Slow Treen Going

The news that former Louisiana Governor Dave Treen has died at 81 won't affect a lot of people who don't have an emotional investment in, and the inevitable mixed feelings about, the political history of the Pelican State. I was born in Louisiana but haven't lived there since 2001, which scarcely matters; once you've made the mistake of getting interested in the stuff, it leaves its permanent mark on you as surely as untreated syphilis. Treen himself was enough of a Louisiana pol that he tried to keep his hand in for most of his adult life, and he spent most of his time having it either ignored or rudely swatted away. Every obituary for Treen will routinely point to him as the first Republican Governor elected in Louisiana after Reconstruction, which may cause some people to think that political ideology, and maybe the rightward shift in the country in the late seventies, had something to do with the shape of his career. But in twentieth-century Louisiana, most of the successful local politicians were registered as Democrats, and the bulk of them were at least as conservative as the politicians in the rest of the country who called themselves Republicans. In recent years, as the Republican party has, nationwide, turned wholeheartedly bugfuck, Louisiana has had to witness the sorry site of its senior U.S. Senator, Mary Landrieu, a "Democrat" who's conservative enough to give President Obama problems getting health care passed, challenged by rampaging right-wing loons like Suzanne Haik Terrell and the dead-now-thank-God Woody Jenkins. Treen wasn't cut from that line of cloth. His identity was defined in relation to his career-long rival, Edwin Edwards, and that identity wasn't "super-conservative" but "dull but honest" in contrast to Edwards's "entertaining crook."

His glory period came with his one term (1979-1983) which fell between Edwards's first two terms and his third term. The two men had run against each other back in 1972, and at the time, Louisiana law prevented Edwards from serving a third consecutive term. He had to sit out the 1979 election, but everyone knew he'd be back, and there were even rumors, which were probably true, that behind the scenes, Edwards put all his muscle to work trying to help Treen get elected, because he knew he'd be a cinch to beat when he came back. It was during the 1983 race that Edwards was inspired to deliver his best-known wisecrack, about how the only way he could lose a race against Treen would be if he were caught "in bed with a dead girl or a live boy." Treen ran a hopeless, fumbling campaign, memorable chiefly for a flood of TV commercials bragging about how few pardons he'd given to felons, compared to the number of pardons that Edwards had racked up when he was in office. This was his way of intimating, without saying it, that Edwards had been handing out pardons in exchange for bribes, but because Treen fancied himself too decent a man to actually say it, the total effect of all the commercials was to make it seem as if he were bragging about what a mean, pitiless son of a bitch he was. In some precincts, that's exactly the key to a Republican voter's heart, but in Louisiana, where the same people who pride themselves on their judgmental uptightness partake of a culture that treasures rascally behavior (and who probably have a relative or two who's no stranger to the penal system, or at least the drunk tank), a candidate aiming for a law-and-order pose has to hit his mark just right. Buddy Roemer, the completely worthless and unredeemed dipshit who kept Edwin Edwards's chair warm for him from 1988 to 1992 (when Edwards won his fourth and final ride at the Governor's desk), made a similar mistake when he tried for a comeback in the mid-90s, flooding the airwaves with a terrifying series of ads, shot as if they were from a lost reel of Cool Hand Luke, in which he promised that, if elected, he'd put your wayward uncle or prodigal son on a chain gang to die of heat stroke by the side of the road.

The tender feeling that people in Louisiana have for politicians who come on like snake oil salesman is based on memories of such legendary hustlers as Huey Long and his brother Earl, complicated, genuinely problematic figures who did a lot of good for the average citizen while honing a ruthless political cunning that sometimes bordered on (and sometimes crossed over into) dictatorial rule. Edwards represented the complete degeneration of that model; in four terms over the course of almost a quarter of a century, he never showed much interest in anything but his own financial enrichment, but voters embraced him because he was so much more fun than dullards like Treen or mealy-mouthed, sanctimonious loads like Roemer. Dave Treen wasn't loathsome, like Roemer, but he seemed clueless about why anyone wouldn't prefer him to a flashy con man like Edwards, and that cluelessness made him a turn-off, even if you shared his disgust. He may have been a nice guy who meant well, but he plainly just didn't get it, and his not getting it made him useless as a good-government conquistador. After Edwards mopped up the floor with him in 1983, Treen entered, or flirted with entering, race after race--for the U.S. House or Senate, for governor again--but he was never taken seriously and never got anywhere; he was stamped forever as Cliff Barnes to Edwin Edwards's J. R. Ewing. He spent part of his later career expressing proper public Republican horror at the brief ascendance of David Duke, and the horrible thing about his show of horror was that he seemed to not understand how Duke could possibly appeal to anybody, either--this despite Treen's own past membership in the segregationist-Dixiecrat States' Rights Party.

That may well have been an association of convenience, forged in a time when it didn't seem likely that a Southern politician would ever have to answer for having applauded speeches about white folks' and colored folks' inalienable right to their own water fountains. But it came back to bite him on the ass in 1987, when complaints about it forced President Reagan to withdraw Treen's name from nomination to fill a vacant seat on New Orleans's U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. That was pretty much the end of Treen's political career, though he kept issuing endorsements and condemnations and kept running for stuff, right up to a couple of years ago, when he announced that he'd run in a special election to fill Bobby Jindal's House seat after Jindal was elected Governor, then announced that, once again, on second thought, no he wouldn't. By then, this had happened so many times that one had visions of some little underling in a basement office of the headquarters of the Louisiana Republican Party whose only job was to watch the local news and see if Treen had stuck his head out of his gopher hole, in which case he would sigh, pick up the phone, punch the only number on his speed dial, and say, "Dave, please."

I don't know that Treen deserved a lot better; I never saw much evidence that he was a man to be hated, but I also never saw any evidence that he was any more colorless, unimaginative, or uninspiring than his colorful, imaginative, and flamboyantly destructive enemies painted him as being. He was a little like Jack Kemp, whose own death earlier this year probably marked the passing of the only Republican politician in history who preached supply-side economics because he actually believed that it would somehow help those at the bottom of the economic ladder. As George Bush, Sr.'s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Kemp became a figure of fun inside Republican circles because he actually tried, fruitlessly, to interest the President in programs aimed to making life better for the less fortunate and disenfranchised. I'm not sure that the less passionate Treen ever inspired as strong a response as ridicule in his comrades. In a political environment notable for the depths of its corruption and cynicism, he was honest, diligent, honorable, and self-effacing, and in the end, he was a menace, because he made it all too easy for the corrupt and the cynical to make their case that having integrity was inseparable from being ineffectual.