By Barbra Murray
Congressional Quarterly

Electoral votes: 9

Delegates: 29

Co-chairmen: Donald T. "Boysie" Bollinger and Donald Ensenat

Hotel: Omni at Independence Park (215) 925-0000

1996 Election:
Clinton – 52%
Dole – 40%
Perot – 7%

For the second consecutive presidential nominating campaign, Louisiana Republicans tried to jump the line and elbow their way into the national spotlight. But when it became clear that they might be headed for a repeat of the fiasco they experienced in 1996, the Louisianans this time decided to take no for an answer.

The result was a Louisiana primary held on the traditional Southern-state "Super Tuesday" - a week after George W. Bush had essentially clinched the Republican nomination in the March 7 avalanche of primaries and caucuses. The Texas governor easily carried neighboring Louisiana; as no other candidate even topped 10 percent of the vote, the state's threshold, Bush claimed all 29 Louisiana delegates.

A united delegation is the opposite of what Louisiana sent to the 1996 gathering in San Diego that nominated former Kansas Sen. Bob Dole.

Frustrated at being ignored in the nominating process, Louisiana GOP officials scheduled a party-run caucus at the very front of the schedule, before even the traditional first-in-the-nation events in Iowa and New Hampshire. But Iowa Republican officials warned they would denounce any presidential candidate who took part in the pre-emptive Louisiana event, and most candidates took them seriously.

The only hopefuls who ran in Louisiana were conservative commentator Pat Buchanan, who won, and Texas Sen. Phil Gramm, whose loss ended his campaign. Turnout was depressed by a series of logistical problems in conducting the vote.

Ultimately, Dole ended up with a plurality of Louisiana's delegates but Buchanan got a large share, making Louisiana's contingent one of the more fractious at that year's convention.

Despite the widely perceived failure of the 1996 event, Louisiana Republicans initially said they would schedule a primary this year for the Saturday before the Iowa caucuses, retreating only when it became clear that this would be as poorly received by national party officials and candidates as the 1996 plan.

The delegate selection process was pleasantly void of contested races, said Susan Bonnett, political director for Louisiana Republican Gov. Mike Foster and a member of the four-person selection committee.

The co-chairmen of the delegation are Bollinger Shipyards Chairman and CEO Donald T. "Boysie" Bollinger, who is attending his sixth Republican convention, and New Orleans attorney Donald Ensenat. "They both invested such a huge amount of time and effort on behalf of Gov. Bush," Bonnett said.

Ensenat is one of the convention attendees who goes way back with the party's standard-bearer: He and Bush were Yale University fraternity brothers and roommates. "We've been close friends for 35 years - we went to college together, we lived together, we were in each other's weddings," Ensenat recounted, adding that it is "kind of heady stuff, watching a dear friend campaign for the presidency."

Ensenat offered no tales of presidential dreams from Bush's college days, though. "If you'd asked me back in college [if he would end up running], I don't know what I would have said," Ensenat said. "I was more worried about dates and what I was going to do Friday night."

Gov. Foster, who likely will attend the convention, passed up a delegation slot, as did most well known Louisiana officials. Ensenat described the delegation as "largely non-politicians, just a bunch of good citizens, including a lot of first-time participants in the process. . . . We hope to have fun and celebrate our future."

The best-known Louisiana delegate, by far, is former Republican Rep. Robert L. Livingston, who had a rapid rise and faster fall from national prominence in late 1998.

After the Republicans lost a net of five seats in the 1998 House elections, Livingston - who had chaired the House Appropriations Committee for two terms - announced that he would challenge incumbent Speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia. The move spurred Gingrich to resign from Congress altogether, and Livingston was designated by his fellow House Republicans to be the next Speaker.

But just weeks later, in the midst of House deliberations on the impeachment of President Clinton for lying about his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, reports leaked out that pornographer Larry Flynt was about to expose Livingston as a philanderer. Livingston then, in a dramatic speech during the House impeachment debate, announced that he too would resign from Congress. He now works as a Washington, D.C. lobbyist.

Bonnett said there were no hard rules on gathering a delegation with specific characteristics. "We're Republicans -we don't believe in quotas," Bonnett asserted. The sole criterion, she said, was to ensure that "the delegation was geographically representative of the state."

She conceded that the delegation is low on racial diversity - "unfortunately, the registration of black Republicans in Louisiana is very low, and the delegation is reflective of those numbers," she said - but noted that there are a number of women in the delegation.

LOUISIANA NOTABLES: Former U.S. Rep. Robert L. Livingston; Louisiana Secretary of State Fox McKeithen; state Elections Commissioner Suzanne Haik Terrell; state Senate President John J. Hainkel Jr.