Foster Lonnie Campbell Jr. (born January 6, 1947) is an American politician and member of the Democratic Party from the U.S. state of Louisiana.
[4] Campbell has six children from his first wife, Paula Wright, from whom he is divorced: Zach, Peter, Kate, Nicholas, Mary Claire, and Sarah Elizabeth.
During his Senate service, Campbell was often allied with Governor Edwin Washington Edwards and chaired the Select Committee on Consumer Affairs.
In hopes of enticing labor-intensive industries to relocate to Louisiana, Campbell proposed to earmark $30 million from the oil and natural gas surplus trust fund.
Under the law which Treen accepted after much wrangling, 20 percent of the membership must take part in any election in regard to enabling PSC jurisdiction over a utility company.
As a former teacher, Campbell proposed that the Bossier Parish school system share in tax revenue from the Louisiana Downs horse racetrack.
[11] Three years later, Nunez removed Campbell from the chairmanship of a committee established to consider a proposed oil and natural gas processing tax on foreign energy imports.
Democrat (later Republican) Garland Mack Garrett, an oil company owner from Springhill born in 1942,[13] trailed with 3,400 votes (21.5 percent).
He chastised the governor for refusal to keep schools open during the summer of 1996 and for other extended hours on the grounds that remediation services were needed in light of poor test scores for fourth graders.
[20] In 1988, Campbell narrowly lost the congressional race to a former Roemer aide, Republican Jim McCrery, a native and resident of Shreveport who was reared in Leesville.
Roemer, however, was not supporting McCrery, but instead the Democrat Stanley R. Tiner, the former editor of the since defunct Shreveport Journal, a native of Webster Parish, and United States Marine veteran of the Vietnam War.
[21] During that special election campaign, triggered by Roemer's resignation to become governor, Campbell was seriously injured in a single vehicle car crash when he drove the wrong way down an unfinished, unopened section of Interstate 49 near Natchitoches.
(McCrery retired in January 2009 and was succeeded by the Republican John C. Fleming, a physician and businessman from Minden, who held the seat for eight years.)
In 1984, Campbell considered running for the Public Service Commission when the two-term incumbent, Edward Kennon of Minden, stepped down, but he did not seek the position at that time.
He narrowly unseated incumbent Donald Lynn "Don" Owen, a native Oklahoman and a former news anchorman for KSLA-TV, the CBS affiliate in Shreveport.
[2] In November 2006, Campbell informed the press that he was considering challenging incumbent Governor Kathleen Blanco, a fellow Democrat, in the 2007 primary election.
The next day, in apparent response to opinion polls showing that she would be unlikely to win re-election over Jindal, whom she had defeated in 2003, Blanco announced that she would not seek a second term as governor.
On April 26, another gubernatorial contender, Walter Boasso, the Republican state senator from St. Bernard Parish in south Louisiana, announced that he was returning to the Democratic Party.