NATIONAL NEWS
NPR: Toyota Pulls Over 6 Million Vehicles Worldwide
http://www.npr.org/2014/04/09/301027981/toyota-pulls-over-6-million-vehicles-worldwide?ft=1
Toyota is recalling 6.4 million vehicles due to defects. The recall comes at a time of heightened scrutiny of automakers, only weeks after Toyota agreed to a $1.2 billion settlement with the U.S. government for misleading consumers.
Thomson Reuters Foundation: New global scorecard aims to promote urban development without cars
http://www.trust.org/item/20140410080029-ksia1
Researchers have launched an international standard and scorecard aimed at persuading planners, designers and architects to develop urban communities that encourage people to walk, cycle or take public transport - anything but drive.
STATE NEWS
Detroit Free Press: Southwest Detroit businesses take streetlighting into their own hands
http://www.freep.com/article/20140409/BUSINESS/304090141/1210/business01
A business association in Detroit has taken on the responsibility of replacing nearly 200 old and broken city streetlights using federal dollars and charitable foundation support.
Star Tribune: Southwest Corridor light-rail route gets green light
http://www.startribune.com/local/west/254566841.html
The Twin Cities’ biggest transit project passed a major milestone Wednesday with the approval of a $1.68 billion design that emerged from years of planning and quarreling.
Washington Post: Silver Line contractor says work is complete
The contractor building the first phase of the Silver Line said that it has made “significant progress” and could ask the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority as early as Wednesday to certify that the work on the rail line is complete.
Pacific Business News: Honolulu mayor, rail agency officials go to Washington
http://www.bizjournals.com/pacific/blog/2014/04/honolulu-mayor-rail-agency-officials-go-to.html
Honolulu Mayor Kirk Caldwell and rail project head Dan Grabauskas, along with Ernie Martin, chairman of the Honolulu City Council, and Ivan Lui-Kawn, chairman of the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation, have spent the past couple days in meetings with Washington big-wigs.
KUTV: Thousands Use Free Passes For Bus, Trains
http://www.kutv.com/news/top-stories/stories/vid_10537.shtml
Utah transportation officials say thousands participated in a program that offered free bus and train passes to people willing to leave their cars at home to improve air quality.
Atlantic Cities: Have U.S. Light Rail Systems Been Worth the Investment?
Five U.S. metros (Buffalo, Portland, Sacramento, San Diego, and San Jose) opened light rail systems in the 1980s to great fanfare. The mode offered many of the benefits of subway systems for far less public money; San Diego's system, per mile, cost about one-seventh of Washington, D.C.'s Metrorail. Light rail cities like Portland became transportation models for the country, pointing toward a transit-friendly urban future.
California High Speed Rail Blog: Texas HSR Could Face Same Challenges as California HSR
http://www.cahsrblog.com/2014/04/texas-hsr-could-face-same-challenges-as-california-hsr/
In recent days there’s been a spate of posts and articles touting the Texas high speed rail project as a better approach than the California project. Some of this is undoubtedly the California-Texas rivalry at work, but it’s also fueled by the routine misunderstanding in the media about the nature of California HSR’s problems. Those problems exist solely because opponents of California HSR found powerful allies in the Congressional Republicans, and have been able to block future funding and create a cascading set of problems that stem from that denial.
Atlantic Cities: America's Most Sprawling Cities Are Also the Most Republican
Hickory, a small industrial city in western North Carolina, lies within the state's 10th congressional district, one that the Washington Post has called "one of the most Republican in the nation." Its representative, Congressman Patrick McHenry, proudly boasts that, on family values issues, he is tied for the "most conservative voting record in Congress."
POLITICO MORNING TRANSPORTATION
By Adam Snider | 4/10/14 5:51 AM EDT
Featuring Kathryn A. Wolfe, Kevin Robillard and Scott Wong
TRANSPORT BILL NEWS TODAY: The leaders of the Senate EPW Committee and its transportation panel hold a joint press conference this morning to make “a major announcement” about reauthorizing MAP-21, which expires at the end of September. MT hears from a source that the senators won’t unveil a legislative text, but could announce a timeline for committee action or a broad agreement on the contours of the bill. EPW Chair Barbara Boxer and ranking member David Vitter join T&I Subcommittee Chair Tom Carper and top Republican John Barrasso for the 10 a.m. presser in the Capitol. With the Highway Trust Fund set to go broke in a few short months, any news of progress on a comprehensive policy bill would be welcomed by a transportation industry anxiously awaiting congressional action.
