By Kevin McGill

The Associated Press

NEW ORLEANS - It was all so much more fun to watch eight years ago.

Merciless attack ads. Plenty of rhetorical punches and counter-punches. Mike Foster, a largely unknown state senator, making a meteoric rise by switching parties and donning a welding hat. Buddy Roemer, a former governor, seeing his dreams of a comeback being dashed, thanks largely to television ads paid for by Jack Kent, a hazardous waste handler with money and a grudge leftover from his regulatory battles with the Roemer administration.

Edwin W. Edwards was leaving the governor's office but remained a factor in spite of himself. In the last hectic days of campaigning, Roemer tried to link Foster to Edwards while then-state treasurer Mary Landrieu tried to link both Roemer and Foster to the scandal-tinged Edwards.

Who would have believed that eight years later, Edwards would be in prison and candidates for governor would be so polite to each other that you have to count the mosquitoes outside to make sure you're still in Louisiana?

True, this race presents something of a challenge: find specific remedies for what ails the state among the platforms. About the only one that comes to mind is Buddy Leach's call for an oil processing tax - an idea routinely beaten down by the Legislature for two decades.

With the entertainment factor diminished, the only fun is in the handicapping. It looks like it may be a bit easier this time around than it was eight years ago, based on three polls made public last week.

In 1995, as in 2003, there were six or seven credible candidates with no incumbent in the field.

Polls had accurately documented Foster's unexpected rise and indicated, accurately, that he would place first. But who would his runoff opponent be?

Less than a week before the election, Foster's own poll showed him with 21 percent and Roemer, who had led during much of the campaign, with 17 percent. Landrieu, at 15 percent, was in a statistical tie with Roemer. Congressman Cleo Fields was fourth with a mere 9 percent.

But, pollster David Walker noted at the time, the undecided vote totaled 23 percent. He estimated about a third of the undecideds were black. Fields, as the only black candidate in the race stood a good chance of capturing that vote and vaulting into the runoff.

A few days later - three days before the election - came a Mason Dixon Opinion Research poll for a group of television stations. Foster had 21 percent, followed by Roemer at 18; Landrieu, 16; Fields, 12. With the margin of error factored in, Fields still appeared at to be firmly in fourth place. But undecideds numbered 16 percent and Loyola University political analyst Ed Renwick noted then that black voters are often more likely to say they are undecided.

The final tally on election night:

-Mike Foster 383,301 votes - 26 percent

-Cleo Fields 279,219 - 19 percent

Landrieu was third; Roemer, fourth.

Three polls recently indicated Saturday's election likely will result in a Nov. 15 runoff between Republican Bobby Jindal, the former state and federal health official, and Democrat Kathleen Blanco, the lieutenant governor.

Three other Democrats - former state Senate president Randy Ewing, Attorney General Richard Ieyoub and former Congressman Claude "Buddy' Leach- have been campaigning hard and spending their own or their supporters' money in hopes of making the runoff.

Arguably, those polls gave them at least a few glimmers of hope.

Undecideds ran anywhere from 17 percent to 23 percent in those polls, which had sample sizes ranging from 600 to 800 and margins for error from 4.1 percentage points to 3.5 percentage points.

But the polls appear to hold the best news for Jindal, assuming he holds on to his right-of-center base, and Blanco.

While Ewing showed some improvement in one poll, there is still no real evidence that his campaign has caught fire. Meanwhile, with no black candidate among the contenders, Leach and Ieyoub appear to be grappling for and dividing the black vote that broke for Fields, eight years ago.

--- Kevin McGill is a reporter for The Associated Press.