Stanley R. Tiner - Tiner's Own Campaign

Tiner's Own Campaign

Tiner himself ran for the U.S. House in a special election held on March 8, 1988, the same day as the presidential primaries. The opening developed when Roemer vacated his Fourth Congressional District seat to become governor. Roemer endorsed Tiner as his preferred successor.

In his statement of candidacy, Tiner declared that people were looking for a "non-politician" to serve in Congress. He continued:

I am not going to follow the old rules. Rather I'm going to do everything in my power to bring change to this state, and I am willing to risk my fortune and my future in behalf of this ideal. ... The politics of our state is corrupted by far too much money. ... I will neither collect money from political action committees nor will I pay out money to political organizations in order to receive endorsements or election day campaign favors."

With his aberrant approach to Louisiana politics, the Democrat Tiner ran third with 19,567 votes (16 percent). In the runoff election held in April between Republican Jim McCrery, a former aide to Roemer, and Democrat Foster Campbell, then a state senator and later a member of the Louisiana Public Service Commission and a 2007 gubernatorial candidate. Tiner trailed Campbell, a self-styled "populist" by 4,653 ballots and was hence eliminated from the second round of balloting. Tiner finished second to McCrery in Caddo Parish and third to Campbell and McCrery in both Bossier and Webster parishes. McCrery then prevailed with 50.2 percent of the vote the following month in a runoff election with Campbell and held the seat until his retirement in January 2009.

Some had wondered if Tiner's liberal newspaper editorials had cost him potential votes in the congressional race. Tiner said that he had not expected his editorials to become a campaign issue. When the editorials became part of the campaign, Tiner called himself "a conservative with a heart", a designation like what George W. Bush would late dub as "compassionate conservatism". When Tiner was questioned about a change in his position to support navigation of the Red River and Amerian aid to the Contras in Nicaragua, he said that the previous opposition to both proposals came from the Shreveport Journal editorial board, not himself: "The Shreveport Journal is not running for Congress. ... I'm coming out from behind the printing press ... two years from now the people will be able to see what I am."

One of Tiner's controversial editorials ran in 1987, when he had publicly praised David O. Connelly (born ca. 1952), a native of Ohio and the arts critic of the The Shreveport Journal for having declared Connelly's homosexuality in a newspaper column at a time before such disclosures became common. Tiner added that he could recall no other "person of standing" making such a declaration in Shreveport, which he noted in 1865 had briefly been the last capital of the Confederate States of America and hence a symbol of southern conservatism. Tiner said that Connelly's declaration could be helpful in fostering awareness of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome.