landrieu, the mayor of New Orleans, she encountered a crush of immediate and extended family. She complimented an aunt on the spring in her step (“Can I have one of those strokes please so I can lose some weight?”), then joined forces with her brother to schmooze.

“She just had her first grandbaby!” Ms. Landrieu exclaimed about a donor. Mr. Landrieu draped his arm around his sister, Louisiana’s senior senator, and added, “She’s having her first one, too!”

Both Senator and Mayor Landrieu face re-election this year in campaigns that are complicated by the currents of race and history that run through this state, but also by national factors, chief among which is President Obama. Mr. Landrieu is trumpeting the president’s endorsement as he seeks to repel an African-American challenger and draw black voters to his side in Saturday’s primary election.

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“We have been in this business for a long time; you try to insulate yourself a little bit from some of the negative aspects,” said Moon Landrieu, 83-year-old patriarch of the political family. William Widmer for The New York Times
His sister, whose tough race for a fourth term requires the statewide support of white moderate voters — many of them hostile to the president — is largely scurrying away from Mr. Obama.

The confluence of the campaigns has created an existential moment for a Democratic dynasty that has become the reigning political family in a state that has been home to the Longs, the Morials and the Boggses. There has been an infusion of money from the conservative Koch brothers, complaints of White House interference and accusations that national Republicans with an eye on winning control of the Senate are meddling in the mayor’s race to tarnish the Landrieu name among the family’s crucial power base of black voters.

“We have been in this business for a long time; you try to insulate yourself a little bit from some of the negative aspects,” said Moon Landrieu, the 83-year-old patriarch of the nine-sibling clan, as he chomped on a cigar outside the fund-raiser. “But yes, there is always a sense of anxiety about it. You can’t be a parent without being nervous.”

The family’s dominance started with the senior Landrieu, who won a historic election for mayor in 1970 by cobbling together a coalition of blacks and progressive white voters. Cursed by entrenched white elites after he integrated City Hall, he won the enduring good will of the city’s and the state’s blacks, who became a prime constituency in the careers of his children.

Mitch, a former state lawmaker and lieutenant governor, became the first white mayor since his father by winning a majority of both blacks and whites in 2010. Ms. Landrieu rebounded from a failed bid for governor in 1995 with the help of her father, who urged her to run for the Senate. (“It’s what we do,” he insisted when the family questioned the wisdom of another political campaign.)

These days, some black activists are attacking his son in New Orleans, while Louisiana as a whole has become a solidly Republican state and increasingly unfriendly territory to his daughter. Ms. Landrieu voted for the president’s health care program, and her poll numbers sank as the website’s rollout stalled and some Louisianans lost their health plans. She is now desperately trying to make it clear that she wants to revise the law.

It is the Senate race that most concerns Moon Landrieu, especially the onslaught of health-law-themed negative television ads underwritten by outside groups, a daunting development even for an old pro who has seen so much.

“I have at times said, ‘Mary, come on home, girl. There’s another life out here,’ ” he said.

As a state lawmaker in his 20s, Mitch Landrieu was sometimes disparaged as “Half-Moon” and colleagues teasingly asked if he consulted his father and sister before each vote. But these days it is he who seems most ascendant, and he is widely believed to have designs on the governorship.

He is favored in Saturday’s Democratic primary, in which he faces a black candidate, Michael Bagneris, a former civil district court judge, who argues that black sections of New Orleans have been largely left out of the city’s comeback story. At a candidate forum at a Lower Ninth Ward church last week, the mayor, whose jitteriness prompted his siblings to call him Nervine, listened with tensely folded hands as Mr. Bagneris shouted that parts of the city had been “absolutely ignored.”

It is this criticism that the Obama endorsement seems intended to answer. “I developed a very, very close relationship with President Obama,” the mayor said in an interview.

Mr. Bagneris sees something else at work. The endorsement, he said, amounted to local interference by Mr. Obama to help save Mr. Landrieu’s endangered sister. “Obviously in this city you have a majority black electorate,” he said. “What better move would you make than to get your big sister to influence the president to do an endorsement?”

Ms. Landrieu, in an interview, said, “I most certainly was not involved.” But regardless of how it came about, the endorsement was viewed by some members of the black establishment as heavy-handed. In an article headlined, “Thanks Mr. President, but We Got This,” The New Orleans Tribune, a local black publication, said shame on you, Landrieus, “if you think black voters in New Orleans are like sheep.”

Mitch Landrieu, 53, has countered with his own effort to hurt Mr. Bagneris among blacks, characterizing him as the puppet of national Republicans looking to end the Landrieu run. He referred in the interview to Mr. Bagneris’s website having fleetingly showed a design credit for Vici Media, a firm specializing in conservative political campaigns. (The company’s motto reads “We kick,” followed by a picture of a donkey.)

Mr. Landrieu echoed the accusations of his supporters by referring to a private meeting at a New Orleans hotel in November attended by the Republican national chairman, Reince Priebus, the Louisiana Republican chairman, Roger Villere Jr., and some of the state’s top Republican donors.

“They were trying to find a way to get money down here without fingerprints,” Mr. Landrieu said.

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Mayor Landrieu plays up his endorsement by President Obama. His sister keeps her distance. William Widmer for The New York Times
The charge incenses Mr. Bagneris. “I’m so glad he said that because now I’m going to retort,” Mr. Bagneris said in an interview, saying there was no outside group funding television ads for him. “Show me the money!”

In fact, the conservative web design company that made Mr. Bagneris’s website said it did so at the request of another firm, which said that it had clients on both sides of the aisle. And while Mr. Villere declined to discuss “strategy that was maybe talked about” in the November meeting, and acknowledged that “if Mitch Landrieu were to lose in New Orleans, then he wouldn’t have the leverage to help his sister in the city,” donors at the meeting denied any plot.

“That’s local New Orleans ya ya going on,” said Kevin Couhig, who attended the meeting.

The one thing everyone seems to agree on is that electoral success for Mitch Landrieu, and his costly ads broadcast during Saints football games, could help his sister. “I just spent $3 million on name recognition,” he said. “And my last name is Landrieu, and so is hers.”

At the forum in the Lower Ninth Ward church, the mayor called attention to the federal assistance championed by his sister, not so subtly making the case that she has not lost touch with her hometown.

boudin balls in Breaux Bridge, Ms. Landrieu rode into the nearby Republican stronghold of Lafayette to empathize with small oil producers who feel victimized by the Obama administration. A campaign tracker from the conservative group America Rising PAC filmed her conversations.

“Very fun,” she deadpanned.

In an interview, she played down the political threat of the health care law. “My opponents take a great risk with that, because I think voters really understand that to have a strong work force you have to have a healthy work force” she said. She said she doubted that Republicans were targeting her by sowing hard feelings among black voters in her brother’s contest.

“I don’t see that race becoming racial,” she said, adding that “he will win and will win broadly, and people will judge me on my own record.”

But that does not mean the siblings are not helping each other. At the New Orleans fund-raiser, Ms. Landrieu took the stage and thanked the 800 gathered “Women for Mitch” for helping her brother and “helping me, eventually, after we get over this one.”

The crowd clapped. When the “Soul Queen of New Orleans,” Irma Thomas, came onstage, she thanked Ms. Landrieu for “being respectful of our president” and invited “the singing mayor” up to perform a duet of the Louisiana politics standard, “You Are My Sunshine.”

Mr. Landrieu flipped the microphone in the air with a flourish. His sister applauded heartily.