Meet the Environmental Czar Who Just Won a GOP Seat

Senator Mary Landrieu lost her re-election bid on Saturday, though the margin revealed a candidate with a command of her base. She won 44 percent of the vote in November's primary; she won 44 percent in the runoff. The deep South will, for the first time, be sending no Democrats to the U.S. Senate, as obituary-writers had been fulminating about for weeks.

And the deep South is unlikely to see another run by Edwin Edwards, whose fifty years of election wins—interrupted by occasional indictments—ended in a lopsided defeat. Edwards, now 87, ran for the open House seat of Senator-elect Bill Cassidy, and his quixotic (and briefly intriguing to reality TV) campaign went down to first-time candidate Garret Graves. I watched Edwards debate Graves last week, and afterwards, I briefly got to ask the candidate about the issue that separated him from most Republicans. Graves used to be Gov. Bobby Jindal's "coastal czar," and from that perch he warned that rising sea levels were threatening the state.