Buddy Roemer, a clean-government advocate whose 4 years as Louisiana governor had been wedged between phrases served by the flamboyant and scandal-
Buddy Roemer, a clean-government advocate whose 4 years as Louisiana governor had been wedged between phrases served by the flamboyant and scandal-plagued Edwin Edwards, died on Monday at his house in Baton Rouge, the state capital. He was 77.
His son Charles E. Roemer IV, who goes by Chas, confirmed the demise, saying his father had lengthy been handled for Kind 1 diabetes.
A Harvard-educated scion of a distinguished north Louisiana farming household, Mr. Roemer was elected governor in 1987 as a fiscally conservative Democrat who promised to repair a state finances disaster introduced on by falling oil and gasoline costs.
He additionally pledged to keep away from scandal in a state the place Mr. Edwards’s trial on federal corruption prices had dominated a lot of Mr. Edwards’s third time period and led to his acquittal in 1986. (Mr. Edwards, a Democrat, was convicted in 2000 in a separate federal corruption trial.)
4 years after profitable the governorship, nevertheless, Mr. Roemer, by then working for re-election as a Republican, discovered himself boxed out of energy largely by the unsettling rise of David Duke, the previous Ku Klux Klan chief who was additionally working for governor as a Republican. Mr. Edwards and Mr. Duke positioned first and second, respectively, within the state’s open major system, advancing to a runoff and dealing Mr. Roemer a blow from which his political profession by no means recovered. (Mr. Edwards defeated Mr. Duke within the runoff to seize a nonconsecutive fourth time period.)
“He by no means actually slot in any celebration utterly,” Chas Roemer mentioned of his father. “It in all probability added to his downfall politically. However that’s who he was.”
Charles Elson Roemer III was born on Oct. 4, 1943, to Charles and Adeline (McDade) Roemer within the north Louisiana metropolis of Shreveport. He grew up close by, exterior Bossier Metropolis, La., the place his household owned a cotton plantation. He enrolled at Harvard College at age 16 and studied authorities and economics as an undergraduate. He later earned a grasp’s in enterprise administration there.
After school, he returned to north Louisiana to assist run the household farming operation, however he was by no means too removed from politics. He helped discovered a pc firm that supplied knowledge evaluation to corporations and political campaigns and based the primary of plenty of banks he can be concerned with over time.
Each Mr. Roemer and his father labored on Mr. Edwards’s first profitable marketing campaign for governor, in 1971-72, during which Mr. Edwards offered himself as a reform candidate. (He would later push by way of a rewrite of the state’s cumbersome structure.)
The elder Mr. Roemer, who was often called Budgie, went on to be Mr. Edwards’s commissioner of administration within the governor’s first two phrases, managing lots of the each day capabilities of state authorities.
The youthful Mr. Roemer went to Congress, representing Louisiana for 4 phrases starting in 1981. On Capitol Hill, he earned a repute as a pointy orator and as a member of the so-called “Boll Weevils,” a bunch of conservative Southern Democrats who had been amenable to the Reagan administration’s financial insurance policies. In worldwide affairs he supported sanctions in opposition to South Africa’s apartheid regime.
Again in Louisiana, Mr. Edwards had been elected to a nonconsecutive third time period as governor. However voters started to tire of his antics — in a single occasion he was accused of paying off six-figure playing money owed with suitcases and envelopes filled with money — and of the grinding fiscal realities of the oil bust.
Mr. Roemer ran promising aid. Len Sanderson, his former chief of employees and marketing campaign director, mentioned in an interview on Monday that Mr. Roemer had grabbed voters’ consideration when he was requested, in a debate earlier than the open major, whether or not he would assist a Republican over Mr. Edwards if it got here all the way down to these two decisions.
Mr. Roemer mentioned he would assist the Republican, on grounds that it was higher to “slay the dragon.” The marketing campaign was fast to print up “slay the dragon” buttons.
As a candidate Mr. Roemer promised what he branded the “Roemer Revolution,” a mixture of fiscal reforms and pledges to cease the endemic corruption that had gone hand-in-hand with a lot of Louisiana’s colourful 20th-century populist custom.
His administration was in a position to perform marketing campaign finance reforms and in addition crack down on air pollution emitted by the state’s highly effective chemical trade, Mr. Sanderson mentioned. However Mr. Roemer’s proposal for a fiscal overhaul, which was to incorporate gasoline and different tax will increase and would have required a constitutional modification, was rejected by voters in 1989.
Mr. Roemer’s third-place end within the 1991 open major was a outcome not solely of Mr. Duke’s attraction to white racists, with its criticism of the welfare system and affirmative motion packages. Mr. Roemer was additionally blasted in adverts funded by the proprietor of an industrial-waste processing firm that had been fined thousands and thousands of {dollars} by the Roemer administration.
Mr. Roemer’s change from Democrat to Republican might have additionally value him. That transfer was according to his fiscal conservatism and his friendship with then-President George H.W. Bush. However even additional, he had most certainly concluded that Mr. Edwards, working for his fourth time period, would tie up a lot Democratic assist, and that working as a Republican may enable Mr. Roemer to construct a profitable coalition of anti-Duke Republicans and anti-Edwards Democrats.
Because it turned out, Mr. Roemer discovered himself sitting out a race that Mr. Edwards would win amid widespread revulsion in Louisiana — and in a lot of the nation — over Mr. Duke’s white supremacist background.
That revulsion — coupled with a typically disconsolate temper amongst some voters — was expressed in a pro-Edwards bumper sticker that famously proclaimed, “Vote for the Criminal — It’s Essential.”
Mr. Roemer launched a failed comeback marketing campaign for governor in 1995. In 2012 he briefly ran as a long-shot presidential candidate, first as a Republican and later as a third-party candidate. That effort was maybe most notable for his star flip in a satirical TV advert criticizing cash in politics funded by a brilliant PAC established by the comic Stephen Colbert.
The advert featured Mr. Roemer, Mr. Colbert and a unicorn named Rainbow — paid for with PAC cash, the advert claimed — being magically transported to C.S. Lewis’s legendary Narnia.
Mr. Roemer, who labored in banking and enterprise after leaving workplace, had a stroke in 2014 that affected his speech. Chas Roemer mentioned that his father’s well being had been declining during the last 12 months.
Along with his son, Mr. Roemer, who was married thrice, is survived by his spouse, Scarlett Osborne Roemer; one other son, Dakota Roemer; a daughter, Caroline Roemer; and 5 grandchildren.