Most of the streets were still flooded, but I knew a back way into the city along the river. I got in my truck and picked up a staff assistant from the Treasury Department. Heading into town, I was carrying three weapons: a Smith & Wesson .38 revolver, a Beretta .380 semiautomatic, and a riot shotgun, all of which I’d brought from my house when I evacuated. I believe love is the answer, but I also own a handgun or two just in case. My staff assistant had a taser. First, we checked on the two houses, which were fine. Then we drove down to St. Charles Avenue in uptown New Orleans, which was eerily empty. Trees were down everywhere, tangled up with electricity lines. There wasn’t a person in sight.

  Driving down St. Charles Avenue toward downtown, I looked up and saw a gang of eight or ten young people about forty yards away, standing still and staring at me. They carried boxes and other bulky objects in their arms. I figured they were looters. Rather than advancing up the street, I turned around and drove in the other direction. These teenagers, I had to assume, were going to try to rob me and may try to open me up like a soft peanut. I didn’t want to shoot anyone, and I sure didn’t want to get robbed or beaten up. Clearly, whatever bravery I had that week had been expended during my brief encounter with the state trooper. I drove out of the city and back to the empty patch of public land, where helicopters were still landing with evacuees from all over town.

  To this day, Mitch Landrieu, the former mayor of New Orleans, tells a great story about those tense few days after Hurricane Katrina. The government was rescuing people from rooftops by helicopter, and many private citizens had volunteered their boats to bring people out of the flooded city. Mitch was in one of those boats as it pulled up to the roof of a flooded home, where an old man was sitting by himself in the sun. Mitch asked the man to get in the boat, explaining he was there to rescue him. The man said he wasn’t getting in. Mitch insisted. The man refused again. Finally, after Mitch told him to get in the damn boat so he could go rescue other people, the old man said, “I don’t want to be rescued by a boat. I want to be rescued by one of those helicopters. I’ve never been in a helicopter before.”

  Only in New Orleans. Only in Louisiana.

  Finally, after about a week, I managed to get back to my house in Madisonville. Thanks to the grim report from the state trooper, I was prepared for the apocalypse. But as we drove into Del Oaks, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the place was mostly dry. That’s not to say that my neighborhood was in good shape. I’ve never seen so many trees down. One large pine tree was stuck through the pitched roof of my neighbor’s house like an arrow. Still, I was relieved to find that floodwaters hadn’t touched my home. I was also glad that I hadn’t told Becky or my son about the report from the trooper who told me the whole place was underwater. To this day, I’m not sure why he gave me the bad information, and I never got his name. I chalk it up to everyone being confused at the time of Katrina. Either that or he was an a-hole.

  Once the relief of seeing my house still standing dissipated, I took stock of our situation. We still didn’t have electricity, and we didn’t know when we were going to get it. Many of the roads had not been cleared and no stores were open. Given that I needed to be in Baton Rouge to begin preparing for the state government’s next steps, I decided to take an apartment there. My son, Preston, was nine at the time, and he, of course, came with us to the apartment, along with our pets. I didn’t fully appreciate how affected Preston was by everything until one evening when he and I fell asleep early in one of the apartment’s bedrooms. After we’d been settled for about five or six minutes, Preston suddenly got out of bed and walked to the middle of the room, where he threw up red Kool-Aid all over the carpet.

  I rushed over to him and calmed him down, then got a wet washcloth from the bathroom and cleaned him up. I asked him why he threw up. Was his stomach upset?

  “No, Dad,” he said. “I’m just depressed.”

  I looked at him and said, “Well, that’s normal. But the next time you get depressed, come talk to me. Don’t just throw up on the apartment’s carpet. I love you.”

  Back at the office, I was beginning to do research about how the storm would impact the state’s economy. Conventional wisdom held that our economy would contract. My research indicated otherwise. I was sure we’d have a recession in the short term, which is what you’d expect after such devastation. But I also knew that eventually, the billions of dollars of federal aid, as well as the aid that was flowing in from charities, would revive our economy and cause it to expand sharply. At the time, no one believed me. But it later turned out to be the case.

  One of my biggest worries, given all the money that was about to flow into Louisiana, was corruption. During one of our special legislative sessions to deal with the storm, I had a friendly legislator introduce a bill that would prohibit any public official or any member of his immediate family from being eligible to receive a construction or repair contract using federal funds of any type. The bill did not pass, and Governor Blanco would not support it. Several legislators were very angry with me. But fighting corruption was still a priority for me. Aside from the moral component, reports of politicians stealing hurricane aid could cause it to dry up and require repayment of what we had already received. I even wrote an op-ed on the subject for The Wall Street Journal, but the legislature was not swayed.

