It wasn’t all that long ago that the political class in Baton Rouge, Louisiana went around talking about their town as “America’s next great city.” And at the time, that wasn’t a ridiculous boast to make. The city, after all, had — still has — a lot going for it. It’s located on the Mississippi River, a little more than 100 miles from the river’s mouth, and as a result Baton Rouge’s port is one of America’s 15 largest by tonnage. Baton Rouge is located along I-10, just 30 minutes from I-55 to the east and 45 minutes from I-49 to the west, giving it excellent, if not-all-that-well-maintained, highway connections. It boasts one of only a handful of rail bridges over the Mississippi River. Baton Rouge is the home of Louisiana State University, a major research center and a flagship university with excellent programs in business, engineering, and other hard-science disciplines. The coach now faces a monumental challenge. He’s got to turn a failing city around, and he’ll have to do it within the next four years. And it’s one of the world’s largest petrochemical hubs, with a massive ExxonMobil oil refinery just north of downtown and installations of many of the major petrochemical players up and down the river to provide huge numbers of middle-class jobs one doesn’t need a college degree to perform. There’s a nascent, if not especially significant, tech sector. State government is in Baton Rouge to provide another employment base. The southern part of the city is relatively wealthy, with average household incomes not far from six figures. At the turn of the century, “America’s next great city” wasn’t a fantasy. But Baton Rouge has lost two decades since, and nobody talks about the place as the next great anything anymore. Not until, perhaps, Saturday night. The Winning Coach Because for the first time since 2004, Baton Rouge just elected a Republican mayor. Sid Edwards, a high school football coach who had never run for anything before and was attacked by his opponents for not bothering to vote in the eight years prior to the election, knocked out the two-term incumbent Democrat Sharon Broome by a 54-46 count in one of the most shocking election results in Louisiana (and maybe even American) history. Edwards didn’t have any money. He threw his campaign together after making a surprising entry into the race on the final day of qualifying. None of Baton Rouge’s Republican politicians had the courage to enter; the conventional wisdom was that it was a suicide mission. Four years before, a popular state representative from wealthy South Baton Rouge named Steve Carter ran against Broome and was clobbered, 57-43. Broome beat state senator Bodi White by just under 4,000 votes in 2016. In the three elections prior to that, Broome’s fellow Democrat Kip Holden skunked Republican opponents by 10 points or more. East Baton Rouge Parish, which has a consolidated city-parish form of government although there are a handful of separate incorporated cities within the parish (we call them parishes; you call them counties), has a Republican elected sheriff, coroner, assessor, and clerk of court, but the perception based on Holden’s and Broome’s success was that Baton Rouge was lost, destined for a slow, yet accelerating death along the lines of a Jackson, Mississippi, St. Louis, Newark, or Detroit. And this year a Democrat politician named Ted James, a former hardcore leftist state representative from the slums of North Baton Rouge who had served as Kamala Harris’ state campaign chairman in 2019, jumped into the race early against Broome. At one point James was thought likely to take over as chairman of the state party but instead left elected office to serve as a regional administrator for the Small Business Association. James developed a campaign against Broome that centered on an appeal to … white Republicans. You can’t win in Baton Rouge, went James’ ultimatum. Your only hope of getting rid of her is to bow down and support me. Give me your money and your support and I’ll end her. James recruited a couple of white Republican politicians, former state representative Scott McKnight and current state representative Paula Davis, to carry that message for him. He focused on an anodyne campaign proclaiming his commitment to do obvious things, such as alleviating traffic congestion and building a mental health facility to help reduce the armies of homeless bums camping at Baton Rouge’s interstate exits. But James’ voting record in the Louisiana legislature marked him as one of the weirdest left-wingers in office, and he’d repeatedly played the race card from the bottom of the deck, once posting a meme equating Trayvon Martin with Emmitt Till on his social media. There weren’t a lot of takers for him during the primary; James came in third with 28 percent, while Broome was second with 31 and Edwards, relying on nothing but sweat equity and grassroots volunteers, placed first with 35 percent. Still, the conventional wisdom went, a Republican can’t win. It was obvious one could, and moreover, Edwards was suited to the task even without political experience. Edwards’ Formula: Character, Cohesion, and Leadership Sid Edwards was the mentor to one of Baton Rouge’s most famous athletes, former Tampa Bay Buccaneers running back Warrick Dunn. Edwards was an assistant coach at Catholic High School when Dunn arrived, and Dunn attributed much of his success to the coach’s efforts at making him believe in himself and showing him how to be a man. When Dunn’s