The GOP's Southern Exposure

This is not a month for reading too much into Trent Lott's ignoble departure from the Republican Senate leadership. While this will change the office arrangements in the U.S. Capitol, it doesn't rearrange the Republican Party, which remains overinvested in the South ideologically and overcommitted to upper-income America economically.

Lott aside, January 2003 is unfolding very nicely for the political flagbearers of the Old Confederacy. By promising a referendum on the Georgia flag, Sonny Perdue rode an angry tide of rural white voters to victory in November and will soon be inaugurated as the first GOP governor of Georgia since Reconstruction. There is no longer any Southern state in which the Republicans have been unable to elect a governor.

In Washington, which first fell to a "Southern Strategy" 35 years ago, a Texas Republican president who campaigned for Perdue this autumn and in 2000 refused to criticize the Stars and Bars in South Carolina's state flag is preparing to give another State of the Union address this month. He won't be whistling "Dixie" then, of course, but he'll probably hum a few bars again in 2004.

The South is now the Republicans' core region. Lott, with his foolish fantasizing over Strom Thurmond -- and before that, his rhapsodies over Jefferson Davis -- didn't build the coalition and his departure won't undercut it. If anything, Lott's willingness to be a sacrificial lamb and step aside has spared the White House and the rest of the congressional GOP from examinations of their own positions on race. At least for now.

This is the nubbin. Republican transformation over the past two decades has led from political acceptance of the South to what amounts to Southern GOP domination and a politics of over-Southernization. First George H.W. Bush and then his son George W. worked hard to woo the religious right, where Ronald Reagan really hadn't needed to. Then both in turn successfully relied on the presidential primaries of their home region as Dixie firewalls against nomination rivals Bob Dole in 1988 and John McCain in 2000.

This has come at a price. As the Bushes adjusted their New England political heritage to run the famous Willie Horton TV ad and pay election-year visits to fundamentalist Bob Jones University, GOP presidential support ebbed in the North. Prior to George W. Bush, no Republican in history has taken office by winning only one Northeastern state while sweeping the Old Confederacy.

The first successful Republican "Southern Strategy" in 1968, with which I had some involvement, was to carry the more centrist Outer South -- Virginia, the Carolinas, Florida, Tennessee and Texas -- while waiting for the rest of Dixie to abandon George Wallace and his segregationist third-party politics. It worked, to be sure -- the Republicans have won the White House in two-thirds of the subsequent presidential elections. However, as with all of the previous major U.S. presidential coalitions over the last two centuries, success had sewn the seeds of eventual excess.

The first obvious signs of over-Southernization came with the Republican takeover of Congress brought about by the 1994 backlash against Bill Clinton. This anti-Clinton feeling was strongest in Dixie, and the new Republican Congress chose Southerners as its leaders. In the House, Newt Gingrich of Georgia became speaker and Dick Armey of Texas majority leader; in the Senate, Strom Thurmond of South Carolina became the president pro-tem and Trent Lott of Mississippi majority leader. But the conservatism of this 94th Congress was too strident, which helped Clinton get re-elected in 1996.

The Southern-ness of today's Washington Republicans is less glaring, but in other ways it is as strong or stronger. After taking Congress, the GOP found hundreds of rural and small-town Southern Democratic officials and legislators ready to switch parties. As this happened, state Republican politics and voting patterns in the Old Confederacy, especially the Deep South, began to shed their old country-club and upper-middle-class, urban-suburban leadership pattern and pick up an increasing rural, small-town and new-suburbia coloration.

In Georgia this was vivid in the 2002 Republican gubernatorial breakthrough, where Perdue did poorly in Atlanta and its inner suburbs but rode the state flag issue to big margins in rural areas and red-clay suburbs that were countryside 25 years ago.

Nor is Georgia alone. In 2000, George W. Bush's highest percentages came in north-central and north Florida, including many of the counties where George Wallace did best in 1968. The older GOP pattern, vivid in Dwight D. Eisenhower's 1952 and 1956 Florida victories and then again with Nixon's in 1968, was to lose in Cracker country but win in the southern and central Florida counties with large transplanted Northern populations. In South Carolina, George W. Bush's critical primary victory over John McCain represented a similar reversal. McCain did best along the more upscale and retiree-settled coast; Bush won his big majorities in the fundamentalist upcountry.

Fifty years ago, the political scientist V.O. Key, in his book "Southern Politics," detailed an earlier split between the urban and rural South and described the prevalence of the latter in Georgia as the "rule of the rustics." Today's Peach State politics is much more suburban, but there are similar cultural legacies.

For all his dimwitted musings over Thurmond and Davis, Lott was hardly an architect of this upheaval; he was simply one of its beneficiaries. Support in the South for the national Democratic Party crumbled in the quarter-century from 1948 to 1972 for several reasons -- racial anger, religious alienation, small-town values, pro-military sentiment and growing pro-business and entrepreneurial self-identification produced by the region's economic boom. But the single most important reason was that the national Democratic Party abandoned its longtime role as the voice of Southern white supremacy.

It did not do so lightly. During the realignment years of the 1930s, as the Democrats built a new national majority, Franklin D. Roosevelt endorsed segregation and campaigned beside its arch-supporters. Only in the 1940s, after the Democrats had begun to win a serious black vote in the Northern cities -- few could vote in the South itself -- did national Democratic politics begin to move toward desegregation. At this point, the South began to break away, and in the 1960s, the break turned into a chasm.

Far from repeating the overt upholding of segregation in the Democratic realignment in 1932, the 1968-72 GOP realignment strategy supported the Supreme Court desegregation decisions and their implementation, save for Nixon's general rejection of school busing and politically shrewd insistence that Southerners were as entitled to sit on the Supreme Court as northerners.