  In the end, a number of politicians with the remarkable talent to steal with both hands ended up going to jail for fraud as well as taking bribes, though it was some years after the crimes because audits take a while. Karma may not be fast, but it’s on time. I read that somewhere. I don’t say that to brag, only to illustrate the importance of holding government and the people elected to run it accountable. As I later continued to campaign for higher office, I made fighting corruption a central feature of my platform. This was one of the many things that didn’t change when I ran again for the United States Senate in 2007. In fact, the only thing that did change during that race was my party affiliation. That year, after a few months of meetings with representatives from the Republican Party, I decided to join up. At the time, I felt that my values were more aligned with the Republicans than the Democrats, and that they had been for some time. The Democrats in Louisiana were not sorry to see me go. We bickered constantly. In truth, party membership never meant that much to me. My ideas didn’t change when I became a Republican in 2007. If anything, the parties had shifted, and I was simply giving a name to a turn that had occurred a long time ago.

  It didn’t help, though. In November 2008, the Democrats swept the nation just as the Republicans had done four years earlier. Barack Obama and Joe Biden took the White House, and I lost my second U.S. Senate race, to incumbent Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu, 52 percent to 46 percent (a libertarian and two independents got the remainder). That was all right. I took the loss full in the face and decided to keep going. It hurt deeply, of course, and I hate losing, but I’ve always had a thick skin, and I liked the job I had already. Sometimes when one door closes you’ve got to get a hammer and some nails and make sure that SOB stays shut, but that wasn’t the case here. Failure’s not falling down; it’s not getting up, I read once. I knew I’d try again if I had the opportunity. As I continued to do my work as treasurer of Louisiana, I never lost the desire to serve my state in the United States Senate. Eight years later, during the strange political environment of 2016, I decided to take one more shot at it. And this time, I won.

  Here’s how.

  Six

  Sweet Victory (Took Long Enough)

  In the fall of 2016, I stood on the stage at Dillard University in New Orleans as a third-time candidate for the United States Senate for the final debate of the first primary campaign. With me were five other candidates, four of whom were decent people.

  The fifth was David Duke.

  In the years since I’d last encountered him, when he was in the state legislature and I was working for Governor Roemer, and when Duke ran unsuccessfully for governor, he continued to try to convince people he had morphed into Bambi’s baby brother. For one thing, he’d gotten plastic surgery. His new nose was patrician-like. He could have used his old one to open a can of Vienna sausage. He also continued to claim he was a born-again Christian.

  He’d also gotten in some trouble. In 2002, he pleaded guilty to mail fraud and filing a false tax return. The authorities accused him of raising money by telling supporters he was broke, then using the money they gave him for personal expenses and gambling trips. He was sentenced to fifteen months in prison and released in May 2004. By that time, most Louisianans had figured out that Duke was a snapperhead who had a fatal attraction to nutty ideas, and rejected his racism, his antisemitism, and his lies. Nonetheless, he had a kernel of support, enough to mount a semiserious campaign for the United States Senate.

  The U.S. Senate race had been a goat rodeo so far, even by Louisiana standards. There were twenty-four candidates, including me, ranging from Duke, a former congressman, two sitting congressmen, and a guy named Crawdaddy Crawford. Raising money, as always, was tough. When the two sitting congressmen I was running against ran out of campaign funds, they just flew to Washington and raised more. I think I received three checks out of Washington in the first primary, and two of those bounced. Additionally, the guy that just about every self-anointed expert, pundit, state and local politician, and state media figure pronounced the likely winner—a multitermed Republican congressman from Lafayette named Charles Boustany—ran into some complications that made half the valley shake.

  In the middle of the first primary, Ethan Brown, a respected investigative journalist and author whose work had been published in New York magazine, the New York Observer, and Rolling Stone, and one of whose books was an Editor’s Choice in The New York Times, published Murder in the Bayou: Who Killed the Women Known as the Jeff Davis Eight?, a book about the murders of eight sex workers in Jefferson Davis Parish, Louisiana, from 2005 to 2008. In the book, Brown alleged, citing anonymous sources, that Congressman Boustany enjoyed the services of three of the eight sex workers at a run-down motel owned by a member of his congressional staff. The book and the allegations landed like a small earthquake. He denied them, his wife denied them, and he hired the lawyer for former Governor Bobby Jindal (I told you the politicians were against me) to sue for damages. (Boustany dismissed the suit after he lost the election.)

  Boustany accused me of “fanning the story” because I was the front-runner in the race at the time. With God as my witness, I swear I had nothing to do with the book. I had never met Ethan Brown—I didn’t even know who he was—and I had to google the murder investigation he was writing about. But when Boustany blamed me, I pounced like a hobo on a ham sandwich. I issued the following statement: “I want to be very clear that my campaign played absolutely no role in creating this story alleging Congressman Boustany’s sexual relationships with prostitutes that were later murdered, his staff’s alleged involvement in running the bar and hotel where this illicit behavior took place, or publishing the book.” If the shoe fits, wear it, Cinderella. My statement was picked up widely, which amplified the allegations that were the top political story in the state.

  Back to David Duke. At the time, in Louisiana, races for the U.S. Senate were decided via “jungle primary.” All the candidates ran against one another regardless of party affiliation. Then the top two went head-to-head in a runoff, and the winner went to Washington. This process did simplify things, but it also allowed cretins like David Duke to slip in and muddy the waters. The bar for entry at our final debate at Dillard in New Orleans was extremely low. To qualify, a candidate only needed to show that some reputable poll had him polling above 5 percent. For the entire race, Duke could never do that. But in October 2016, Mason-Dixon Polling & Strategy showed he was receiving 5.1 percent support, which put him right over the line. So, on the evening of November 2, 2016, I found myself less than twenty feet from depravity.