DON’T BE CRUDE: The push to make trains carrying crude oil safer continues to roll down the tracks, and quite a bit has happened in the last 24 hours. The FRA wants two-person train crews, which drew opposition from the railroad industry. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx is fast-tracking a rule on safer tank cars and says oil companies still aren’t sharing enough data, but API is defending itself and cites “some confusion around the collection of data.”
Tank car rule coming before 2015: Foxx said yesterday that the final rule to improve the DOT-111 tank car fleet will come before 2015. “The DOT-111 either needs to be improved or phased out. As the ongoing rulemaking process continues there will be more as that rule is announced,” Foxx said under questioning at a Senate hearing. Sen. Susan Collins replied that “it’s not sufficient to hear you say we won’t let it go into 2015.” Foxx said that the “target date is ASAP,” but Collins cut him off and chided his “frustrating answer.” That prompted the secretary to tell her “it’s frustrating for me to give it to you. We are working as hard as we can to get the rule done as quickly as we can.”
Two’s a crew: The FRA wants to require two-person crews on trains carrying crude oil and set crew minimum standards for most freight and passenger rail lines, yet another step taken in the aftermath of fatal crashes like the disaster in Lac-Mégantic, Canada. The agency said its upcoming notice of proposed rulemaking will “most likely require a minimum of two person crews for most mainline train operations including those trains carrying crude oil,” but also said there will be some exceptions. AAR noted that all Class I freight railroads already use two-person crews for crude shipments and said FRA is moving ahead with the rule even though it “never shared an iota of data that shows or proves two-person crews are safer. It takes grounded data, not rhetorical pronouncements, to justify further regulations.” API praised the FRA’s move.
Data dispute: Foxx indicated again yesterday that API isn’t handing over enough data about the characteristics of crude oil, saying that DOT officials “haven’t received a robust sample from the industry to this point.” API hit back in a letter to Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, saying that there have been four companies that shared the needed data, with an engineering firm doing the same soon. API’s Jack Gerard wrote that there is “some confusion around the collection of data” and that the group itself “does not collect any of this data but we have and will continue to encourage other members to do so.” Heitkamp had defended API at the hearing, telling Foxx that the group has “been working on trying to get more data to you.” Letter: http://politico.pro/1sC0CtO
THURSDAY, APRIL 10. Thanks for reading POLITICO’s Morning Transportation, your daily tipsheet on trains, planes, automobiles and ports, where four years ago today, Polish President Lech Kaczynski and 95 others died in when their Polish Air Force plane crashed near Smolensk, Russia. Please be in touch: asnider@politico.com and @AdamKSnider on Twitter.
“Are you waiting for the streetcar?” http://bit.ly/QYypPW (h/t Matt Daily)
**A message from POWERJobs: Jobs on our radar this week: Manager — Transportation Programs at Deloitte, Director, Public Affairs and Grassroots Advocacy, National Association of Manufacturers, Supply Chain Bus Systems Manager, METRO. Interested? Apply to these jobs and more at www.POWERJobs.com; finally, a career site made for YOU!**
HALVORSON’S HELP: “The conservative cavalry hasn’t shown up for Art Halvorson. The tea-party insurgent who’s challenging powerful House Transportation and Infrastructure Chairman Bill Shuster has seen little of the outside money needed to oust the entrenched, seven-term incumbent Republican. Halvorson is being outspent by Shuster by a 10-to-1 margin in the campaign, enabling the incumbent to pummel him on TV and radio and in mailers in rural Pennsylvania’s 9th district. The only outside help for Halvorson has come from the conservative Madison Project, which spent $10,000 on a radio spot bashing Shuster for ‘piling more debt onto the backs of taxpayers.’ But that was last July. And big-dollar super PACs run by Club for Growth and FreedomWorks aren’t expected to jump off the sidelines before the May 20 GOP primary. The lesson: Even if you’re an articulate, passionate candidate with an attractive bio, there’s no guarantee the outside money will come flooding in.” Pros get it all: http://politico.pro/OHT88B
Talk it out: Shuster has agreed to participate in four debates ahead of the May 20 primary. http://bit.ly/1hj61BM
In other campaign news: Four-time Louisiana Gov. Edwin Edwards is running for Congress — and a big campaign issue for him is “building support for a high-speed rail system between Baton Rouge and New Orleans,” according to a great story from POLITICO’s Bill Nichols: http://politico.pro/1hu9Ncr
IN WEDNESDAY’S ACTION — Nominations: The Senate confirmed Debra Miller to sit on the Surface Transportation Board that rules on rate disputes between shippers and railroads, filling the three-member board. The upper chamber also confirmed Steven Joel Anthony to be on the Railroad Retirement Board, an independent government agency that oversees retirement, unemployment and other benefits for railroad workers.
