In Louisiana’s Senate Race, One Too Many Candidates
Posted on October 10, 2014
"Col Robert Maness" by U.S. Air Force photo - http://www.offutt.af.mil/shared/media/bio/hi_res/Maness_RL.jpg. Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
(This originally appeared in the Wall Street Journal’s Think Tank)
Periodically, I get e-mail alerts from Col. Rob Maness.
He likes to keep me informed about his campaign for the U.S. Senate. He is a true-blue conservative, a constitutional conservative, a Sarah Palin conservative, an Erick Erickson conservative.
In fact, Sarah Palin went to Louisiana to campaign for him last week, and Red State has endorsed him.
Sadly for the colonel, he is not going to win. He won’t be among the top two finishers on Election Day. It’s not even likely to be close: The latest polls show him getting less than 10% of the vote.
About the only thing his campaign is doing is making it easier for the incumbent, Sen. Mary Landrieu, to survive until a post-Election Day run-off, where anything can happen.
Col. Maness is attacking the leading Republican candidate, U.S. Rep. Bill Cassidy, for refusing to debate him and Sen. Landrieu. There’s a simple reason Rep. Cassidy is sitting out Thursday night’s debate: He is the front-runner, and if he can avoid any unforced errors in the campaign, he can provide one more vote to stop the Obama agenda on the Senate floor.
If Col. Maness truly cared about fiscal responsibility, he would drop out of the race and allow Rep. Cassidy to win the election without forcing a run-off. It would save Louisiana taxpayers a couple hundred thousand dollars, and it would all-but guarantee that Republicans would be one vote closer to knocking Harry Reid out of the Senate majority leader’s office.