Yellow Jacket still a yellow dog

By David Ball
The Port Arthur News

PORT ARTHUR April 18, 2008 09:46 pm

— Raymond Strother built a career as a political consultant, including working with Bill Clinton. Not bad for a boy who lived on Sabine Avenue in Port Arthur.
Strother, however, left Port Arthur as a young man and didn’t return for a number of years. He has since made several trips back to his hometown to enjoy old acquaintances. In fact, he was in town this week to celebrate his 50th class reunion with classmates.
“I had an early rejection of Port Arthur as many young people do finding their way, leaving the old life behind me” he said. “Old classmates like Mickey Walker, Dennis Dorman and Charles Wilkerson invited me to go to the beach for a delightful time. I was inducted to the Museum of the Gulf Coast about the same time. It was the first time for me here in 30 years. I have been here several times since then.”
After leaving Port Arthur in 1958, Strother hitchhiked to Natchitoches, La. to Northwestern State University on a track scholarship. His adviser told him he was a pretty good writer, and since he was an athlete, he should become a sportswriter, so he majored in journalism.
Strother said he was a liberal democrat and the son of a union member, so he and a friend made signs and picketed the ultra-conservative John Birch Society on campus. The university president disapproved of the protest and told him to leave. He spent a total of three-and-a-half semesters at Northwestern State.
He next enrolled in to LSU and became the editor of the daily campus newspaper. From there, he became a reporter and photographer for the Associated Press. His next step, however, was politics.
“John McKeithem was running for governor (of Louisiana) and he was in fifth place at the time and I thought he had no chance of winning. He told me if he won, I would become his speech writer. He got elected and I got a call about a week later asking me, ‘Are you ready to go to work?’ I was making about $500 a month at the AP and he would pay me $650 a month,” Strother said.
As a new governor, McKeithem wanted Strother to help him remove some older state legislators resistant to his policies, so they ran campaigns against them. In 1967, Strother launched his political advertising agency in Louisiana and worked in Texas, Arkansas and Mississippi. He moved to Washington, D.C. in 1980. He would work for Sen. Gary Hart’s presidential campaign and Clinton’s gubernatorial campaigns in Arkansas and Texas Sen. Lloyd Bentsen.
“Back then, the governor had to run for re-election every two years. I worked for Bill Clinton in 1984, 1986, 1988 and 1990 and get him ready to run for the presidency,” he said. It was during this time Strother’s well known political consultants James Carville and Dick Morris worked for Strother.
Hillary Clinton then took over the campaign and fired Strother and his staff and replaced them with her own people who would answer to her. The stings of those events still do not sit well with Strother.
“I’m an (Barack) Obama supporter and that’s all I have to say about that,” Strother said.
Strother believes his profession is slow to change.
“Campaigns are seen as a boxing match. Hillary is a puncher of the old school and Obama is trying to stay above the fray and run a more civil campaign until he started counter-punching and his numbers started going down. The American public has changed,” he said. “People yearn for strong leaders. (John) McCain is a strong man. I’m a liberal democrat; not a progressive. A progressive is someone who is apologizing for being a liberal. But I’m an admirer of the man. I can’t damn the man. Obama is on his own course, but with a McCain presidency, the country would be okay. The older I get the more objective I get.”

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