Yesterday, we had a story about John Fleming jumping into the 2026 Senate race with Bill Cassidy – and included in that was a quote from a Cassidy spokesman which wasn’t very nice to Fleming…

“I thought he wanted to be State Treasurer? John Fleming wants to get out of Louisiana. He publicly said he wanted a job in the Trump administration, and apparently, they didn’t want him. So after less than a year as State Treasurer, he’s looking for another job to return to Washington. Again, I thought he wanted to be State Treasurer, but apparently not.”

Moon Griffon saw that quote and more or less had a conniption fit on air, and naturally from a conservative perspective it’s hard to blame him. Griffon noted that spending a year as State Treasurer and watching Cassidy continue to act as a RINO in the U.S. Senate would be perfectly enough honest motivation to decide to run against him, and then he went through a nearly endless litany of inconsistencies Cassidy is guilty of over the past four years since he was re-elected in November of 2020.

We had a little more on the race in today’s American Spectator column, by the way.

But Fleming wasn’t about to let Cassidy have the last word yesterday. His campaign popped off quite a chippy response to Cassidy…

After spending a year campaigning for reelection in 2020, invoking President Trump’s name in every campaign commercial, Bill Cassidy ran back to the Senate to cast a vote convicting President Trump, in a failed attempt by Cassidy and the Democrats to destroy President Trump’s reputation.  It failed, and everyone in Louisiana got to see Bill Cassidy’s true colors! Bill Cassidy failed President-elect so badly, the President called Cassidy a “lamebrain” and Cassidy continued attacking President Trump well into 2024, and even refused to endorse the President-Elect.

Bill Cassidy left Louisiana for Washington, DC’s social and cultural circles and to become part of the regulatory, spend-a-rama, pro-open borders crowd.  I don’t want to leave Louisiana.  I want Louisiana values in Washington, DC, and Louisiana common sense in the United States Senate.  Bill Cassidy represents neither.  I look forward to a vigorous debate over the next year, because I make no apologies about serving President Trump as Senior Advisor in the White House during the toughest political times.

I will serve Louisiana the same way in the United States Senate will fight to put America and Louisiana first.

Oh, this is going to be a fun race. When Clay Higgins and/or Eric Skrmetta get in, it’ll be an absolute free-for-all on the GOP side, and the fun part is that it’s very likely going to be about actual policy rather than stupid sex scandals or other dirt.

In that American Spectator column, the first part of which focuses on the attempts to destroy Pete Hegseth’s nomination for Secretary of Defense with tabloid garbage, I’m calling that the Old Game. Everybody knows what it is – you pick at something in your opponent’s personal life which impugns their character, and it’s usually that they’ve done drugs or drank too much or had sex with the wrong people, or otherwise engaged in the kinds of moral failings most of us at one time or another have been guilty of, and then the stupid legacy corporate media sensationalizes that crap and turns it into an “important” issue that decides how public policy is made.

The David Vitter “hookers” debacle in the 2015 gubernatorial election is the classic Louisiana example of the Old Game. What Vitter did 15 years before that election as a younger man with, perhaps, too much testosterone and not enough discipline flowing through him had absolutely no bearing whatsoever on the lives of the people of Louisiana, but because special interests whose oxen Vitter promised to gore were desperate for something to beat him with, it was time for the Old Game.

The Clintons, who were among the most accomplished political thieves America has ever seen, used to call this “the politics of personal destruction.” That was rich, seeing as though their camp practiced the Old Game all day long. Their political hatchet man James Carville, who has become an ugly caricature of himself in his newly-irrelevant dotage, continues to tout the Old Game; if you sat through that horrific rant a couple of weeks ago on his podcast where he proudly extolled the virtues of “slapping ya mama” if that’s what it took to win an election, you saw a pretty standard emblem of who the people are who want to play the Old Game.

The thing about the Old Game is that the people of Louisiana really don’t care about that stuff anymore. One of the key indicators, to me at least, that we’ve entered a new political era that is quite different from the mid-to-late 20th century major-media era of American politics that lasted far too long is that things which used to be slam-dunks no longer matter.

The sea change which looks like it’s happening across the country seems to have actually begun here in Louisiana in 2016. That was the year Scott Angelle was supposed to walk away with the congressional seat Charles Boustany was vacating to run for Vitter’s Senate seat, and Clay Higgins emerged out of nowhere as Angelle’s main opponent. Higgins was a YouTube sensation as the “Cajun John Wayne” from the Evangeline Parish Sheriff’s Department Crimestopper videos, and he turned out to have a very MAGA/Freedom Caucus revivalist conservative ideological grounding that was far more in tune with the voters of that district than Angelle’s old-school “centrist” worldview.

Higgins was what the voters wanted, and they were also very irritated with Angelle for having gleefully jumped into the Old Game against Vitter back in 2015 and playing a role in producing John Bel Edwards and his massive tax increases as the state’s governor.

So when the runoff between Angelle and Higgins began and the Angelle campaign decided to base its pitch to the voters in nasty allegations made by Higgins’ ex-wife, the voters quickly recognized that all Scott Angelle brought to the table was Old Game personal attacks – and they rejected him so fiercely that he’s never run for anything again.

It’s going to be interesting to see whether Team Cassidy decides to play the Old Game against Fleming (Lord knows what dirt you can even find on him; Fleming is one of the cleanest/most boring Louisiana politicians we’ve ever seen) or Higgins or Skrmetta if they get in. The James Carvilles of the world advising an incumbent the public has little use for would shout “Slap Ya Mama!” at the top of their lungs and shop all the opposition research they can find to the Baton Rouge Advocate and other legacy media while trying to drag the race into the gutter, because in an actual battle of ideas they’re cooked.

Except I don’t think that works anymore. I think the public has woken up to the Old Game and it actually offends them now. They’ve seen the corruption and they’ve seen how the game is played, and the minute the Old Game makes itself known they react very badly to it.

Which isn’t good news for Cassidy. If he wants to hang on to that seat, he’d better spend the next two years earning it on Capitol Hill.