Small Comfort

In northwest Louisiana's Fourth Congressional District, liberals are about as popular as the cottonmouths that abound in the swamps about Shreveport. Last week, in a special election to fill the seat of Democratic Representative Overton Brooks, who died Sept. 16, the voters of the Fourth had just the sort of choice they liked: arch-Conservative Democrat Joe D. Waggonner Jr., 43, was pitted against arch-Conservative Republican Charlton H. Lyons, 67. When the votes were counted, Waggonner was the winner --by 33,846 votes to 28,275, a remarkably narrow margin for a Democratic congressional candidate in Louisiana.

Waggonner, a former White Citizens' Council leader from the town of Plain Dealing (pop. 1,357), started the campaign as an overwhelming favorite. But Oilman Lyons closed the gap by identifying Waggonner with the national Democratic Party. Cried Lyons: "The national Democratic Party is 80% socialist and 1.000% anti-South. They are taking us down the road to disaster." The election of a Republican Congressman from Louisiana, Lyons argued, would "jar the Kennedy Administration to the marrow of its bones. If elected to Congress. I would stand steadfast and work unflinchingly against the onslaught of socialism."

This put Waggonner on the defensive, and he was unhesitant about disassociating himself from President Kennedy. But, he said, "you can't spite the President. You can only spite yourself. Anyone who does anything, anywhere, any time out of spite is only guilty of faulty reasoning. I'm still a good, conscientious, conservative Southern Democrat." But. argued Waggonner, he should not be damned simply because he was running as a Democrat: "There is not a thing that is going on today that has not been going on for the past eight years. The Republicans have made mistakes; the Democrats have too." Thus, he said, with the issue of segregation. Republican Attorney General Herbert Brownell was "guilty of everything that Robert Kennedy is guilty of." On that basis, Waggonner won--but it was a victory in which national Democrats would find precious small comfort.

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