Congressional Comeback Attempt Fails By 1,812 Votes
In 1999, Treen attempted a political comeback by running for the U.S. House. By this time, his home in Mandeville had been drawn into the 1st District. That seat was being vacated by Representative Bob Livingston, who left Congress in a sex scandal amid the House vote on the impeachment of President Bill Clinton. This was the eighth election that Treen's name appeared on a Louisiana ballot for Congress.
In the special election with David Duke, also trying to score a comeback, and Republican state Representative David Vitter, Treen finished first with 36,719 votes (25%) to Vitter's 31,741 (22%) and Duke's 28,055 (19%). (Six other candidates, including New Orleans businessman Rob Couhig, shared the remaining 33% of the votes cast.) In the low-turnout special election runoff, Vitter defeated Treen, 61,661 ballots (51%) to 59,849 (49%), a margin of 1,812 votes. The race against Vitter was a bitter contest, with attacks flying back and forth. Many of Vitter's colleagues in the state legislature, including Republicans, supported Treen and charged that Vitter was difficult to work with as a legislator. Duke endorsed Treen over Vitter, perhaps to get back at Treen, hoping to defeat him, because Treen had supported Edwards against Duke in 1991. Vitter ultimately won the seat. In 2005, Vitter left the House to become the first Republican to be elected to the U.S. Senate from Louisiana since Reconstruction.
Read more about this topic: Dave Treen
Famous quotes containing the words attempt, fails and/or votes:
“Every man is in a state of conflict, owing to his attempt to reconcile himself and his relationship with life to his conception of harmony. This conflict makes his soul a battlefield, where the forces that wish this reconciliation fight those that do not and reject the alternative solutions they offer. Works of art are attempts to fight out this conflict in the imaginative world.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)
“The youth, intoxicated with his admiration of a hero, fails to see, that it is only a projection of his own soul, which he admires.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The war shook down the Tsardom, an unspeakable abomination, and made an end of the new German Empire and the old Apostolic Austrian one. It ... gave votes and seats in Parliament to women.... But if society can be reformed only by the accidental results of horrible catastrophes ... what hope is there for mankind in them? The war was a horror and everybody is the worse for it.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)