Between 1968 and 1988, the Republicans won five of the six presidential elections, and desegregation was managed in a way acceptable to national opinion, save for the 10 to 15 percent on the left and the 10 to 15 percent on the right. However, since the mid-1980s, three new circumstances have emerged.

First, the Republicans have become much more focused on economic policies that, in the name of business and the markets, have favored the top 1 percent income group. Second, use of the race issue by GOP presidential nominees has had less to do with real racial policy (as in the '60s and '70s) and more to do with gratuitously raising convenient themes and prejudices -- Willie Horton in 1988, the visit to Bob Jones University in 2000 and the various flag incidents.

The importance of the second circumstance lies in the political requirement of a third. During the Bush Era, the Republican presidential nominee got 53 percent of the popular vote in 1988 but won less than a majority in 1992, 1996 and 2000. Non-white voters are becoming more numerous, pro-rich economic policies are a poor draw and in the Northern states so is the GOP's increasing over-Southernization. War in the Persian Gulf could override these problems in 2004, but then again war benefits wore off quickly in 1992 with the economy in the doldrums.

The upshot is simple: For all its talk about reaching Hispanics, blacks and Asians, the GOP also has a pressing strategic need to use cultural themes to maintain a high level of support among white Southerners in order to eke out electoral-vote victories in normally close states such as Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana and Missouri.

By stepping down as majority leader last month, Trent Lott cut short a debate over these tactics and tendencies that was already unnerving and worrying the Bush White House. But with the weaknesses in the increasingly outdated Republican coalition unlikely to go away, the debate over the cultural politics needed to sustain it is bound to resurface.

I am so tired of being MIS-characterized by these people...they have no idea who I am, why Sonny Perdue was elected, etc. It does make me think secession (though not for the reasons that caused it in 1861) wasn't such a bad idea after all

Interesting. Apparently, the majority of southerners are racial or religious bigots who can be conned into voting against their own economic self-interest.

Or I suppose its possible that the author has somewhat misrepresented the situation.

In political battles, the first thing you try to do is define your opponent in a manner to put him on the defensive. The Democrats have clearly chosen race as the issue on which to do that. I believe the strategy will fail, because Republican actions will speak louder than the Democrat talking points. Also, I think that most people are getting pretty sick of the subject. Not that that's going to stand in the way of the Democrats. They were proven to have a tin ear in the last election, choosing to make it about payback for 2000, putting them back in the majority, etc. Too bad they forgot to include any positions on issues in all that.

As if the Rats don't use "cultural themes" to get the votes of blacks, latinos and the rest of the base of misfits? I hope the Ga flag issue IS decided in the polls. The old flag will definitely be back!

Every time I think the AJC couldn't possibly move farther to the Looney Left, Cynthia Tucker comes through once more. Today's front-page (nearly full-cover) story was about Emmett Till, the Mississippi boy whose 1955 lynching precipitated calls for an end to segregation in the South. Why was he the newspaper's cover boy? Hard to say, unless the paper is trying to convince its readers that we are headed back to the 50s in America.

Every time I think the AJC couldn't possibly move farther to the Looney Left...

I would tend to agree. The AJC is definitely jonesing over the CSA battle emblem.

There was also today an article (paraphasing), "Flag Issue Follows Perdue to Green Bay".

Walt

angry tide of rural white voters

Ah, those angry white voters. I understand they're not too bright and easily led.

In the House, Newt Gingrich of Georgia became speaker and Dick Armey of Texas majority leader; in the Senate, Strom Thurmond of South Carolina became the president pro-tem and Trent Lott of Mississippi majority leader. But the conservatism of this 94th Congress was too strident, which helped Clinton get re-elected in 1996.

Actually, Bob Dole became majority leader in 1994.

Second, use of the race issue by GOP presidential nominees has had less to do with real racial policy (as in the '60s and '70s) and more to do with gratuitously raising convenient themes and prejudices -- Willie Horton in 1988,Sister Souljah the visit to Bob Jones University in 2000 and the various flag incidents.

Oh, wait. Clinton use Sister Souljah in 1992 and Gore used Willie Horton in 1988.

First, the Republicans have become much more focused on economic policies that, in the name of business and the markets, have favored the top 1 percent income group.

Policies that favor everyone who works and pays taxes.

We have just elected a Republican governor in Maryland. His inauguration has not yet occurred. The lame duck Dem Governor is acting like Clinton in his waning days: stroke of the pen = law of the land actions. Yet the Baltimore Sun has regularly been doing destructive reports on all the terrible things that are going to happen after Mr Ehrlich becomes governor.

Talk about fairness, or honeymoon interval? The Dem house organs do not know the meanings of those words! The Atlanta and Baltimore papers have taken these losses VERY personally.

How funny. They completely overlook the war against terrorism,
which is strongly supported in the patriotic South.

This is a major campaign issue, and the Republicans have it locked up.

I didn't read all the article.

What they see as South, I see as everything between the East and West coasts, or middle America.

So the Democrats have come up with a "Southern Strategy" of their own--a massive propaganda blitzkrieg to make the Republican Party appear to be the party of The South and The South to be The Old South.

Very interesting.

They will have to keep the Republicans, history, and the world from pointing out that the Democrat Party is the party of slavery, segregation, Jim Crow, THE DEMOCRATIC WHITE PRIMARY, and 21st century racism.

Tough job, but they can count on The Mainstream Newsmedia (also known as The Democrat Propaganda Machine), Hollywood, academia, and a host of "celebrities". You can see why they're cautiously optimistic.

Vet, they don't care who you are, why Sonny Perdue was elected, etc., any more than they care about truth for its own sake. If it surves their propaganda purposes, they'll use it. They'll make it up.

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