Hot topic: The Senate Commerce Committee approved a bill (http://1.usa.gov/1n6apV5) from ranking member John Thune and Democrat Amy Klobuchar to give state governors more authority to relax work limits for some truckers delivering home heating energy during a crisis. The bill started life as a companion to Rep. Shuster’s legislation loosening the rules during an energy shortage, but was tweaked after that measure was recently signed into law. The panel also approved the Driver Privacy Act (http://1.usa.gov/PTuaV4) that addresses data on auto black boxes.
Transparent or opaque? The House Transportation Committee approved Shuster’s bill to roll back the 2012 DOT rule mandating an advertised airfare include the government taxes. The Transparent Airfares Act sailed through on a voice vote, and Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton withdrew her amendment on a database for sexual assaults on airplanes. “It is only fair that consumers know what they are paying for,” Shuster said at the markup. “All consumer products are advertised at base price, with taxes added at the point of purchase.” But not everyone is on board — U.S. Travel Association head Roger Dow said that the “impetus for the bill is solid, but it could be more accurately called the ‘Translucent Airfares Act’ because it doesn't go far enough in providing the transparency in airfare pricing that consumers crave.”A4A head Nicholas Calio praised the bill, which the airlines have wanted ever since the DOT changed price advertising rules several years ago.
NOT GM THIS TIME: Toyota is recalling 1.7 million vehicles in the United States as part of a larger recall of more than 6 million cars around the world. The U.S. recalls include 1.3 million vehicles across six models with faulty spiral cables that cause the airbags not to deploy and another 472,000 vehicles that could have the seat move in a crash. The L.A. Times has more on how the Toyota issues mean automakers are close to breaking the recall record set in 2004: http://lat.ms/PSSqGA
THE AUTOBAHN (SPEED READ)
— The contractor building the first phase of the Silver Line has submitted it for approval — again. Transportation Nation: http://bit.ly/1n5lKVj
— The Heritage Foundation lays out the case for turning the surface transportation program back to states. http://herit.ag/1hCo7dh
— DDOT launches “Potholepalooza,” a month-long campaign to improve DC’s roads. http://1.usa.gov/R32j5B
— Innovative camera and display system from Land Rover can make a car’s hood virtually disappear. Wired: http://wrd.cm/1n5iDwJ
— Apple’s giant headquarters isn’t near public transit, and its transportation program is inadequate, writes Mobility Lab Director Tom Fairchild. http://bit.ly/R3LgjK
— FAA grants the Republic of the Philippines a Category 1 rating for compliance with ICAO standards. Release: http://1.usa.gov/R4p7C6
THE DAY AHEAD: 9:30 a.m. — Surface Transportation Board holds a meeting on recent service problems in the United States rail network and to hear from rail industry executives on plans to address their service problems, and additional options to improve service. DOT, 395 E Street SW, Hearing Room.
10 a.m. — Architectural and Transportation Barriers Compliance Board holds a meeting of the Rail Vehicles Access Advisory Committee on revising and updating accessibility guidelines issued pursuant to the Americans with Disabilities Act for transportation vehicles that operate on fixed guideway systems, April 10-11. Access Board Conference Room, 1331 F Street NW, Suite 800.
10 a.m. — Press conference on legislation reauthorizing MAP-21. Senate Radio/TV Gallery, Capitol.
Noon — The California High-Speed Rail Authority holds a board meeting. Sacramento, Calif.
Noon — FMCSA holds a teleconference meeting of the Unified Carrier Registration Plan Board of Directors.
2 p.m. — Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx delivers remarks at the National Action Network's 16th annual national convention. Sheraton New York Times Square Hotel, 811 7th Avenue, New York Ballroom, New York, N.Y.
