Hamburger in every pot

I don't have a real joke here. It's just that Foster Campbell is kind of a goofball.

“I’m Foster Campbell, and I live on a farm in north Louisiana,” the candidate said to the crowd in an accent that was gravy-thick, drawing unexpectedly raucous cheers as he championed Democratic presidents for pushing Medicare, Social Security and the G.I. Bill of Rights. He ended by telling the crowd to come visit him in Washington: “I’ll buy you a hamburger.”

I should be upset that that NYT profile treats the Louisiana Senate race as an inconsequential curiosity. Unfortunately, that's pretty accurate. It's an opportunity for demoralized Democrats in state as well as activists and donors from out of state to channel a little impotent rage at the Trump result.  But it's not likely to come to much of anything.  Campbell isn't a strong enough candidate to overcome a statewide Republican base strong enough to sweep even a toad like John Kennedy in.

Also, the story does contain a pretty good dig at Elliot Stonecipher so it's not all for naught. 

“Look, I know them both,” said Elliott Stonecipher, a political consultant from Shreveport, La., who first met Mr. Campbell when they were both public schoolteachers in the 1970s. “The three of us could sit around in a living room and talk politics and as long as Foster Campbell doesn’t have a chance to attack oil and gas, there’s not going to be a smidgen of difference.”

That is a bit of an overstatement: Mr. Campbell was alone among the major Senate candidates here talking openly about human-caused climate change; he also supports an increase in the minimum wage and promises to vote against any repeal of the Affordable Care Act.

But Mr. Campbell’s fondness for bashing the oil and gas companies, along with the railroads, the tobacco companies, the payday loan companies and a long list of other corporate targets, makes him an interesting figure in a party suddenly trying to figure out how to regain support among the rural working class.

Also it's kind of weird for Stonecipher or anyone to minimize the significance of a fundamental difference between candidates in how they relate to oil and gas. In this state, that's pretty much everything.