Louisiana at a Glance State Profile - Gov. Foster (R) - Sen. Breaux (D) - Sen. Landrieu (D) Presidential Politics Congressional Districting - 01 - Vitter (R) - 02 - Jefferson (D) - 03 - Tauzin (R) - 04 - McCrery (R) - 05 - Cooksey (R) - 06 - Baker (R) - 07 - John (D) Almanac 2002 Home States & Districts Elected Officials For district profiles and additional information on the elected officials of Louisiana, please use the pull-down menu above.

Northwestern Louisiana, south of Arkansas and just east of Texas, is part of the Deep South. The overwhelming majority of people here are Protestants, not Catholics, often very tradition-minded, with names that are English or Scottish, not French. The tone is set not by wide-open New Orleans--which was not accessible by interstate until 1996, when the last chunk of I-49 was completed--but by the much smaller Shreveport, which could be just another East Texas oil town. The countryside is agricultural, though there are few vestiges of large riverfront plantations and backward farm country. Shreveport was discovered when Captain Henry Miller Shreve, with the Army Corps of Engineers, in the 1830s dispatched a young deputy named Robert E. Lee to break up a 100-mile blockade of logs in the Red River, moving the region's epicenter upriver to a new town, which was named after him.

Oil provided the basis for much of the economic growth of the 20th Century; defense facilities also helped; more recently there has been some high-tech and local entrepreneurship as Shreveport has encouraged economic revival with a convention center and downtown entertainment district. Politically, northern Louisiana voters, for more than 100 years, have been voting against cosmopolitan New Orleans and the Catholic Cajun south, sometimes for riproaring populists, and more often, as the economy grows more sophisticated, for market-oriented Republicans. The local Mardi Gras was revived in 1990 and is a more sedate, family-oriented affair compared to the Big Easy.

The 4th Congressional District consists of the northwest quadrant of the state. More than half the votes here are cast in Caddo and Bossier Parishes in the far corner around Shreveport, with the rest scattered around rural areas, picturesque old towns like Natchitoches and strip-highway towns like Leesville near the Army's giant Fort Polk. This area seemed to be trending Republican in the 1980s, but in the middle 1990s it went the other way: Both Bill Clinton and Senator Mary Landrieu carried the district in 1996, a critical factor in her narrow 5,788-vote statewide margin. But in 2000 George W. Bush carried the area by a comfortable margin, 54%-43%.

The congressman from the 4th district is Jim McCrery, a Republican first elected in 1988. McCrery grew up in Leesville, graduated from Louisiana Tech in Ruston (next door to Grambling, site of the football-famous, historically black college) and LSU Law School, and practiced law in Leesville and Shreveport. In 1981 he worked for Congressman Buddy Roemer, then a Democrat; later he joined Georgia Pacific. When Roemer was elected governor in 1987, McCrery ran as a Republican and won the special election 51%-49%. McCrery's toughest re-election race was in 1992, when the creation of the new black-majority 4th District put him in the 5th District with 16-year incumbent Jerry Huckaby, a conservative Democrat. But the district, with few black voters, was heavily Republican and Huckaby had 88 overdrafts on the House bank. McCrery weathered some negative personal attacks, led in the October primary 44%-29% and won the November runoff 63%-37%.

McCrery has compiled a mostly conservative voting record and has worked on major legislation from his seat on the Ways and Means Committee. Armed with the intuition that made him one of only 72 House members to vote against the disastrous 1988 catastrophic health care bill, he advanced a Republican alternative to the Clinton health care plan in 1994, capping deductibility of health insurance, opposing the Democrats' cost control measures, limiting medical malpractice and instituting medical savings accounts. Seven years later, he continued his innovative approach when he joined with liberal Democrat Jim McDermott of Ways and Means on a sweeping plan to replace employer-provided health insurance with a system for all individuals to find private insurance, coupled with mandatory pay increases to assist them and subsidies for the poor. "If we don't address escalating costs, we will end up with a government-run health-care system," McCrery warned. "I'm doing this to avoid a government takeover of health care, which is where I think we're headed." He worked on the Republicans' Medicare and prescription-drug alternatives and on the party task force to craft HMO reform. He favors individual investment accounts for Social Security. He has worked on local projects like completing I-49 and promoting I-69, the proposed Michigan-to-Mexico interstate, which is supposed to come through the northwest corner of Louisiana.

After running in four different districts in four elections, local politics settled down after 1996 and he has not faced serious opposition. McCrery became more active in national Republican campaigns, as vice chairman for incumbent retention at the National Republican Congressional Committee. Only four incumbents, three of them in left-leaning California, were defeated in November 2000, for which he may be due some credit.

When Bill Thomas became Ways and Means chairman in January 2001, McCrery, as one of his strong backers, was named chairman of the revived Subcommittee on Select Revenue Measures. Its wide-ranging jurisdiction permits McCrery to serve as a trouble-shooter, including liaison to fellow Louisianan Billy Tauzin, chairman of Energy and Commerce in what are likely to be serious turf fights between the two committees.

Redistricting will require the district to grow slightly larger, but will not make much difference politically.

Cook's Call:
Safe. On paper, this Shreveport-based district looks like it could be competitive. Clinton rolled up large margins here in 1992 and 1996 while Bush won the district in 2000 with 54%. But McCrery has a solid hold on this district and will be extremely difficult to dislodge. As one of the slower growing districts in the state, it will need to pick up some population in redistricting.

The People:

• Pop. 2000: 616,120; Pop. 1990: 602,692, up 2.2% 1990-2000.
• 62.4% White, 34% Black, 0.7% Asian, 0.8% Amer. Indian, 0.1% Hawaiian, 1.3% Two+ races, 0.7% Other. 2.1% Hispanic origin.

2000 Presidential Vote Bush (R) 124,956 (54%) Gore (D) 99,592 (43%) Nader (Green) 1,866 (1%)

1996 Presidential Vote Clinton (D) 122,729 (53%) Dole (R) 92,741 (40%) Perot (I) 17,525 (8%)