"I say, I say, I say boy, you are about the weakest chicken hawk I have seen in fifty years of public service!"
....(Insert sounds of chicken hawk kicking ol' Foghorn Leghorn all over the barnyard....)
Posted on 08/12/2003 5:57:03 AM PDT by Liz
WASHINGTON -- For decades, the phrase "Southern strategy" has had a negative connotation of Republican presidential candidates playing to the racial fears of Southern whites.
In 1968, Richard Nixon wooed Southern Democrats with the idea that he wouldn't push too hard for progress on civil rights. He railed against court-ordered busing and affirmative action.
In 1980, Ronald Reagan won Democrats in the South and elsewhere by focusing on traditional values, complaining about "welfare queens" and promising to move able-bodied "young bucks" off the dole.
Today, though, appealing to Southern Democrats is more complicated.
Even Southerners have a hard time making a sale.
In South Carolina, which has seen more than its share of presidential hopefuls because of its early primary, the leading Democratic contender is still undecided.
Undecided wins support from 42 percent of likely Democratic primary voters in the state. That compares with just 5 percent for native son John Edwards, who was born in Seneca, S.C., and is a senator from North Carolina.
No one got more than 13 percent (Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut). The other Southerner in the race, Sen. Bob Graham of Florida, garnered a puny 3 percent - even though he's a NASCAR sponsor. The Zogby poll was taken at the end of July.
South Carolina is one of the nation's most Republican states, and President Bush is wildly popular. You could sense the Democratic Party's frustration in the zingers from Sen. Fritz Hollings, D-S.C., last week.
While announcing he would not run for re-election, Hollings, 81, said Bush was the weakest president he'd seen in his 50 years in public service. "He's a nice fellow," Hollings said dryly. "You can't find a better fraternity brother."
Almost every Democratic presidential candidate is struggling to find his Southern accent.
Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont, is making a splash nationally but was just 4 percent in the South Carolina poll. Dean all but promised last week to name a Southerner as his running mate.
Ticking off the factors he would consider in a veep, Dean said on Larry King Live, "The South is a region I am always interested in as somebody from the North." Dean said he'd pick somebody who could be president and has Washington experience. Here comes a Dean-Graham ticket, observers said.
For his part, Graham sees NASCAR as a vehicle to showcase his values.
"We are going to be particularly appealing to Americans who have a rural set of values," he said on CNBC.
Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts early on said in San Francisco that "Al Gore proved you can win the election without a single Southern state -- if only he'd won New Hampshire.''
Kerry quickly backed off the notion that he didn't need the South, campaigning in South Carolina, saying he had killed people in Vietnam. Kerry came in at 5 percent in the South Carolina poll.
Rep. Dick Gephardt of Missouri and activist Al Sharpton tied with 8 percent.
Jesse Jackson, who ran for president twice in the 1980s, is flouting conventional wisdom and urging the Democratic contenders to compete in the South against Bush.
Jackson says he will launch a major voter registration drive to mobilize African Americans and the poor. He contends that Al Gore should never have ceded the region to Bush last time.
Much has changed since 1960, when a Democratic senator from Massachusetts running for president chose a Southerner as his running mate.
John F. Kennedy also promised to protect the Southern textile industry from cheap imports. He called Coretta Scott King a couple of weeks before the election to express his sympathy that her husband, the civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., had been jailed in Atlanta.
In a final campaign swing through Virginia, Kennedy mocked his opponent simply by comparing him to Thomas Jefferson.
"A contemporary once said of Jefferson that he was a young man of 32 who could plot an eclipse, survey a field, plan an edifice, break a horse, play a violin and dance a minuet.
"What on earth has he got in common with Richard Milhous Nixon?" Kennedy asked voters in Norfolk. Kennedy won North and South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana and Texas, Lyndon Johnson's home state, on his way to the White House.
But promoting Jefferson over Nixon didn't work magic in Virginia. Nixon may not have been able to do the minuet but he did turn out enough voters to beat JFK in the Old Dominion.
Kennedy's Southern strategy was to balance his ticket, appeal to rural voters and blacks and have some fun with his opponent's image. Could it work again?
As Ronald Reagan used to say, stay tuned.
Marsha Mercer is a columnist for Media General. E-mail mmercer@mediageneral.com
"I say, I say, I say boy, you are about the weakest chicken hawk I have seen in fifty years of public service!"
....(Insert sounds of chicken hawk kicking ol' Foghorn Leghorn all over the barnyard....)
Prig? Do I look like a prig?
Was he the cook?
Holy cow look at the liberal bias in these first three paragraphs. If you're against forced busing, affirmative action (quotas), people ripping off the welfare system, and putting lazy people to work then you're a racist and have fears. Sheesh!
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