Friday marks the 50th anniversary of a second-place primary-election finish that changed the history of Louisiana and, really, the whole nation.
“What if” lookbacks sometimes are amusing or thought-provoking, so… here goes — and you’ll love the little-known ending:
In 1976, 36-year-inciumbent U.S. Rep. F. Edward Hebert, D-New Orleans, was finally retiring, and Democratic City Council member Jimmy Moreau, a moderate-conservative, was a heavy favorite to replace him in the First Congressional District. Moreau was so well regarded that President Gerald Ford called him in May to try to talk him into running as a Republican rather than a Democrat. After a full century without any Republicans from Louisiana in Congress, the GOP was on a small upswing, electing David Treen in the Third District in 1972 and Henson Moore in the Sixth District in 1974.
Moreau, though, remained a Democrat and led a six-man Aug. 14 party primary by a huge margin: His 37,646 votes nearly doubled the 18,888 votes of state Rep. Rick Tonry, a union-backed populist.
On the Republican side, assistant state attorney general Bob Livingston, a last-minute contestant after the expected nominee backed out, won the nomination, although the local news barely mentioned him. But it was Tonry’s move into second place on the Democratic side, forcing a runoff, that had the long-term consequences.
In the Democratic runoff, Tonry ran a much more aggressive campaign than Moreau, and by official totals he eked out a stunning upset, 48,789 to 48,605.
Had Moreau won, the Democratic label alone would have made him a betting favorite against Livingston. Instead, Moreau’s team immediately began yelling that Tonry supporters had committed massive vote fraud. With increasing evidence buttressing those charges, an ethical cloud weighed Tonry down while Livingston’s spirited campaigning made a real race of it.
Tonry narrowly won a three-way general election race, 47.2% to Livingston’s 43.4%.
And, lo and behold, as Tonry spent an antic-filled (that’s another story) four months in Congress, the charges were proved in court: Illegal votes had put him over the top, and he himself resigned from Congress, pleaded guilty to accepting illegal campaign contributions and went to prison.
With a special election thus necessitated, Livingston had a second chance that surely wouldn’t have come so quickly or promisingly if the honest Moreau had won and built the power of incumbency. That election lured rising-star state Rep. Ron Faucheux into the race on the Democratic side, but Livingston’s momentum from the first race pushed him, in another three-way contest, to a 51.2% to 37.2% victory.
The downstream consequences of those races loom large.
Who knows where Faucheux’s elective career would have gone if he had not been lured into that race? Would he have found a different path — a different higher-office to shoot for, rather than eventually losing a very close race for mayor of New Orleans — if he had been bided his time and waited for a better opportunity? His smarts and energy certainly seemed well suited for elective office.
As it was, Faucheux did superbly in non-elected posts: He became the state’s Secretary of Commerce, then a major political consultant, publisher of Campaigns & Elections magazine, and trusted pollster, and he now graces these opinion pages with an insightful weekly column.
The biggest hinge of fate, though, involved Livingston. The second chance afforded to him by Tonry’s primary shenanigans obviously had huge repercussions. Livingston’s election catalyzed massive tangible benefits for Louisiana through his work on the Appropriations Committee. And nationally, without his powerful will and discipline in chairing that committee from 1995-99, there is very little chance — as anyone then in Congress would attest — that the federal government would have balanced its budget for four consecutive years.
In light of massive subsequent debt, those balanced budgets look like epochal accomplishments.
But ... what about Tonry?
Well, after his prison term ended, Tonry drifted back into trouble. In 1986, he was convicted of bribing the chairman of the Chitimacha Indians for exclusive rights to lucrative bingo games on Indian land.
Tonry appealed, arguing that bribery statutes applied only to money given to government officials. Native American leaders, he said, were not government officials, so the money wasn’t illegal. In open court, one of the judges, puzzled, asked Tonry — who was acting as his own lawyer — what he would call himself if not the purveyor of a bribe.
“I guess you could just say,” Tonry chuckled, with stunning lack of political correctness, “that I’m an Indian giver.”
Yes, Tonry won his appeal.
But all that history — Faucheux, Livingston, balanced budgets, illicit payoffs — happened only because, 50 years ago tomorrow, Tonry managed to finish a distant second in a sleepy Democratic primary. Fate works in odd ways.