The confounding re-election of William Jefferson

In a jaw-dropping result Saturday, an underwhelming 16% of registered voters in Louisiana’s 2nd District returned William “Dollar Bill” Jefferson to Congress for another term. From NOLA’s Times-Picayune:

Overcoming the specter of a roiling federal corruption probe that threatened to draw the curtain on his 16-year career on Capitol Hill, U.S. Rep. William Jefferson survived the fight of his political life Saturday, easily defeating state Rep. Karen Carter to win his ninth term in the 2nd Congressional District.

Guilty pleas by aides and associates who admitted to bribing the New Orleans Democrat, and the revelation in court documents that FBI agents had found $90,000 in marked bills in Jefferson’s freezer, had prompted pundits to begin inking his political obituary.

Of course, the ink in those political obituaries won’t go to waste; the probe into Jefferson’s money storage woes is merely hung-up in court at the moment, as the Congressman tries to define which documents seized from his office are defensibly protected from the FBI, and which are not. This bizarre election outcome won’t keep him from being indicted; even he expects it.

Voters knew this, yet they re-elected Dollar Bill anway. Why?

Was it Jefferson’s hypocritical attacks on Carter’s pro-choice stance, or her “reluctance to back an anti-gay rights amendment asking voters to define marriage as ‘between a man and a woman.’”? (Washington Times)

Mr. Jefferson had sought to make inroads in the conservative white community by portraying Mrs. Carter as pro-choice and pro-same-sex “marriage.”

The Carter camp then called Mr. Jefferson a hypocrite, saying he has long been supported by pro-choice and homosexual-rights groups.

That’s probably not what happened here. If 2nd District voters were seriously focused on those issues, Jefferson would long-since have been bounced from office.

Was it because of Jefferson Parish Sheriff Harry Lee’s mass-mailing to voters, telling them not to vote for Carter? (LA Times)

Analysts believe that Carter’s fate might also have been sealed by her failure to garner enough votes in Jefferson Parish, where Sheriff Harry Lee mailed out fliers during the final week of the campaign urging parish residents not to vote for her.

Lee and other Jefferson officials were outraged over comments Carter made in a recent Spike Lee documentary, criticizing Jefferson law enforcement officials for blocking Katrina evacuees from crossing a bridge to safety in their parish in the aftermath of the storm.

While Lee’s reputation as a racist was made long before the incident on the bridge, I’ve never been convinced that what happened there was a matter of race. In the face of all that baby-raping, throat-cutting hysteria, who would not have been terrified of the people trying to leave the city? The bridge-blocking incident was doubly tragic, since those trying to get out were every bit as afraid as those on the other side of the bridge.

Lee’s mailing did, however, manage to bring race back into the equation — a despicable, divisive tactic that further distanced white and black in a city that really needed no help maintaining its racial polarity.

It’s more likely that Jefferson’s win reflects a less-discussed aspect of New Orleans, and Louisiana itself — resistance to change:

Political analysts said voters in the district, which spans most of New Orleans and the West Bank of neighboring Jefferson Parish, were more concerned with maintaining the status quo than with change.

“It’s a vote for continuity,” Brian Brox, a political scientist at Tulane University in New Orleans, said of the results.

It’s hard to overstate New Orleanians’ level of attachment to tradition and the depth of intergenerational roots, or to measure the compounding impact these have had on the post-Katrina socio-political landscape.

An excellent example is public housing residents’ desire to return to the drug and crime infested projects. The living conditions were appalling, but comforting to people who had been in them, or the immediate neighborhoods, for generations. Destructive though it may be, this attachment to continuity has solidified into rigid resistance to change.

For people around the country, and for a newly elected Democratic Congress that has pushed ethics and reform, though, the choice made by the 2nd District’s electorate (or rather, by the few who voted) is problematic. From the Washington Post:

City Councilman Oliver Thomas said Jefferson’s victory would make the recovery more difficult.

“People are watching this election all around the country and I can only imagine what they are thinking,” Thomas said. “It will be very difficult to go back to them and ask them to trust us with the money we need here.”

The real problem here, of course, is that New Orleans is in a national fishbowl, and while they’re perfectly correct to vote for whomever they like, current circumstances, and the volume of federal taxpayer dollars, dictate that people around the country also feel as if they have a stake in the outcome:

“Jefferson’s re-election can’t do much good for Louisiana’s reputation, which is not high anyway on the scale of political ethics,” said Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. “That hurts because the . . . state needs all the backing in the country and the Congress that it can get for the long rebuilding from Katrina that lies ahead.”

Speaking Saturday night, Ed Renwick, the longtime director of Loyola University’s Institute of Politics, said the lack of support could stem the flow of financial aid.

In post-Katrina New Orleans, perception matters, and sending Jefferson back to Washington is likely to generate a great deal of derision for New Orleans — the last thing they need.

What a shame.