  And Duke hadn’t come alone.

  Outside the debate hall, in which a couple of hundred people were seated, a bunch of Duke supporters, who showed up to protest and otherwise scream like they were part of a prison riot, purposely kept clashing with supporters for other candidates and issues, including Black Lives Matter. If you watch a replay of the debate today, which was televised live, you can hear them pounding on the locked doors and chanting hateful slogans during the quiet moments between debate questions. I don’t know how many of them there were; I was later told somewhere around fifty. I do know they were loud and obnoxious. It was like someone asked ChatGPT to generate the perfect conehead, and they cloned themselves. Listening to all this from the stage was like being an extra in A Clockwork Orange. (Cool movie; look it up.) For a moment, I thought the Dukesters might break through one of the side doors and overrun the audience. Duke was loving it. He seemed to know that he had a captive television audience and the attention of every member of the considerable number of media in the room. He looked so smug. As Lyndon Johnson used to say, he looked like he could strut sitting down. Of course, Duke proceeded to make a spectacle of himself during the debate. The television reporter who was moderating had difficulty keeping him under control. Duke would talk out of turn and refuse to stop talking when his time was up.

  As soon as I learned I would be sharing a stage with Duke, I began to think about how to handle this guy. I was running first in the polls at the time, and I knew he’d attack me. So, I decided to look up his federal prisoner number—which I don’t remember, but let’s call it 12345–678—and memorized it. Every time Duke attacked me from the debate stage, I would wait patiently for him to finish. Then, when it was my turn to respond, I did not call him David or Mr. Duke. Instead I said, “Federal prisoner number 12345–678 is wrong, and here’s why.” Now, Duke has always been an angry man. Maybe he’s still mad someone dented his car in high school, though it probably goes back further than that.

  Anyway, subtlety does not become me, and this was a campaign anyway, and what I did worked: Every time I called Duke by his federal prisoner number, he became angry. (Don’t go away mad, Duke; just go away.) So, naturally, I continued to do it. The more outraged he became, and the more time he took up, the better it was for me anyway. Since I was running first, all I had to do was get out of the debate in one piece. I never told any of my campaign staff I was going to do this on live television, of course. I knew they would try to talk me out of it. It was a gamble. But it worked. When the votes were cast for the first primary, David Duke got just 3 percent of the vote. I led with Democrat Public Service Commissioner Foster Campbell coming in second. Duke’s showing made me even prouder of Louisiana.

  That same night, like everyone else I also learned that Donald Trump, the real estate mogul from Manhattan, had defeated Hillary Clinton to take the White House. The experts got his race wrong too. (Note to my readers: In politics, the experts are almost always wrong. And they are almost always the same. Didactic. Tendentious. High-minded. Convinced that they have infallible minds and superior instincts when in fact a penny for their thoughts would be pricey. And they are usually liberal, partial to man purses and organic broccoli. If you showed these people a handgun, you would have to explain to them that the end with the hole in it is the dangerous part. Did I mention that these guys are almost always wrong?) Trump and I were both Republicans, and our party made an impressive showing in races all over the country. But unlike the victors in some of these races, I still had to win one more time because of Louisiana’s unique election system before I could officially become a United States senator. As soon as Foster Campbell and I were declared the winners of the jungle primary, a runoff election was scheduled for early December. Of course, many people weren’t paying attention to my race at the time. They were more concerned with figuring out how Donald Trump and his campaign had pulled off the political upset of the century.

  I had a few ideas about that.

  * * *

  In my opinion, Donald Trump was successful because he preached that our future could be better than our present and our past—but not unless we changed a few things. I’d been saying that for years.

  President Trump and I are very different people in personality and style, and sometimes we disagree on issues. But Trump and I are alike in that we both believe in limited government, personal responsibility, and that the impossible is often just the untried. We believe that it’s not inconsistent to think that America has made mistakes, but that it’s still the best friend freedom has ever had. We also don’t lose sleep over the approval of our peers. We’re more interested in the aspirations of our people. That’s why they call us crazy, misfits, troublemakers, rebels. That’s Washington-speak for “you’re not doing it the way we like.” Our response? The way you’ve been doing it sucks.

  We’re both running dogs, not porch dogs. We may not get invited to too many parties, but we get results. We believe you’ve got to seize your future, not fear it. And we know one thing for certain: If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got. And what we’ve got in Washington is a credentialed ruling elite that cares more about keeping their jobs than doing their jobs.

  Trump won, in my opinion, because he understood something simple but profound: Washington is not America. And most people in America loathe Washington. In D.C., they worry about polls, privilege, power, and special interests. In the real world, people worry about their jobs, their health care, and their kids’ education. In D.C., they mock folks for owning guns, believing in God, and teaching their children values. Hillary Clinton called them (us) deplorables, as if we aren’t real people. But we are real and in this election we got real mad. Trump won because he showed he cared about the lives and concerns of ordinary Americans. People don’t care about how much you know until they know how much you care.

 

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