The Way Down South (Page 3)

"Presidential campaigns are the primary vehicle for selling a party's identity," notes Steve Jarding, a Democratic strategist who steered Mark Warner and Jim Webb to upset victories in Virginia in 2001 and 2006. "When John Kerry says, 'I'm not going South,' that means that there's some $40 to $50 million in Democratic investments not going South, either. It means digging a deeper and deeper hole in those states."

For a moment in the summer of 2004, it appeared that Kerry might "look South" after all when he tapped John Edwards as his vice presidential running mate. But shortly after the Democratic convention, Kerry's brain trust decided to wave a big white hanky, "suspending operations" in Purple South states--Virginia, Louisiana, Missouri and Arkansas--as well as in competitive states outside the region like Nevada, Arizona and Colorado. All told, even before Labor Day, Kerry had "strategically" conceded twenty-seven states, including all of the South but Florida--and all but forty-three of the electoral votes Bush needed for re-election.

Once again, Republicans were left to preach their divisive cultural populism to Southerners in a virtual echo chamber. The Democratic presidential campaign--and whatever its message might have been--was little more than a distant rumor. "In most of the South, and most of the country for that matter," Edwards told me ruefully after the election, "you couldn't hardly tell we were running a candidate. It's tough to convince people you're right when you can't be bothered to talk to them."

When the inevitable went down on November 2, 2004, with another non-Southern campaign sending the Democrats down in flames, it seemed high time to reassess the strategy. Instead, the blue-state backlash only intensified. "Fuck the South," began the most popular in a parade of blogs laying blame for Bush's re-election on the dimwits of Dixie. It wasn't just bloggers: On the morning of November 3, prominent Democratic strategist Bob Beckel called on the South to "form its own nation." Democratic wise man Lawrence O'Donnell, creator of The West Wing, ordered Southerners to shape up or be shipped out of the Union. "Some would say, 'Oh, poor Alabama. It's cut off from the wealth infusion that it gets from New York and California.' But the more this political condition goes on at the presidential level," O'Donnell blustered, "the more you're testing the inclination of the blue states to say, 'so what?'"

The new cry among the punditocracy was for something bolder and more divisive than John Kerry's approach: an anti-Southern strategy. "The Democrats need their own 'them,'" writes Thomas Schaller in his 2005 book, Whistling Past Dixie, "and the social conservatives who are the bedrock of southern politics provide the most obvious and burdensome stone to hang around the Republicans' necks.... If the GOP can build a national majority by ostracizing an entire region," he says of the South's animosity toward Yankees, "the Democrats should be able to run outside the South by running against the conservative South." By picking off a few non-Southern "purple" states like Montana and Colorado, Schaller and others believe, the Democrats can cobble together small national majorities in presidential elections.

As a species of Democratic defeatism, this approach can hardly be topped. And for all the charts and graphs that accompany such strategic chess games, calls for a non-Southern strategy are rooted in cultural stereotypes. While probing deeply into the politics of states like Montana, Schaller offers mostly context-free statistical "evidence" and sweeping judgments when it comes to the South. Among the various "pathologies" of the region Schaller identifies, for instance: "The South is the most militarized region of the country." But like everything else, it's not nearly so simple: Despite Southerners' often well-earned reputation for a patriotic belligerence unusual even among Americans, recent polls have found that they now oppose the Iraq War just as strongly as people in the rest of the country--and more Southerners now think the United States should "withdraw completely" from Iraq.

That's no anomaly. The chasm supposedly yawning between Southern ideology and national norms is wildly, though routinely, overstated. In a 2003 comprehensive study of Southern political attitudes, pollster Scott Keeter found folks still tilting to the right on many issues of race, immigration and the use of military force. But Southerners are just as likely as other Americans to support government regulation, strong environmental protection and social welfare. They're prochoice, too (though less than the rest of the country), and on another contentious "cultural" issue, gay civil unions, are just slightly less supportive than other Americans. Polls show that young Southern voters, along with the region's booming Hispanic population, lean Democratic.

Rather than diverging from national political patterns, Southerners continue their post-Jim Crow evolution toward the American mainstream. And Democrats continue to run screaming in the other direction.

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