While John Bel Edwards has already earned admission to the Campaign Ad Hall of Fame with his unforgettable "prostitutes over patriots" spot that eviscerated David Vitter, a couple of outside groups also played big roles in setting up Edwards for his unlikely victory. One was the mysteriously named Louisiana Water Coalition, about which the public knew almost nothing except that it had been funded by a Baton Rouge law firm clearly eager to stop Vitter. But in a fascinating new piece, the National Journal's Karyn Bruggeman pulls back the proverbial curtain and talks to the operatives who created the super PACs ads, which included a pair of Democratic pollsters and, remarkably, a Republican ad man who'd worked for Arnold Schwarzenegger, Rob Stutzman.
Stutzman explains his involvement by saying he (correctly, as it turned out) viewed Vitter as "one of the worst candidates we had anywhere in the country" and hoped to damage him enough so that another Republican (either Jay Dardenne or Scott Angelle) could pass him in the primary, a gambit that almost worked. Most interesting is how the Water Coalition went about its task: Its ads did not merely attack Vitter over the prostitution scandal itself, because Vitter could parry by reminding voters that his wife had forgiven him, but rather focused on the questions the scandal raised about Vitter's judgment. That message, the pollsters found, resonated most strongly, and it was echoed in Edwards' own ad, to devastating effect.
The trio behind the Water Coalition's assault on Vitter packed up shop after the primary, but, says Bruggeman, credited another group, Gumbo PAC, for "picking up where they left off." Gumbo PAC was funded chiefly by the DGA and run by an LA Democratic Party operative named Trey Ourso, who sat for an interview with the New Orleans Times-Picayune right after the election. In his post-mortem, Ourso touched upon similar themes of trust and character, but he also said that his group's most powerful ad featured clips of Angelle and Dardenne hammering Vitter in debates—a potent set of attacks that helped persuade anti-Vitter Republicans to switch to Edwards. Ourso also cited the absurd Vitter's private investigator debacle, which helped reinforce voters' concerns about the senator at a critical time.
Perhaps his most important point, though, was that the prostitution scandal had never been "fully litigated politically." While most observers thought it was safely dead after Vitter cruised to a second term in the Senate in 2010, none of his opponents back then had pushed the issue in the forceful terms that Edwards and the super PACs did this year. While political science literature generally argues that scandals fade with time, Vitter's experience shows that this is by no means always the case. If anything, his re-election campaign may have made him complacent, and he paid a bitter price for it.
