Obama's New Southern Strategy: Send Biden

August 28, 2008

No matter how much I hooted and mooed when Bill Clinton slithered on stage last night to nourish his ego afresh, I couldn't help cracking a smile of recognition when Bubba brought out his slowest drawl to declare, "I looove Joe Biden."

I have been hearing that exact same phrase, drawn out just the same way, from Southern delegates all week when I asked them about Obama's number two. "Oh, we looove Joe Biden," they say, almost always adding that they love him because he just comes on out and says it, consequences be damned. It's been a while since anybody in Dixie was saying such things about a Democrat on the ticket. And it counts as just about the highest compliment a politician can get down there.

Biden's big speech was hardly a classic from start to finish. But what a start: His son Beau (the new heartthrob of the Democratic set--at least my set) got the waterworks going, and Biden kept it flowing for a good while--until that awful "More of the Same" refrain came a-clunking, with the Democrats holding signs bearing the wretched phrase, waving them on cue as if they were auditioning for the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics. I almost like Biden better for fumbling those pedestrian lines.

Bubbas for Barack

August 27, 2008

I was feeling a mite low yesterday afternoon, heading to Day Two of Denver, bumping along amid a sea of my fellow reporters (and one or two actual Democrats -- there are some here) through a scorching afternoon along the hellish, roped-off, cement stretch of cattle path cut through downtown Denver to the Branding Center where the artists once known as the people's party had held forth with distressing mutedness on Day One.

And then, just about thirty yards short of the first of many points at which DNCC passes are scowlingly scrutinized, setting apart The Invited from The Masses, I beheld a thing of great joy: Two older, white, baseball-cap-wearing, fellows, each holding one end of a red, white and blue banner that proclaimed: "Rednecks For Obama."

Les Spencer and his friend, Tony Veissman (apologies for a possible misspelling) came all the way out from Rolla, Missouri -- the very sweet spot of America, if you look at it from a certain angle. "The population of the United States is almost a bull's eye for Rolla," Spencer says. "Actually, the last time I heard it was a steel mill about nineteen or twenty miles Southeast of us."

Working the South

August 26, 2008

Roaming the Southern delegations on Monday and talking with my homefolk, I heard tell a few times that former Senator Gary Hart was running around on the first convention day spouting more of his gibberish about how Democrats must look West for new votes and abandon the South. So for the sake of my sanity, I had to seek out somebody sensible on the subject (is that enough sibilance for you?) -- a Yankee who's taken the time and trouble to understand the South. Bruce Raynor, general president of UNITE HERE, has organized in Dixie since the early 1970s (y'all remember Norma Rae, from his J.P. Stevens campaign), and he's seen firsthand part of the devastation left in the region by the Democrats' steady withdrawal from the South from Nixon forward.

"There's no question that it made the South more conservative, the Democrats not contesting the South," Raynor says. "You know, when I came to Georgia in the 1980s, overwhelmingly the Georgia congressional delegation was Democratic, the governor was Democratic, and the legislature was Democratic. And they were not right-wing Democrats. Some of them were very progressive. I think what happened is when the Republicans played their race card in the South, the Democrats abandoned the South. And as a result, the South became more and more conservative because the Democrats were not contesting the South. That was and is a terrible mistake."

Organized labor compounded that mistake. "The other thing that happened is that unions pulled out of the South, basically concluding you could not win," Raynor says. "That was not our experience. In the '80s and '90s, unions started putting their resources into places that were easier. So, the result is that half the union membership in America is concentrated in six states. That's not a good situation, because it really corrals our effect on American society."

Virginia Dems--And Republicans--Make Obama's Case

February 12, 2008

It's hard to know where the good news ends for Barack Obama as results pile in from the Potomac. There was no question that Obama would dominate in DC and Maryland. But his overwhelming romp in Virginia--one of a handful of formerly "red" states that are toss-ups for 2008--made the best case yet that the Illinois senator just might live up to his promise of blasting the red-blue electoral map to smithereens come November.

Meanwhile, the surprising Republican results in Virginia, where Mike Huckabee gave John McCain a scare, bolstered Obama's argument just as effectively. It wasn't a shock that McCain fared poorly among right-wing Christians and the sorts of NASCAR Republicans who've been guffawing happily this week over the revelation that the genial theocrat from Arkansas fried squirrel in a popcorn popper during his heck-raising college days. But the results underscored an undercurrent that defies conventional wisdom: McCain's shakiness among the very voters--suburban independents--who are supposed to be his ace in the hole. While Obama was winning over all kinds of Virginians he was not supposed to have a prayer with, McCain was losing some of those he absolutely has to have. And losing them in a state that he has to carry to have any chance of becoming President.

Like Missouri and Colorado, both of which Obama won last week, Virginia can make a valid case for being one of the "next Ohios" of 2008--the next ideologically mixed, demographically topsy-turvy state where Republicans will have to fight mighty hard to defend their turf. With the influx of non-native professional types and Hispanic immigrants into Northern Virginia in recent decades, the Old Dominion has become a thoroughly Middle American state of the 21st century in terms of its politics--a lively mash-up of conservative Christians, Blue State liberals, rural populists and swelling ranks of independents (more than one-third of Virginians no longer register D or R). It's American politics in miniature And that is what makes the results--on both sides--so revealing.

