Democrat incumbent Sen. Mary Landrieu is increasingly on the ropes in the battle for her Louisiana Senate seat, which she has held since 1996.
With polls showing her chief opponent, Republican Bill Cassidy, up in the RCP average by 4.6 points, and added to that an on-going train of scandals and questions of legitimacy, things probably couldn’t get much worse. Until now.
State Senator Elbert Guillory, a black man, made big news across the country last year when he publicly announced he was switching parties from Democrat to Republican. Among his many reasons for doing so, Guillory explained that the Democrat Party had not only abandoned black Americans but is exploiting them for political gain.
Now comes Senator Guillory this week, on behalf of Free At Last PAC – a name which obviously harkens back to the struggles in the civil rights movement and the iconic phrase coined by Martin Luther King in his famed ‘I Have A Dream’ speech at the Lincoln Memorial – with the unveiling of what may be best political ad ever to hit airwaves.
In it Senator Guillory walks the streets of a poor black neighborhood where he grew up as he addresses black Louisiana voters very directly, “Mary Landrieu first ran for Senate in 1996 promising to be a champion for the black community. But 18 years later, little has changed.”
Guillory continues, “Our communities are poorer than they were in 1996. Our schools continue to fail children. Our jails are filled with young black men who should be at home being fathers. Meanwhile, Mary Landrieu lives in a $2 million mansion on Capitol Hill.”
He concludes the ad with an indictment of his fellow black voters, “But Mary Landrieu knows that she doesn’t have to do anything for our community, because no matter what she does, 95 percent of us will line up and vote for her, every single time.”
