This is worth a read, on that topic:
http://rudepundit.blogspot.com/2011/09/who-fuck-is-buddy-roemer-when-daily.html
9/12/2011
Who the Fuck Is Buddy Roemer?:
When The Daily Show featured an interview with Republican presidential candidate Buddy Roemer, you can be sure that a whole bunch of people looked up from their bongs and said, “Who the fuck is this guy?” Who the fuck that guy is happens to be one of the sad, tragic tales of late 20th century American politics (but do not pity the man for, indeed, he is very rich).
Buddy Roemer was a Democrat who was elected governor of Louisiana in 1987 after being a four-term member of Congress, getting 33% in an open primary, beating the blatantly corrupt former governor Edwin Edwards by 5 points. There should have been a runoff, but because he wanted to dick over Roemer (and was going to lose), Edwards conceded before the election, and Roemer became governor. Now, anyone will tell you, Louisiana politics in the 1980s (and early 1990s) was just fucking weird, filled with good ol' boy Huey Long wannabe Democrats (in both man o’ the people cred and/or graft-receiving whoredom) and moderate Republicans (who knew they had to appeal to the majority Democrats to have any chance), all covered in a sauce of Catholic morality, infused with Southern Baptist bible-thumpin’ spice. And fried in oil. Always oil. Roemer was not supposed to win. Edwards and/or one of the very cronies that he had supported and was running should have.
So Roemer gets to Baton Rouge, and, because he’s the anti-Edwards, he wants to be fiscally responsible and not batshit crazy on Moral Majority issues. He came into a state with a $1.3 billion deficit. He pissed off the Edwards Democrats, who were desperately afraid of losing their gravy train, he pissed off his own supporters by bravely vetoing an anti-abortion bill that would have outlawed it in cases of rape and incest, he pissed off everyone in the state by proposing tax hikes so that Louisiana would not be so beholden to the massive fluctuations in oil prices (the proposal went to voters, who rejected it in 1989, thus making him a lame duck nearly immediately in his term) and by opposing a lottery, which he saw as a tax on the poor. Basically, by trying to be honorable and trying to solve problems and doing it as an outsider and renegade Roemer ended up alienating just about everyone you could think of.
And then he switched parties. Yeah, enticed by entreaties from the administration of Bush I, and believing, as so many did post-Persian Gulf “war,” that Republicans were going to cruise to victories in 1992, and fearful that his own chances of even getting the Democratic nomination were slim to none, Roemer jumped to the GOP, thus pissing off all but a few die-hard followers. And he assured that the 1991 gubernatorial race would be a runoff between the vile Edwards and viler KKK grand wizard David Duke. Oh, and the Louisiana Republican Party dicked him over, too....
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