THE COUNTDOWN: MAP-21 expires and DOT funding runs out in 174 days. FAA policy is up in 539 days. The mid-term elections are in 208 days and the 2016 presidential election is in 943 days.
CABOOSE — No: Some websites are complicated. This one that tells if whether or not the Silver Line is open isn’t. Stay in the Metro loop in a minimalist way: http://isthesilverlineopenyet.com/
**A message from POWERJobs: Tap into the power of POWERJobs for the newest job opportunities in the Washington area from the area’s top employers, including Boeing, METRO, Financial Services Roundtable and SAIC. Powered by names you trust — POLITICO, WTOP, WJLA/ABC-TV, NewsChannel 8 and Federal News Radio- POWERJOBS is the ultimate career site with more than 2 million job searches and nearly 17,000 applications submitted this year so far. Connect through Facebook or LinkedIn, search jobs by industry and set up job-specific email alerts using www.POWERJobs.com, the site for Washington’s top talent.**
Stories from POLITICO Pro
Shuster challenger Halvorson comes up short in fundraising
Shuster challenger Halvorson comes up short in fundraising back
By Scott Wong | 4/10/14 5:01 AM EDT
The conservative cavalry hasn’t shown up for Art Halvorson.
The tea party insurgent who’s challenging powerful House Transportation and Infrastructure Chairman Bill Shuster has seen little of the outside money needed to oust the entrenched, seven-term incumbent Republican.
Halvorson is being outspent by Shuster by 10 to 1 in the campaign, enabling the incumbent to pummel him on TV and radio and in mailers in rural Pennsylvania’s 9th District. The only outside help for Halvorson has come from the conservative Madison Project, which spent $10,000 on a radio spot bashing Shuster for “piling more debt onto the backs of taxpayers.”
But that was last July. And the big-dollar super PACs run by Club for Growth and FreedomWorks aren’t expected to jump off the sidelines before the May 20 GOP primary.
The lesson: Even if you’re an articulate, passionate candidate with an attractive bio, there’s no guarantee the outside money will come flooding in.
For one, the conservative groups are being much more selective when it comes to spending millions on GOP insurgents who take on establishment lawmakers. Halvorson’s task is even harder, since he’s going after a sitting chairman with deep ties to business groups and powerful political allies, John Boehner among them.
Travis Schooley, a farmer and Army veteran, is also running in the three-way primary.
Halvorson, a retired Coast Guard captain and real estate investor, insists his grass-roots campaign is still in good shape without the outside funding, and he says he won’t rule out pouring more of his own cash into his bid. Last year, he loaned his campaign $100,000.
“You know I can put more in. … I will have enough money to be able to defeat Shuster,” Halvorson told POLITICO in a phone interview. “People underestimate the value of passion and volunteers.”
In recent weeks, Shuster bloodied Halvorson with a $400,000 TV ad buy painting his rival as a “hypocrite.” The 30-second spot claimed that Halvorson campaigned against federal subsidies but financially benefited from hundreds of thousands of dollars in subsidies from farms he owns in Iowa and Pennsylvania.
FactCheck.org concluded that the Shuster ad stretched the truth, saying the “suggestion that Halvorson got a half-million in subsidies for his Iowa farm is simply wrong.” But by then, much of the damage had been done.
FactCheck also dinged Halvorson for claiming in a radio ad that Shuster is “leading the charge” for a new vehicle mileage tax or VMT. That ad was based off an erroneous Bloomberg News headline that was later corrected.
Halvorson’s real-estate holdings have muddled his message more than once. He volunteered that his North Carolina beachfront rental property would actually benefit from Shuster’s $8 billion water projects bill known as WRRDA, legislation that Halvorson has dismissed as a big waste of taxpayer money.
And there have been other stumbles for the first-time candidate. Last December, Halvorson lost his cool and called 911 on a tracker who followed him to a meeting with reporters at POLITICO’s headquarters. That prompted an embarrassing Twitter hashtag: #HalvorsonCalls911.
New campaign finance reports will be out next week, but the most current figures from January show Shuster had raised nearly $2.1 million this cycle, a personal best for the new chairman. He had $1.36 million cash on hand.
By contrast, Halvorson raised just $51,000 over the same period, in addition to the $100,000 he loaned his campaign. He had $72,400 cash on hand. Schooley was a distant third with $12,200.
