Washington Watch for Aug. 31, 2008

• By GERARD SHIELDS
• Advocate Washington bureau
• Published: Aug 31, 2008 - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

• Print
• Email
• Save
• Share

• Del.icio.us
• Digg
• Facebook
• Reddit
• 

Though he is running for Congress and has served the last four years in the state Legislature, state Sen. Don Cravins Jr. said it was an event outside of the political arena that  most shaped his life.

The Lafayette Democrat considered himself a lucky man seven years ago when he was working as an attorney and just had his second child. That’s when his wife, Yvette, suffered a stroke that resulted in a coma.

“My life went from the top of the world to hitting rock bottom,” Cravins said. “Here I was a lawyer and a new father and I thought I lost everything.”

Cravins, a Catholic, spent much time in the hospital chapel before his wife emerged unscathed — on her birthday.

“I was asking for a miracle,” Cravins said. “And I got it.”

So Cravins thinks he has nothing to lose in challenging popular incumbent U.S. Rep. Charles Boustany, R-Lafayette. Cravins was elected to the state House in 2004 and the state Senate in 2007.

He served two years with his father, Don Cravins Sr., who was in the Senate while the junior Cravins was in the House, the first time in Louisiana history that a father and son  served together.

The senior Cravins lost to Boustany in 2004, garnering 25 percent of the vote in a five-candidate general election field. Cravins Jr., 36, thinks his prospects are better.

He has a one-on-one race with Boustany in a district that is slightly more than 50 percent Democrat with Republicans and Independents splitting the rest. It is also a district where one in four voters is African-American — like Cravins.

Like most incumbent challengers, Cravins faces significant hurdles. Though he raised an impressive $186,461 in the last three-month period ending in June, Boustany had $681,120 to spend. And the soft-spoken and mild-mannered Boustany won the last election with 71 percent of the vote.

But Cravins is confident he can get his message out to voters. He recently received the endorsement of the so-called “Blue Dog Democrats” in Congress, a House caucus that promotes pro-gun, anti-abortion and fiscal conservative stances.

Whether national Democrats get behind Cravins remains to be seen. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is already pushing to pick up two Republican Louisiana seats — in Louisiana’s 6th Congressional District and the 4th Congressional District. National backing in Louisiana could be spread too thin to help Cravins.

But he isn’t worried. He believes he will be able to raise enough money to tell voters about his support for the kind of legislation recently passed, such as federal expansion of children’s health insurance, education benefits for veterans and raising the minimum wage.