Nathan Koenig has a great piece here at The Hayride this morning talking about the pathetic text message the Ted James campaign dropped on Wednesday starring Paula “Pelosi” Davis (that’s Moon Griffon’s nickname for her), the tax-raising “conservative” state representative who deigns to lecture voters that a Republican can’t win in Baton Rouge.
I’ve described this tactic by Team James in historical terms, particularly with respect to Davis’ predecessor Scott McKnight, the first star of James’ outreach to white Republicans particularly in South Baton Rouge. My take is he’s turned McKnight into a modern-day political version of Henri Philippe Petain, the washed-up French general who was installed as the president of the Vichy French Republic after the Nazis conquered his country.
This appeal is pretty crude. As Nathan notes, East Baton Rouge Parish is by no means lost to the GOP. The coroner, clerk of court and sheriff, all of whom are parishwide elected officials, are Republicans. There is zero reason to concede the mayor-president’s race by throwing in behind a sleazy leftist pol like James, whose voting record in the state legislature was actually worse than Sharon Weston Broome’s was during her time in the legislature.
What’s funny about this is that Broome’s campaign hired M.E. Cormier, a Democrat operative known for less-than-above-board tactics, to run things back in July. Cormier didn’t come to the campaign empty-handed; she brought some audio recordings with her that have now become a grand mess for James.
Why? Because the recordings are of conversations she and James conducted at the CC’s Coffee House on Perkins Road, which is a place often teeming with Baton Rouge politicos.
James was trying to make the case to Cormier for why Broome was screwed and he was the inevitable winner of the race. And what he said actually might have had a little bit of truth to it but, well, let’s just say Ted James regrets talking to M.E. Cormier now.
Take this quote, for example…
“People have donated to me that I don’t always agree with and I don’t want to confuse the voters by – if some of y’all hate Eddie Rispone so much – great, Davante Lewis is gonna endorse me. So, I got MAGA and LGBT like that’s what I’m bringing together, right? So you can’t say that I’m the Trump guy – I got the first openly gay Black man as an elected official supporting me. You- I can’t be both, right? I can’t be woke and MAGA, right? And they’re saying it all about me. I’m woke and MAGA. I’m a woke MAGA guy. (laughter)”
By the way, Eddie Rispone has donated a lot more money to Sid Edwards since Edwards entered the race than he ever gave to James.
Saying that you’re a woke MAGA guy is really not a good idea, in case you haven’t figured that out. To the MAGA people it’s a disqualifier that you’re woke. And to the woke people it’s a disqualifier that you’re MAGA.
And to both sets of folks it’s a disqualifier because you just let everybody know that you don’t have any principles at all and you’re simply trying to grift your way into office.
Then there’s this quote…
“Quite honestly, this is screwed up, a white man, if he knows he gotta deal with somebody Black, would rather deal with another man than a woman. It’s fu*ked up. It’s screwed up. And I’m – honestly, I get to take advantage of it right now. It’s, and I’m not – that’s not going to change in four years, it’s not going to change in eight years.”
Which is followed up by this…
“The funny things is, I fight about it in terms of Kamala Harris, right? Like I fight about it because she’s a personal friend of mine. She gets the same, right now, the same like, even people in our party, they, she, they don’t care about Joe (Biden), they just don’t want her to be the President because she’s a Black woman. I get it, I understand it.”
James was the state chairman of Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign in 2019. Remember that? She crashed on the launch pad and had to drop out before the Iowa caucuses.
Anyway, we’ve said Ted James was a racist for years – our dead giveaway was when he was posting stupid memes on his social media accounts which compared Trayvon Martin to Emmitt Till – and this is a little extra evidence for that proposition.
What does Ted James know about who white men would rather deal with? And why does he think the supposed sexist/racist attitudes of white men inure to his political benefit when Broome has gotten elected twice with at least a smattering of white support?
And the Harris quote, which was said back in the summer, is the same identity-politics drivel opening a window into James’ mindset.
This is somebody who can’t see past skin color and sex. Ted James will make some pretty broad assumptions about you based on those characteristics, and it’s obvious his assumptions about white people and white men in particular are fairly ungenerous.
It’s decidedly unmayoral. The one thing we can say about Kip Holden, who is still held up as the standard for what a black mayor in Baton Rouge should be, was that Holden didn’t hold any animus for white people.
Can you say that about James? Not after this stuff has dropped.
Cormier dusted off her recordings of James and handed them to Broome’s admakers, and now there’s an exploded torpedo right in the hull of the S.S. Can’t Trust Ted.
Here was the ad Broome busted out on Wednesday…
ICYMI: Ted James does not stand for anything. In disturbing comments, he called himself a “Woke MAGA Guy” and said he uses sexism to his advantage. Listen to our radio ad to hear him in his own words. pic.twitter.com/PpkN416NdR
— Sharon Weston Broome (@SharonWBroome) October 24, 2024
Here was WAFB’s report on this yesterday…
Broome’s now playing the “sexism” card, which is dumb, but the effect of that is to make the James-Broome fight a battle of the sexes, and typically there are more black women voters than black men voters, so she might not be wrong to drop that one.
And James’ camp is squealing like stuck pigs, which is lending an air of hilarity to the proceedings.
This was especially entertaining…
The James campaign said the Broome campaign had “sunk to a new low.” “Do you really believe that Ted James had a conversation with M.E. Cormier where he announced he was a sexist MAGA man?” a James spokesman said. “Of course not. This is what death throes of a desperate politician look like now that polls are showing our strong lead.”
Then James’ campaign put out a statement complaining about some supposed deadline that Broome was expected to meet to turn over all of Cormier’s recordings (say what?), and it was more than a little crabby…
The Broome campaign has missed the deadline to make the full, unedited and uncut audio files available. Their failure to release the full, unmanipulated audio demonstrates the depths at which the Broome campaign will sink to falsely portray Ted James and his true comments. “The calls of support and reactions on social media show that this classless stunt has backfired. The mayor has shown a reckless disregard for truth as mayor and a candidate. This past weekend saw 2 more homicides and another mass shooting. We are focused on healing the wound at the heart of this city” said James. We hope that all stations will continue to act responsibly and remove this false advertisement from the airwaves. We will continue to weigh our legal options while she continues to humiliate herself.
Meanwhile, Broome’s camp is claiming that Cormier wasn’t working for them when she taped James at the coffee shop, which is hilarious in its own right. How stupid do they think we are?
As stupid as James is for dropping those air biscuits in the first place, apparently.
We can’t help ourselves here. This is the most entertaining a Baton Rouge mayor’s race has been in our lifetime, because the Democrats chewing each other to bits are two of the dumbest, laziest politicians we’ve seen and that’s been true for a long time.
That Scott McKnight and Paula Davis, who decided to surrender to one of these morons probably as part of some sort of prospectively lucrative sellout, look even dumber is a special bonus.
Neither one of these two clowns deserve the job of mayor-president. This delicious controversy makes it more likely that Edwards – who isn’t a politician and has the extra feature that as a legendary high school football coach in this town can actually claim to be a competent leader – navigates his way into the runoff and perhaps an upset win.
When presented with the prospect of an Iran-Iraq war, Henry Kissinger remarked, “Why can’t they both lose?” That’s where we are in Baton Rouge with James and Broome. And the great news is it could happen.