Beat in the money game, Halvorson has resorted to trying to spin Shuster’s ads. Voters in the district are sick of the negative attacks and the ads have only served to boost Halvorson’s name recognition among voters, he said.
“His message is distortion; it’s negative,” Halvorson said. “He put my face on four different mailers. He put me on TV for 10 days. People everywhere know my name. I’ve got 10 times more return on his investment than he got out of his investment.”
The Shuster camp’s response: Halvorson’s lackluster fundraising — and poor support from outside groups — shows his message just isn’t resonating.
“I’m not surprised that Congressman Shuster’s message of proven conservative leadership has resonated positively with the voters of Pennsylvania,” said Shuster’s campaign manager, Sean Joyce. “Conversely, I’m not surprised that Art Halvorson’s incessant, negative campaign hasn’t gained any traction, because he’s been proven wrong at every corner, on every accusation against Congressman Shuster — from VMT to Shuster supporting Obamacare.”
Halvorson best hope now may be for Shuster to commit a game-changing gaffe in one of their four debates. The first will be hosted by the Indiana/Armstrong Patriots, a local tea-party group, on April 24.
Conservative super PACs say they’re still interested in the race, even if they aren’t opening their pocketbooks.
“We are watching the race,” said Barney Keller, a spokesman for the Club for Growth, which gave Shuster a lifetime rating of 70 percent on its pro-growth policies scorecard.
The Madison Project confirmed that it still wants to oust “liberal Rep. Bill Shuster,” but wouldn’t shed any light on whether it would invest any more cash in the race.
“There’s time before election day and we’re currently strategizing about the best approach to take,” said Drew Ryun, who runs the Madison Project with his father, former Rep. Jim Ryun (R-Kan.). “It’s never been more critical to defeat Shuster for his continued support of massive spending bills, funding Obamacare and raising transportation taxes.”back
Edwin Edwards’s last stand back
By Bill Nichols | 4/9/14 5:04 PM EDT
A subscriber-only sneak peek of POLITICO's top story tomorrow.
GONZALES, LA. — Just down I-10 from Baton Rouge, south on state Highway 44 and a mile or so beyond the Do Right Full Gospel Baptist Church, Louisiana’s legendary political lion is having the time of his life.
Edwin Washington Edwards — scoundrel, irresistible charmer, four-time governor, reality show star, convicted felon and the very last of the line of New Deal Southern Democrats — is running for Congress at age 86. That would be 12 years after he was sentenced to prison at the age of 75 on corruption charges. That would be 49 years after he was first elected to Congress in 1965 and his friend President Lyndon B. Johnson called him with congratulations and the phone number for Harold Barefoot Sanders, LBJ’s chief legislative aide. Edwards was so moved that he stood up at his desk to take the call.
And that would be eight months after the birth of a son, Eli, to Edwards and his third wife, Trina Scott Edwards, who is 35. They met as pen pals while he was in prison, where he proudly served as the facility’s librarian. “I did what I could for my fellow inmates. I helped a number of them get their GEDs, and I was helping several more when my term expired. Now, I have to be honest; I didn’t stick around to see if they succeeded,” Edwards says with a twinkle in his eye.
“Why am I running? Because it’s what I want to do,” Edwards tells a visitor in the wood-paneled office of his home in a Gonzales golf course development, with that soft Cajun accent born in Avoyelles Parish in 1927 still very much present. “Somebody told me the other day, you’re 86 and retired, why don’t you do what you wanna do? So, I am.”
He faces an uphill battle for an open seat in a redrawn 6th District that now tilts Republican, but he’s a decent bet to make a December runoff and the universal view is that, hey, this is Edwin Edwards, anything can happen and probably will.
“He is the best-known name in the race and there are many potential Republican candidates … so at this point, he is likely to make the runoff,” says John Maginnis, a longtime syndicated Louisiana political columnist. “But … I don’t see how he could win in a strong GOP-performance district like the 6th. But it should be entertaining.”
“The most basic math of the Edwards race yields an ‘it is not impossible’ answer,” says veteran state pollster Elliott Stonecipher.
Former Gov. Buddy Roemer says that it is highly unlikely, but “yes, he can win.”
