Louisiana Voice

I just finished an interesting book entitled Falling Up: How a Redneck Helped Invent Political Consulting, by Raymond D. Strother (LSU Press).

Though the book was published in 2003 and I was late in discovering its existence when I found it on a friend’s bookshelf and borrowed it, the book’s subject matter is perhaps more relevant today even then when it was written.

I almost worked for Strother once, though I’m certain he doesn’t remember it.

It was back in either late 1978 or early 1979 when the governor’s race was heating up. For the first time in eight years, Edwin Edwards wouldn’t be a factor; he was term-limited, so as is the norm for Louisiana, the candidates were lining up to become his successor.

I had just left a job at the old Shreveport Journal where I found I wasn’t a fit for the Journal or for Shreveport. I had left the Baton Rouge State-Times in 1976 to return to my first paper, the Ruston Daily Leader as managing editor and when publisher Tom Kelly ran afoul of the Leader’s ownership in Panama City, Florida and was unceremoniously fired despite all he had done for the paper, I left as well for a less-than-satisfactory tour at the Journal.

So, as the governor’s race was heating up, I was looking for a job when the late Wiley Hilburn, then head of the Louisiana Tech Department of Journalism came to me to say that Strother had a spot for me as Paul Hardy’s press secretary for his gubernatorial campaign.

Even that early on, I knew Hardy would never be governor. I didn’t have the foresight to realize that in political consulting, there are always other campaigns in which to work. The work is almost self-perpetuating, but I didn’t understand that basic political truism, so I declined Stother’s offer.

It turns out after reading Strother’s book that I’d made a good decision. I would never have fit in the high-rolling, rollicking world of big-time politics. In fact, that point was driven home on pages 122 and 123 of his book. In those two pages, he described how the days of Bob Dole, John Stennis, Sam Nunn, Patrick Monynihan “and a host of others from both parties (emphasis mine) represented a dying generation of comradeship and decorum in the Senate.

“They have been replaced in large part,” Strother continues, “by petty partisans who care more about their party than about the institution of the Senate or even about their country (emphasis mine). I always…wonder how American voters allowed giants to be replaced by midgets.”

Strother also laments the morphing of political consultants like Karl Rove into policy wonks. He recalled how Sen. Lloyd Bentsen had a firm rule for political consultants: “You make the campaign commercials and I’ll draft the legislation.”

Strother takes Louisiana Democratic political operative James Carville (at one time one of his employees, by the way) to task for his violation of the Bentsen rule. In 2001, Zell Miller was elected to the Senate from Georgia on a promise to vote the interests of Georgia and not blindly follow party dogma. “He said it and he meant it,” Strother writes. But when Carville denounced Zell over his independence and publicly demanded that his own thousand-dollar contribution to Miller’s campaign be refunded, Strother says bluntly that Carville was out of line, especially when Zell pointed out that he’d paid Carville’s firm more than $300,000 in fees when he worked on Zell’s gubernatorial campaign several years earlier and wondered if Carville would be repaying that money.

“James Carville is a brilliant campaign consultant, one of the best in the country, but he shouldn’t be running the Senate.”

Strother’s is an insightful but somewhat depressing book that gives us a behind-the-curtain peek at the inner machinations of political campaigns, the decision-making process that has evolved from the savvy observations of consultants who have fought in the political gutters to today’s committees of pinstripe suits with Ivy League degrees but no feel for the average working American.

Written as it was nearly two decades ago, it also may have been an unwitting omen of what today is an unquestionably sorry state of political compromise and diplomacy that has given us the likes of Ted Cruz, Ron DeSantis, Ron Johnson, Josh Hawley, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, Clay Higgins, Steve Scalise, Greg Abbott, Andrew Cuomo, Gavin Newsom, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Robert Brady, Anthony Weiner, et al.

The book may be 18 years old, but it’s as relevant today as the day it was written.