Good Ol' Fashioned Cajun Showdown

GOP Sen. David "Diaper Dandy" Vitter looked like he was on Big Easy Street heading for another six years as Senator...until a last minute primary challenger popped up late Friday night in the Louisiana race.  Suddenly, Vitter's about to find himself under assault from his own party's Teabagger flank.

Meet Chet Traylor, a former Louisiana Supreme Court Justice well-connected in Louisiana Republican political and business circles circles, who surprised everyone this afternoon by qualifying at the witching hour to challenge Vitter.

Vitter has plenty of money in the bank and, with just weeks to go, time on his side. But Traylor could catch up quickly.

Traylor was elected to the court on the strength of support from the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry, which suggests that Vitter might have lost the support of the business community (at least over the course of the next several weeks until the primary).

And, in the meantime, Traylor will make Vitter spend money he had planned to save, and nudge him off his anti-Obama message, or at least distract him from it. Traylor appeared Friday evening with Roy Fletcher, a high-powered GOP consultant whose work helped propel Mike Foster to victory in the 1995 gubernatorial race.

Traylor was the very conservative justice who once wrote in an opinion upholding a Louisiana sodomy law that "any claim that private sexual conduct between consenting adults is constitutionally insulated from state proscription is unsupportable," so you can bet that he'll blast the already conservative Vitter from the right, and draw blood over Vitter's high-profile scandals. 

We'll see how this works out, but odds are that Vitter will have to take Traylor's challenge seriously.  The bad news is this could put somebody even further to the right in the Senate, but that could make things easier for Democrat Charlie Melancon.