It is not a feel-good story of redemption for much of the state’s political class. Many of its members are wringing their hands and complaining that they are just now living down a reputation for endemic sleaziness that Edwards — EWE or just Edwin to virtually everyone here — almost single-handedly cast down on Louisiana like a biblical plague.
Nearly nine years after Hurricane Katrina and with the corruption convictions of former Congressman William Jefferson and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin now finally in the state’s rearview mirror, there is a feeling here that Louisiana may have finally turned the corner on its national image as Political Huckster Central. Gov. Bobby Jindal, while not overwhelmingly popular, is universally viewed as a bright, serious person. New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu may be the state’s most respected politician.
Edwards “cannot run for office and truthfully tell us he really cares about Louisiana,” wrote longtime Louisiana Democratic operative Bob Mann, in a column for the New Orleans Times-Picayune. “If he cared about us, he’d stay home and raise his child. If he cared, he’d go fishing. If he cared, he’d ask for forgiveness for making us a national laughingstock for so many years.”
Roemer, who beat Edwards in 1987 but lost to him four years later, says Louisiana’s population is shrinking dangerously and “the biggest hindrance to the growth of people coming from the rest of the country might be the perception of corruption. Edwards personifies that corruption. So yes, his election would be an indictment of our good people, but also an indictment of the corruption and decay in American politics. We must do better.”
Edwards, who has viewed Roemer’s reformist gospel as akin to dentistry without anesthesia for more than 30 years, says all the naysayers need to take a deep breath.
“People in Louisiana emphasize how it looks to them and assume people in Wyoming and Montana, they’re getting up every morning and that’s all that they’re thinking about,” he says of his colorful history and convicted felon status. “It’s an issue but it’s not nearly the issue that some in the press want to make it.”
Edwards, still sharp as a razor except for diminished hearing and seemingly in remarkably vigorous health, says he intends to win, he plans to win and he’s already mapping out his late-life career in Washington. He quizzed a visiting reporter at some length about the cheapest flights between New Orleans and Washington.
“There is a guy running for Congress in Florida [Republican Joe Newman] who is 101,” Edwards deadpans, his hand on his visitor’s shoulder as they stroll down his driveway. “At that point, I’ll be in my eighth term.”
• • •
For decades, Louisiana has struggled to come to grips with Edwin Edwards. Is he simply an immensely entertaining and personable crook? Or he is more authentic, a populist son of a Cajun-Catholic sharecropper who, like his idols Earl, Huey and Russell Long, was decidedly no choir boy but also helped bring his state into the modern era?
The same Edwards that generations of prosecutors chased like Ahab for 30 years was a stalwart supporter of civil rights, appointing scores of black Louisianans to key positions. The same Edwards who lost hundreds of thousands of dollars during binge gambling trips to Las Vegas under aliases like “T. Wong” defeated the former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke in the 1991 governor’s race almost out of sheer force of will. He was the unlikely Gary Cooper in a kind of “High Noon” on the bayou.
“Vote for the crook, it’s important,” the famous slogan of that campaign implored, pleading with voters to get beyond Edwards’s slimy reputation (though he had, at that point, defeated all attempts to prosecute him). But those who watched Edwards in those final weeks — and this reporter was one of them — know how much that contest came to matter to him in a deeply personal way. He kept spinning one-liners — feigning concern, for example, that Duke risked smoke inhalation “because he’s around so many burning crosses” — but he also saw himself as the one person who could save his state from humiliation and economic disaster.
“I never dreamed of it,” he said last week, when asked if he ever thought Duke could win (and some senior members of his staff most definitely did). “I admire the people of Louisiana too much for that.”
But Edwards’s 2001 conviction on 17 of 26 counts, including racketeering, extortion, money laundering, mail fraud and wire fraud seemed to bring the debate about the so-called Silver Fox to an ignominious end. Trundled off to federal prison, Edwards’s political career seemed utterly finished and his battle with history punctuated with a humiliating coda.
His second wife, Candy Picou (she was 40 years his junior when they wed) divorced him. In his state’s great moment of need, during Katrina in 2005, Edwards was a disgraced old man sweating in an unair-conditioned dormitory where he had been moved when the prison where he was serving lost electricity. Then when he got out, he participated in “The Governor’s Wife,” an A&E reality program that died a quick and painful death.
The Edwards era had ended, and with it, seemingly, a way of life.