The South's Obama Effect

February 6, 2008

When Barack Obama came a-cropper in New Hampshire after looking sweet in the polls, suspicions were immediately stirred that the dreaded "Bradley effect" had kicked in. Named after former Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, who lost a big edge for California governor in 1982 on the final day, the "effect" is said to kick in for white voters who tell pollsters they plan to vote for black candidates--and then suffer a kind of racial panic when they're actually hoisting their ballot-punchers on Election Day. Nowhere was the "effect" more pronounced through the years than in Dixie--surprise!--where Virginia Governor Doug Wilder and US Senate candidates Harvey Gantt in North Carolina and Ron Kirk in Texas fell victim to the syndrome, and also to the tendency of white voting turnout to swell when black candidates are on the ballot, outnumbering the increases in black votes.   Exit polls eventually quelled the "Bradley effect" rumors in New Hampshire; Obama ended up with more of the white working-class vote on primary day than he'd gotten in the polls. And in the Southern primaries on Tsunami Tuesday, the "effect" was even more emphatically absent. Adding to his landslide in South Carolina, Obama trounced Hillary Clinton in Georgia and Alabama, and appears to have very narrowly won the border state of Missouri, the ultimate "purple state," where Clinton led in recent weeks by healthy margins.

The Alabama victory was unexpected, particularly because the state's most powerful black political organization had endorsed Clinton months ago. But Artur Davis, the state's own rising "post-racial" member of Congress, bucked them and got behind Obama early, spurring a surge of enthusiasm among black voters similar to Obama's overtaking of Clinton in South Carolina.   Clinton split the South on Tuesday, winning her semi-home state of Arkansas, along with Tennessee and Oklahoma. But in every case except Tennessee, where he lost by the expected 13 points, Obama's Southern vote was higher than his standing in the polls--inverting the Bradley effect. He scored 15 percent better than predicted in Alabama; seven percent higher than Missouri polls were showing; eleven points better than he'd polled in Georgia. In Georgia, Obama won 43 percent of white votes--almost double the share he captured in South Carolina.   That certainly doesn't mean that white Southerners--or the rest of white Americans--have somehow gone colorblind overnight. (If only.) The ultimate test of white voters' ability to look past race might come next November, when Obama--if he's the nominee--is likely to make a run at states like Georgia, where Clinton would almost certainly not even attempt to campaign. But Obama's Southern support--coupled with his impressive white vote in red states in the Midwest and Interior West--does indicate that one longtime manifestation of racialized voting just might be disappearing. And it's one more reason to believe that, unlikely as it once would have seemed, Barack Obama is the Democrat with the best chance to break through in Middle America and win the White House with a genuine mandate. Maybe we'll someday call that the Obama Effect. 

Dawn in South Carolina

January 26, 2008

When I was growing up in North Carolina, our neighbor South Carolina played an important role in our lives--giving us something to look down on. We fell for too many racist demagogues through the years (y'all remember Jesse Helms?), but we weren't always run by them. We didn't have no rebel flag flying over our statehouse. We elected a racially moderate governor at the height of the civil-rights backlash in 1960. It was something to say for ourselves, and we appreciated South Carolina's making us look relatively all right.

After Saturday's primary, this Tar Heel can do nothing but offer a big, deep bow to the Democrats of South Carolina. Not because I was particularly rooting for Barack Obama over John Edwards--but because of these fine folks' rejection of the Clintons' gutter politics. The majority of white Democrats, in a state where the Democratic Party was so long the organized mob enforcing Jim Crow, repelled the Clinton campaign's unspeakably vile attempt to paint Barack Obama as some kind of coke-dealing, slumlord-pimping cousin of Al Sharpton--and their equally vile assumption that Deep South whites, whether they're Democratic or Republican, can be manipulated by coded racial divisiveness in 2008 the way they were in 1968. Or, to add a bit more vileness to the mix, their assumption that they could make South Carolina blacks believe that one of their own would be "unelectable" by definition.

The overwhelming majority of South Carolina blacks rejected Senator Clinton in the most profound way: after first supporting her. She had a two-to-one lead on Obama among black South Carolinians at mid-campaign. Whites didn't reject her nearly so soundly--about one-quarter of them voted for Obama, with the others pretty well split between Clinton and John Edwards. But half of under-30 white voters--and there were a ton of them--went for Obama.

McCain's Southern Revival

January 19, 2008

If South Carolina's Democratic contest next Saturday is the closest it gets to a "black primary," today's Republican face-off was as near as we'll come (thank God) to an evangelical primary. Six of ten voters who came out on an unusually wintry day in the Palmetto State identified as evangelical Christians, according to one exit poll. Which only makes it all the more remarkable--or depressing, depending on your perspective--that this was the place where Arizona Senator John McCain, that former bogeyman of the Southern religious right who was derailed by the religious right here in 2000, dealt a serious blow to the presidential aspirations of a deviously charming Baptist preacher from Arkansas.

