By DAN JUNEAU

As this column is being written on the Friday before the Congressional elections, it is obvious many of the contests have become proxy wars for more powerful players.

Control of the House and Senate, and the personal power that comes with it for a handful of the elite in Washington, is making elections in bayous and cornfields sound more like a race for national office than a contest to see who will represent the hometown folk.

President George W. Bush obviously has a lot riding on these elections. While enjoying a slight Republican majority in the House, his political agenda is bottled up by Senate President Tom Daschle and the one-vote Democratic majority in the Senate. That majority came into being not because of an election loss by the GOP, but by the defection of one of their “own,” Jim Jeffords of Vermont, who is now an Independent.

Bush wants his agenda advanced and his judicial appointments confirmed in the Senate. To accomplish that, he must reverse the Democratic majority.

The importance of the Senate elections is obvious to him. In the last two weeks, his campaign schedule on behalf of Republicans almost matches the campaign stops he made at the end of his race for president.

He is obviously tired of being at the mercy of Daschle, and he is doing whatever he can to have one of “his” setting the agenda in the Senate.

But President Bush is not the only player engaging in proxy wars. Democratic chieftains have already proven they will do everything in their power to hold on to the Senate and try to regain majority status in the House.

The Democratic ploy of replacing battered New Jersey incumbent Robert Torricelli with the more appealing former Senator Frank Lautenberg just weeks before the election shows how much they will play hardball to win.

Perhaps no race illustrates the viciousness of the proxy wars as much as the governor’s election in Florida. Democratic Campaign Committee Chairman Terry McCauliffe recently stated the No. 1 objective of the Democrats in the fall elections would be the removal of Jeb Bush from his seat in the state that “stole” the presidential election from Al Gore. McCauliffe’s words served as great locker-room material for the Republicans.

The President has made many forays into Florida since that challenge, and the state party apparatus has redoubled fund-raising and “get out the vote” efforts. The result has been a recent surge in the polls for the president’s brother, a factor that must be very satisfying to George W. Bush.

This proxy war, for one, is not going the way the Democrats planned.

The South Dakota Senate race is another classic proxy war. President Bush and Vice President Cheney practically handpicked the Republican candidate, Congressman John Thune, to run against the Democratic incumbent, Tim Johnson.

South Dakota is Daschle’s home turf, so he is not sitting idly by as this heated campaign comes to a close. In a real sense, the race is more of a contest between George Bush and Daschle than it is between Thune and Johnson.

Polls indicate it is a toss-up, and this race may well decide if Daschle keeps the Senate presidency or turns the gavel back over to Republican Trent Lott of Mississippi.

The 2002 Congressional elections are, in general, not very exciting. There is little interest in most of the races, and turnout is predicted to approach historic low levels. But these elections are anything but boring to the politicos whose positions of power and political futures hinge on what happens on the bayous and in the cornfields on Nov. 5.

DAN JUNEAU is the president of the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry.