Peggy Wilson was elected to the city council in 1986 for District A , which includes the Lakeview neighborhood . She defeated the Democrat Joseph V. DiRosa ( 1915-1997 ) , a former at-large council member who had been allied with former Mayor Victor Schiro and narrowly lost the 1978 mayoral election to Ernest Nathan Morial , the first African American in that position . Wilson introduced the referendum which enacted term limits for the city council and mayor with 67 percent voter approval . Herself term-limited in 1994 , Wilson switched to one of the two at-large seats , along with Jim Singleton , an African-American Democrat who served on the council for a total of twenty-four years . In her career in municipal government , Wilson was called the " watchdog " of the city council . She was frequently at odds with the mayors , the city administrators , and her council colleagues but served as council president . She was unseated in the at-large seat in 1998 by Singleton and Eddie L. Sapir , another Democrat . In 1988 , Wilson played an influential role in locating the 1988 Republican National Convention to New Orleans , at which the Bush-Quayle ticket was nominated to run against the Democrat Dukakis-Bentsen slate . In 1991 , Wilson lost a race for Louisiana insurance commissioner , a position vacated earlier in the year by Doug Green , who faced multiple federal corruption charges and landed a long prison sentence . Her principal opponent was James H. " Jim " Brown , originally from Concordia Parish , a former state senator and the Louisiana Secretary of State from 1980 to 1988 . Brown led in the primary with 572,719 votes ( 40 percent ) . Wilson trailed with 435,355 votes ( 30 percent ) . Former Commissioner Sherman A. Bernard , another Democrat , drew 270,749 votes ( 19 percent ) . Two other Democrats and two other Republicans shared the remaining 11 percent of the ballots . In the general election on November 16 , in which Democrat former Governor Edwin Edwards defeated David Duke for the governorship , Brown secured a large victory over Wilson . He polled 1,002,038 ( 60 percent ) to her 674,097 ( 40 percent ) . Wilson lost Orleans Parish by a wide margin but carried the suburban parishes of Jefferson , St. Bernard , and St. Tammany . She outpolled Duke , who was a drag on the other Republican candidates that year , by some three thousand votes though Duke carried more than a dozen mostly smaller parishes in North Louisiana . Brown himself was forced from the insurance position in another scandal in 1992
1988 Republican National Convention
1988 Republican National Convention
Peggy Wilson (Louisiana politician)