Republicans and conservatives, especially in the South, should
all send birthday wishes to David C.
Treen of Louisiana, who turns 80 today. Treen put himself on
the line again and again to build a two-party system in the
one-party South, against what at first were impossible odds, and
(at least for a while) much to the detriment of his own personal
finances. When he finally won election as the first Louisiana
Republican in Congress in the 20th Century, it sent a jolt through
the state GOP and set the table for significant growth. In
Congress, he served as one of the leading young conservative
reformers of the 1970s. When elected governor in a close race in
1979, GOP registration jumped again, quite significantly -- helping
set the table for the explosion of GOP growth in Louisiana under
Ronald Reagan.
Treen also served as an early mentor to U.S. Rep. Bob
Livingston, the single best chairman of the House Appropriations
Committee ever (and the only one to actually cut actual dollars
from domestic discretionary spending: $50 billion worth in just two
years).
It is also very much to Treen's credit that he took strong,
unshakeable moral stands against the meteoric political rise of
neo-Nazi David Duke in the late 1980s and early 1990s. When other
leaders cowered, Treen stood tall. It may seem in retrospect to
have been an easy thing to do, but anybody who was there at the
time knows just how effectively Duke had pulled a sheet over the
eyes of much of the public and convinced people that he had shed
the worst of his KKK/neo-Nazi past and was a new, Yuppified version
of Ronald Reagan. The truth, of course, was quite the contrary, as
Duke secretly maintained many KKK and neo-Nazi ties -- but it took
somebody with Treen's reputation for conservatism and probity to
make enough people look beyond Duke's carefully crafted TV persona
and acknowledge the frightening facts.
At the age of 70, Treen tried to make a comeback in a special
election for Congress in 1999, helping to dispatch Duke in the open
"jungle" primary in the process. Treen was expected to win the
runoff against David "D.C. Madam" Vitter, but was distracted in the
final week when his grandson went missing on a Western hiking trip.
Treen suspended his campaign and used every bit of his fame to
rally a huge search for his grandson -- a search that was
successful when one of the TV helicopters attracted by the story
found the teenage grandson, safe but scared, in a remote area.
Treen returned to Louisiana just a day or two before the election,
only to find that Vitter had run an underhanded and dishonest
campaign against him. Flyers went out in black neighborhoods, for
instance, claiming ludicrously that Treen was an ally of Duke
(despite Treen's strong record against Duke, his strong record as
governor of appointing blacks to government offices, and Vitter's
almost total silence against Duke in the races when it really
counted). Buoyed by huge margins in Vitter's favor among the small
slice of the district's electorate that was black, Vitter squeaked
out a narrow victory, 61,661 votes to 59,849 for Treen. That
race effectively ended Treen's career as a political candidate. But
it cannot erase the services he performed for the conservative
cause.
A good and decent public servant, Treen lives today in
Mandeville, LA. Happy Birthday, Governor!
topics:
Conservatism
