John Henry Baker - "Abolish The Office"

"Abolish The Office"

Baker ran for elections commissioner, basing his campaign on abolishing the "useless" office, which then had a salary of $37,400 per year, and returning its duties to the secretary of state, where they had been before Earl Long punished Martin, who had continued to be reelected secretary of state until his retirement in 1976.

Ironically, what Baker was proposing would have worked to the advantage of Baker's former rival, state Senator Jim Brown, who would be elected secretary of state in the same 1979 election. When Baker offered his proposal to abolish the very office for which he was seeking election, he began to make headway. He won a student mock poll at Louisiana State University at Alexandria and several other colleges as well as the endorsements of "good government" groups and most of the state's newspapers. The New Orleans Times-Picayune did not "endorse" Baker, however, but "recommended" his idea of abolishing the office.

Baker polled 175,017 votes in the nonpartisan blanket primary, just enough to enter the 1979 general election against Jerry Fowler, who had been a former professional football player and a former educator. Baker and Republican gubernatorial candidate David C. Treen, then of Jefferson Parish, were the first Louisiana Republicans to win statewide general election slots since the implementation of the jungle primary law in 1975. (The law did not take effect for congressional elections until 1978, and it ended for those elections in 2008.)

In the second round of balloting, Fowler polled 762,324 votes (62.8 percent) to Baker's 452,189 (37.2 percent). Baker won 68.1 percent in his own Franklin Parish, which Treen lost to the Democrat Louis Lambert of Baton Rouge. Baker won 55.8 percent and 51.2 percent in his neighboring Richland and Ouachita parishes, respectively. He polled 49.1 percent in Caddo Parish (Shreveport) and ran nearly as well in Calcasieu Parish (Lake Charles), where he had the support of former state Representative and state Senator Robert G. "Bob" Jones, the stockbroker son of former Governor Sam Houston Jones.

Like his father, Jerry Fowler was also elected commissioner five times: 1979, 1983, 1987, 1991, and 1995. In 1999, however, he finished in third place in the primary after bribery allegations surfaced. He would later serve a prison sentence. The post was then won by the only Republican who ever held it, Suzanne Haik Terrell.

In 2004, more than four decades after Long's death, the elections division was hence returned to its original administrative home. Baker never received political credit for his "good government" proposal from 1979. Instead, it was left to Commissioner Terrell to implement Baker's longstanding proposal.