While I was preparing today's classic-actress entry for the Cahiers du Cinema thread (
https://www.alternatehistory.com/fo...cinema-the-classic-movie-buffs-thread.396450/ ), I got to thinking about what if today's subject, B-movie/film noir "bad girl" Cleo Moore:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleo_Moore
had gotten into politics. She and her family had strong connections to the Long dynasty, and her parents were heavy-hitter activists in the Louisiana Democratic Party in the Huey Long era - in fact, Cleo herself was briefly married to the Kingfish's youngest son, Palmer. She joked at one time that she was thinking about running for governor of Louisiana, so that got me thinking; what if she decided to get serious about it, and ended up possibly being a well-enough-known, highly-regarded-enough national Democratic figure to be able to make at least a serious run for the Presidency, say, in 1992? (She was born only five months after George H. W. Bush, so she'd have been 68 in that year, when he ran for reelection OTL.)
I put up several posts in the Politiyanks thread about the idea, and the scenario I like best so far, more or less, has her, impelled by Ronald Reagan's example and with the encouragement of the Long family (e.g., Senator Russell Long) and the "pro-Long" faction in Louisiana Democratic politics generally, running for the governorship of Louisiana in 1971-72. In my scenario, she'd overcome initial skepticism about a "blonde B-movie bombshell from Baton Rouge" (mmmm, maybe I should incorporate that into the title if this does go to a full TL

) wanting to win elective office to defeat Edwin Edwards and Bennett Johnston in the primaries, then beat David Treen in the general, does well enough to win election again in 1975, then move on up to the Senate in 1978 when Allen Ellender, who due to butterflies lives longer than OTL, either dies or retires. With her two decades' track record in Baton Rouge and Washington, she'd probably be one of the best-known Democrats nationwide by 1990. Very little appears to be recorded about her political opinions online, so she's pretty much a clean slate politically. For the purposes of the current exercise, I think it likely that she'd be associated with the "Blue Dog" moderate/conservative Democratic faction in Congress and be a founding member of the Democratic Leadership Council or its TTL analogue in 1985. One idea I had was that she might take a cameo role (maybe it even metastasizes into a full-on supporting role) in 1989's
Steel Magnolias, which is set in her state, and the favorable notice she gets therefrom helps fire her up to take the big plunge in 1992.
I think the idea is worth pursuing, if not here in post-1900 then at any rate in the Writer's Forum, but I'd need assistance from people knowledgable about 1960's-1980's Louisiana politics to help pull it off. P.S. If you think this scenario is silly, just remember that a lot of people in Hollywood (and elsewhere) thought exactly the same thing about Reagan when he decided to run for the governorship of California in 1966. Cf. Jack Warner's famous crack when he heard about it: "No, no, no, you've got it backwards.
Jimmy Stewart for governor,
Ronald Reagan for best friend."