Our View: A new look at Senate race

• Published: Oct 6, 2008 - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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Against the backdrop of hurricanes Gustav and Ike, Wall Street and Obama-McCain, Louisiana probably hasn’t paid much attention to this year’s election for the U.S. Senate.

That will change today, when the first of four scheduled debates between incumbent Democrat Mary Landrieu and her Republican challenger, John N. Kennedy, takes place at the Press Club of Baton Rouge.

For those who have paid some attention to the campaign, it’s been a flash of increasingly vitriolic television commercials. The two routinely have characterized each other as corrupt and incompetent, to use some of the nicer language.

Those who haven’t been paying attention so far have been the lucky voters, indeed.

Whatever the two candidates have in mind for their performances at today’s Press Club and subsequent forums before the Nov. 4 election, we pray for something better and more substantive than the degrading series of television ads and Internet attacks that we’ve seen so far.

For one thing, both candidates bring more to the table that just snarkiness.

We’ve applauded some of the things Landrieu, herself a former state treasurer, has done in her two terms in the Senate. Despite Kennedy’s hysterical attacks on the “liberal” Democrat, she is among the most conservative members of her caucus and has been an outspoken proponent of more offshore drilling. We’ve wondered at Kennedy’s trying to portray her as anti-drilling, a distortion of the record.

Landrieu’s campaign has been all too willing to respond in kind. Kennedy’s party switch — he became a Republican last year — has provided rich fodder for accusations of flip-flopping by the treasurer. That’s not too far out of bounds, given Kennedy’s losing 2004 campaign for the Senate in which he was ideologically quite far from the Reagan Republican he now runs as.

Landrieu ads have taken to portraying Kennedy as an Edwin Edwardsesque state official enjoying lavish perks from questionable sources, such as the controversial Louisiana Citizens Property Insurance Corp. board. This is just not the case, either. Because Kennedy was on that board, he’s tarred with excesses of others. He spoke against some of those problems. Landrieu has to do better than this for research on attack ads.

We’ve applauded some of Kennedy’s high-profile battles in the State Bond Commission, where the treasurer serves as chairman. He’s taken on powerful politicos by opposing questionable schemes. That’s served taxpayers well.

As the challenger, Kennedy has the harder task in the campaign. He has to make a case that the incumbent Landrieu should be replaced. While voters are going to be paying more attention in the weeks remaining before Nov. 4, we don’t know how much of that case has been made by a shotgun barrage of attack ads.

Would it be too much to ask that candidates stick with fundamental issues in their debates?