Love & Passion Quote by Edwin W. Edwards

Edwin W. Edwards delivers this line like a backroom punchline, but it’s also a thesis statement about the political culture that kept him viable. The shock value isn’t accidental: he reaches for the most socially radioactive images available in his milieu - necrophilia and homosexuality - to set the outer boundary of what his voters would deem disqualifying. Everything short of that, he implies, is survivable. It’s gallows humor as electoral math.

The intent is twofold. First, it’s a swaggering reassurance to supporters and donors: the coalition is solid, the machine is intact, the usual scandals won’t stick. Second, it’s a preemptive reframing of corruption allegations as mere noise. By elevating the threshold to grotesque extremes, Edwards shrinks every other accusation into the category of tolerable vice, the kind politics has always metabolized.

The subtext is uglier than the joke’s rhythm suggests. The “dead girl” invokes a universal horror; the “live boy” banks on the period’s casual homophobia, treating queerness not as identity but as scandal prop. That choice is a tell: Edwards understood not just that voters would forgive graft, but exactly which taboos they wouldn’t.

Context matters: Edwards, the charismatic Louisiana governor later convicted on federal racketeering charges, came out of a state where patronage networks, personality politics, and a certain performative cynicism were features, not bugs. The line works because it flatters the audience’s self-image as street-smart realists while quietly admitting the system’s moral bargain: competence, kinship, and favors outweigh ethics, until the story becomes too lurid to laugh off.