mother, Betty Smothers, a Baton Rouge police officer, was shot dead by criminals attempting to rob a late-night bank ATM, Edwards and his wife did the best they could to help him get through high school and off to Florida State, where he had an All-American career on his way to NFL stardom. It was Dunn’s nomination which later resulted in Edwards, who’d moved on to become a head coach at Redemptorist High School and then to Central High School, being awarded by the NFL as the national high school coach of the year. He’s a legend in his profession in Louisiana, and he’s taken teams made up of working-class and underprivileged kids to the state playoffs time and again not because he’s a brilliant X’s and O’s man but because he stresses character, cohesion, and leadership. Sid Edwards builds winning organizations, and that’s a skill that travels. People understood this, and it made Edwards stand out. James raised and spent a million dollars, but other than establishing himself as an accomplished grifter he convinced no one he was capable of improving on Broome’s performance. And it isn’t hard to do that. I could write a book about what a disaster Sharon Broome has been as Baton Rouge’s mayor, but most of what that book would say is exceedingly familiar to our readers who live in big blue cities. Three things stand out, though, as examples of her abject failure. Regular readers might remember a column I wrote a couple of years ago about the murder of Allie Rice, a beautiful LSU coed slaughtered at a train crossing by a couple of hoodlums, likely as part of a gang initiation. The Allie Rice murder shocked the people of Baton Rouge for several reasons, not the least of which was its racial implications. Despite a reward being offered which ultimately topped $50,000 the police to this day don’t have a single lead in the case. The Fall of Baton Rouge Meanwhile Baton Rouge has become Clownshow Murdertown, ranking dead last out of 182 cities surveyed in public safety. Broome has proposed budget cuts to the city’s police department and the political class has begun advocating merging BRPD with the much more effective East Baton Rouge Sheriff’s Department, which patrols the areas outside the city limits. Also two years ago, Broome attempted to impose a new $40 million annual tax on landowners in the city-parish via a stormwater utility fee, and she told the Baton Rouge Metro Council, seven of the 12 members of which are Republican, that she couldn’t discuss the details of what the fee would cover because it was proposed as a means of bringing the city in compliance with federal mandates, and that the feds had demanded she and her people sign a non-disclosure agreement. This came under scrutiny both by the Metro Council and by Baton Rouge’s congressman Garret Graves, and it was quickly uncovered as a lie. A scandal ensued from which Broome never really recovered. But most important of all was Broome’s near-comic mismanagement of St. George, the newly incorporated city in the suburban south of the parish. Despite a vigorous campaign by the mayor to stop it, the voters in St. George chose to incorporate the new burg in November of 2019, and by law that should have resulted in a mayor and city council being chosen first by gubernatorial appointment and then by an election. Only after that would have followed the transfer of tax receipts from a two-cent sales tax according to Louisiana law. But Broome and her cronies filed suit to invalidate the St. George incorporation, and for the five years that followed those tax receipts weren’t put in escrow but instead spent by Broome’s city-parish government — and not in St. George. The tab is now over $250 million and it grows at nearly $4 million per month, without a single check remitted to St. George despite the Louisiana Supreme Court finally throwing out the lawsuits in June and the city being fully incorporated. Ironically, the other major item on Saturday’s ballot in East Baton Rouge Parish, aside from a handful of state constitutional amendments, was a tax election in St. George to force those revenues out of the city-parish’s coffers going forward. And while voter turnout inside the city of Baton Rouge was a meager 29 percent, it was 44 percent in St. George — giving a giant boost to Edwards and sinking Broome’s political career. The Challenge and the Promise The coach now faces a monumental challenge. He’s got to turn a failing city around, and he’ll have to do it within the next four years. Baton Rouge still has those assets and it can still be America’s next great city, but it needs an economic boom and it needs a thorough housecleaning not just at City Hall but in the institutions of power which have assisted in its decline. We’ll see if his experience in building winning organizations quickly can create the turnaround Baton Rouge needs. But there is reason for hope. While Edwards was winning the mayoral election this fall he was also coaching Istrouma High School, a perennial sad-sack program which hired him two years ago, into the state quarterfinals. Maybe politics isn’t as hard as winning in football. We’ll find out. But pray for us — because if Baton Rouge really can become America’s next great city, there’s hope for urban America after all. READ MORE from Scott McKay: The Old Game Continues Among the Worst GOP Senators Robert Reich’s Ravings Against Musk Are Pure Lunacy The post Hope Returns, Miraculously, To Baton Rouge appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.