“The familiar theory is that the people of Louisiana would rather be entertained than served with ethics,” novelist Nancy Lemann wrote in her wonderful account of Edwards’s 1980s corruption trials, “Ritz of the Bayou.” “As a political columnist has said, in Louisiana we elect our governors to be kings. The nuttier the better, that they should then turn into megalomaniacs, provide public entertainment and have public breakdowns. One recent governor had been a decent, honest man; he was considered to be too dull. The people reelected the present governor instead.”
Lemann was referencing former Gov. David Treen, a stolid, respectable Republican whom Edwards merrily ran rings around for decades. As in this Edwards zinger: “David Treen is so slow it takes him an hour-and-a-half to watch ‘60 Minutes.’” In a 1983 debate, Treen finally lost his reserve and howled at Edwards: “How come you talk out of both sides of your mouth?” Edwards’s instant response: “So people like you with only half a brain can understand me.”
• • •
So the 6th District contest, an open seat created when GOP Rep. Bill Cassidy decided to run against Sen. Mary Landrieu, becomes about a lot more than electing a member of Congress. Though you would never know the stakes, or that the entire state is basically in a tizzy about the race, from a mid-afternoon visit with Edwards.
In the era of Barack Obama, an age of politics as seeming drudgery, Edwards makes one remember that there once were politicians who just loved the game — though perhaps no one more than he did. And does.
Some examples of a lightning round of quick questions and answers — and remember, he’s 86.
On whether he can run for statewide office as a convicted felon (the law is ambiguously complicated):
“Pardon me, and we’ll find out.”
On Gov. Jindal’s evident 2016 aspirations:
“I don’t understand the fella. It looks like he wants to be president of every state except Louisiana.”
Who was the best president of his lifetime:
“Lyndon Johnson. He knew what power was and how to use it. And he was my friend.”
The worst president:
“Ronald Reagan. Because he repeatedly talked conservative policies, but never acted them out.”
On his potential future boss, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi:
“I don’t know enough about her to judge her, but from watching her, I do see that she’s very, very liberal.
On President Obama:
“Very disappointing. He’s just sitting there on the Keystone pipeline, which is very important to this area … we’re just shooting ourselves in the foot.”
His key campaign issues:
Building support for a high-speed rail system between Baton Rouge and New Orleans and “emphasizing the good aspects of Obamacare, while doing what I can to change or amend the provisions that I think are onerous.”
• • •
It is unclear exactly what kind of campaign Edwards will run. So far, it’s been predominately free media and fueled by his wife’s presence on Facebook and Twitter. When asked about his campaign structure, Edwards says: “Oh my wife and some of her friends are down at the campaign headquarters now.”
There is also a question of whether Edwards will help or hurt Landrieu in her very difficult campaign against Cassidy. Edwards believes he will help get Democrats out to vote, though he acknowledges that he’ll have difficulty connecting with his vaunted African-American base, given that those under 40 would have barely heard of him, much less voted for him.
Others see Edwards helping Cassidy; if he makes the runoff, this theory goes, Republicans will turn out in droves to defeat the party’s historic archenemy.
Landrieu, like pretty much every other Democratic official in the state, seems to want to say as little about Edwards as possible. Asked whether she supports him by a POLITICO reporter at the Capitol, she said, with a laugh: “I am running my race, and he’s running his. That’s what he said, and I couldn’t have said it better. He’s running his race and I’m running mine.”
Most of all, this race is about Edwards, who has made Louisianans chuckle since before the age of color televisions, having the last laugh for himself.
Some, like Mann, think he doesn’t even really want to do the job. Some blame his wife for pushing him into it. For Edwards, the rationale is simple.
“I just want to be in a position where I can pick up the phone and help people,” he says. “And oh yes, I can win. I’ve never known a politician yet who’s run for office and didn’t think he could win . . and I’m not ashamed to say I’m a politician.”
Before continuing on to the rest of his busy afternoon, Edwards brings a reporter over to his desk to look at an old-fashioned date book, filled with indecipherable scratchings from the governor’s own hand. “I feel good. I’ve been going almost 18 hours a day for the past 2½ weeks.
“I kept every one of those commitments. Why look here … ” Then a beat. Then a slight pause. Then a wink.
“My goodness gracious, look at this: I even went to a prayer breakfast.”
Burgess Everett contributed to this report from Washington.back