Mike Huckabee tried to win South Carolina with a blue-collar spin on the tried-and-true Southern strategy formula that successful Republicans have used in Dixie from Nixon onward. While relying on the organizational experience of the state's evangelical network to turn out his base, Huckabee also gunned for the NASCAR vote, stumping with wrestling legend Ric "Nature Boy" Flair in barbecue joints; holding meet-and-greet-and-shoots at gun clubs; and dishing up regular-fella populist rhetoric like his quip in Columbia on Friday that, "in many ways, I'm like a lot of people in the United States: I'm a guy over 50 looking for a job." Huckabee's economic populism, of course, was a rhetorical leap beyond where Republican faux-populism has traditionally dared to go, empathizing with folks "who are living from one paycheck to the next, who are literally one paycheck from not being able to pay the rent, one paycheck from not being able to pay for their kid who falls in the playground and breaks his arm, one paycheck from not being able to put gas in the truck."

With his turn toward border-warrior, Huckabee also had South Carolina's growing anti-immigration movement behind him against "Mr. Amnesty" McCain. Buddy Witherspoon, a right-wing Republican challenging Senator Lindsey Graham, McCain's immigration ally, aired a commercial as the primary crept close that featured a rapid-fire montage of Hispanic immigrants and border scenes in stark black and white, with Spanish-speaking voices overlapping in what was clearly intended to suggest a contemporary version of Babel. A black screen then fills up with military-stencil-style white letters: ENOUGH IS ENOUGH.

The GOP's Beautiful Chaos

January 15, 2008

In his surpassingly disengenuous campign for president, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney has borne only the most superficial resemblance to his dad, George, the late and former governor of Michigan--much the same chiseled, coldly handsome visage, but starkly different political trajectories. Even if he didn't actually march with Martin Luther King, George Romney was the kind of old-style Republican who strongly backed civil rights, became an opponent of Vietnam, and got axed as Nixon's HUD Secretary for pushing to integrate the suburbs.

  Maybe Mitt, like George W. Bush, has a daddy thing--he's run his campaign, much as Bush has run his presidency, as though the only thing he had to learn from his father were negative lessons. George W. thought his father didn't push hard enough on Iraq and didn't get mean enough to win re-election and was bonkers to raise taxes, and by God, he didn't make those mistakes. Mitt saw his father tarred as a weirdo when he sought the 1968 nomintion and--at a time when he was the favorite for the nomination--famously told a TV station, "When I came back from Viet Nam [in November 1965], I'd just had the greatest brainwashing that anybody can get," and that he no longer supported the war.

  Mitt's campaign has run in the opposite direction: hard right. But until Michigan, his arch-conservative makeover--from the fellow who promised to out-gay Teddy Kennedy to the terror-warrior growling about doubling the size of Guantanamo--hadn't been convincing enough to help him carry a primary. But Romney managed to convert his familiar name into a victory tonight that (at least temporarily) saved his candidacy--and plunged the already muddled GOP race into a kind of beautiful chaos. Beautiful, that is, for Democrats.   The oddest thing about Romney's win is that it came in a state in economic crisis--a place that you'd have expected to overwhemingly reject a man who made millions as a downsizing consultant. You'd also have expected former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, who pushed his economic populism here harder than his Christian Dominionism, to fare better. But there is no explaining Republican voters this year. Not even to themselves.

Hearting Huckabee

November 2, 2007

OK. I have to admit it. It's time for me, like many other reporters who ought to know better, to look myself straight in the face and ask: Are you crushing on Mike Huckabee?

Dear God, surely not. His social views are positively Pat Robertsonian--the Family Marriage Amendment and all that. But I have been spending some time on the "I Heart Huckabee" online circuit, looking at videos and web sites devoted to Hearting the latest version of a neo-populist from Hope, Arkansas. And there are times when Huckabee strikes me as awfully refreshing. He talks about his scratchy roots in more appropriately earthly ways than John Edwards: "On my mother's side of the family, I'm one generation away from dirt floors and outdoor toilets. On my father's side of the family, there's not a male upstream from me that even graduated high school."

He often governed in a most un-Republican way in Arkansas, too. "He was pro-life and pro-gun, but otherwise a liberal," says one of his longtime right-wing foes. That's an overstatement. But the bass-playing Baptist preacher does say surprisingly smart things about domestic issues once they're outside the realms of the "moral." Then "Islamofascism" starts rolling off his silver tongue, and I'm slapped back to reality. He'd probably be a lousy President. Although there's no question that one good thing might come of that lousiness: Huckabee seems like a guy who could help re-orient Christian values at the ballot box. He talks a lot about poverty, about prison reform, about preventive health care and rehabilitation and treatment and fairness for everybody. He won 48 percent of black votes for governor one year in Arkansas.

Two Cheers for Alabama

October 11, 2007

I owe Alabama a half-hearted apology.

Two years ago, I wrote a piece for Out magazine based on my three-and-a-half year stint as a gay bachelor in Montgomery, the state capitol.

I steered clear of saying it directly in the story, but sure enough, right there on the cover of the magazine, it was promo'd: "The Worst Place to be Gay in Bush's America."