Last night, Senator Mary Landrieu, Democrat of Louisiana, had her one and only debate with her Republican challenger, Rep. Bill Cassidy, a doctor with the face of a cartoon pervert who gets off on putting his penis in your mouth while you sleep, giggling, and running away on his tiptoes. Landrieu probably won, if for no other reason than she's better at it than Cassidy, who just didn't seem to try. But the conventional wisdom is "Who the fuck cares? She's gonna lose."
And everyone knows why she's gonna lose. It's "changing demographics in the Bayou State, the deterioration of the Democratic Party’s brand in the South and President Barack Obama’s dreadful unpopularity," as US News and World Report politely put it. But let's be honest here, shall we? It's because the whites in the South hate the nigger president, and anyone who helped him put his nigger hands all over the nice, white Lady Liberty is just a nigger-lover who needs to be proxy-lynched for the nigger president, who they can't vote out of office now.
Too harsh? Well, shit, Landrieu herself knows it. Her ads that targeted white voters talked about how she differs with Obama on issues like oil and gas drilling and the Keystone XL pipeline. The subtext, of course, is "Hey, crackers, I'm not the nigger president's ho." And her ads that target the black community? Well, let's just say that if they showed Landrieu on her knees, sucking off the president and giving a thumbs up, they'd be more subtle.
In other words, let's stop pretending that the completion of the Republican near-sweep of the South is about anything other than race. It isn't about government overreach, it isn't about economic policy, it isn't about the president acting as an emperor or some such shit. It's about showing Barack Obama that they can still call him "boy" by getting rid of all the white traitor Democrats they could.
At the debate, Cassidy repeated, endlessly, "Senator Landrieu supports Barack Obama 97 percent of the time," which was something her chief of staff said at a secretly recorded meeting with African American leaders. "Senator Landrieu represents Barack Obama. I represent you," Cassidy continued, blowing that racist dog whistle so hard that hounds in Texas started howling and getting out the rope.
Landrieu went out fighting over a scrap, accusing Cassidy of falsifying his time sheets when he was a doctor at LSU hospitals. In general, Cassidy bumbled, saying that he peeked at Landrieu's notes and offering that, racially, things are "better than they were under Jim Crow," which is not unlike saying that it's better to get kicked in the nuts than have your house burned down. Sure, you've got a point, but could we maybe work on not getting kicked in the nuts?
But, as ever, Landrieu hedged some of her even vaguely progressive beliefs (and she is most definitely moderate-right in the Democratic Party). She supports abortion rights called getting an abortion "immoral." She supports the Affordable Care Act, sure, but she has never been a fighter for it on the campaign trail. She has never made Cassidy say what specifically he would do to replace it or whether he would take health insurance away from people who got it under Obamacare.
That's what Landrieu should have been doing this last month. She should have been making a righteous case for the agenda that she has supported instead of trying to hide it from whites. There is no fucking way that whites who hate Obama are gonna vote for her. Trying to convince them is like touching a burning cross repeatedly and hoping it doesn't hurt this time. Instead, she should have tried to get the white progressive vote, which exists, and pushed even harder for the black vote, which could be overwhelming. Last time, 18% of whites voted for her. It will almost surely be less in this run-off.
And, frankly, considering how many times she stood up for Obama the last 6 years, the Democratic Party should have spent a fuck of a lot more coin on her campaign. They abandoned her, took their millions, and let her fall alone.
Mary Landrieu's long political career will die, then, having given in to the Republican racist narrative, even as she admitted that the narrative exists. She could have pushed beyond it, showed it as a lie. But she decided that it was better to try to convince idiots they're wrong than say what's right. She probably still would lose, but at least she'd lose with a bit of dignity by showing how dim, how devolved the GOP worldview is.
