If the political stars had been aligned a little differently, Gov. Buddy Roemer of Louisiana and not Gov. Bill Clinton of Arkansas might have been the Southern New Democrat elected to the White House in the 1990s. But Roemer’s very promising first decade in elective office ended in disarray and defeat, and by the time he died last week in Baton Rouge at 77, he was largely remembered as a bright comet who fell to Earth prematurely from a mixture of bad luck and poor judgment.
The son of a wealthy planter-politician in Bossier City, near Shreveport, Charles Elson Roemer III was blessed with good looks, a nimble brain, the gift of the gab, and outsize ambition that he seemed destined to realize. Graduating from Harvard at 21, he earned a master’s degree at the Harvard Business School and, returning to Louisiana to work in the family business, founded a successful computer company and the first of a number of banks he would help run during the next several decades.
Politics, however, was his principal calling. Defeated in the open primary for a House seat in 1978, Roemer tried again two years later and defeated the incumbent by a wide margin. The arrival of the freshman member from Louisiana’s 4th Congressional District coincided with the election in 1980 of Ronald Reagan as president. Roemer, who supported Reagan’s 1981 tax cuts, became a leader of the House “Boll Weevils,” conservative Southern Democrats who often handicapped Speaker Thomas “Tip” O’Neill with their votes for Reagan’s domestic initiatives and foreign policy.
Roemer played his hand shrewdly: While O’Neill complained that he was “often wrong but never in doubt,” Roemer remained on friendly terms with his ostensible leader by regularly joining him for after-hours games of gin rummy. This enabled the speaker to learn what the Boll Weevils were thinking and earned Roemer a coveted seat on the Banking Committee, dismaying House liberals.
Roemer’s big break came in 1987 when, after four terms in Congress, he ran for governor. By any measure, it was an uphill battle. The populist incumbent, Edwin Edwards, had just been acquitted in a federal corruption case but largely retained his ardent following. Roemer’s other primary opponents were two powerful senior congressmen, Republican Bob Livingston and Democrat Billy Tauzin. But Roemer ran a sharp and sharp-elbowed campaign, saying things such as, “I want a governor who puts our pocketbook ahead of his,” which attracted widespread media attention and support and propelled him to a first-place plurality on primary election night. Edwards, who came in second, declined to fight a runoff and, at 44, Roemer became governor.
The Roemer Revolution, as he called it, got off to a robust start. Seeking to rescue Louisiana’s crippled finances, he cut spending and Edwards-era frills, borrowed against the state’s reviving economy to balance the budget, and sued oil and gas companies for decades of underpaid royalties. Like Jimmy Carter in 1970s Georgia and Clinton, Roemer began to attract attention as a centrist Southern Democratic governor who might have national appeal.
But then, almost overnight, things began to go sour at home. Roemer’s ambitious plan to reform and restructure the state’s tax system by referendum was defeated at the polls. Then his veto of an anti-abortion bill was overridden by the legislature, an unprecedented rebuke in Louisiana history. A staff retreat to regain momentum included a “spiritual adviser” whose New Age counsel inspired widespread mockery. When, in 1991, he faced a primary election against ex-Gov. Edwards and the onetime Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, even Roemer’s eleventh-hour switch from Democrat to Republican couldn’t save him from a third-place finish.
Roemer returned to the world of finance and banking with success, and his term as a reform governor is seen in retrospect as historic. But his promising political career was finished: He ran unsuccessfully for governor in 1995, and his 2012 campaign for president collapsed when the Americans Elect Party failed to gain access on any state ballots.
Philip Terzian is the author of Architects of Power: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and the American Century.
