I just finished one of the better political essays I've read in some time -- Bob Moser's The Way Down South: A Populist Route to Democratic Revival in this week's (dead-tree date 12 February) The Nation. It's absolutely worth a full read, but if you don't have the time for that, check out my excerpts and commentary below along with a discussion of Moser's other recent piece Johnny Populist, Jason Zengerle's piece on Edwards in The New Republic, and other recent discussions of populism along with a discussion of how other Democrats, especially Jim Webb, fit into a new Democratic Strategy to Win the South and Become a Permanent Majority Party.
In short, Moser's new article (part of a series on Southern Politics) debunks the myths perpetuated by the DLC and national pundits, skewering John Kerry's "anti-Southern strategy" and Thomas Schaller's "Whistling Past Dixie" and advocating a new Democratic Populism to win back not only large sections of the South (not to mention the industrial Great Lakes states).
Moser starts with a discussion of pre-1972 (before the apparent victory of Nixon's Southern Strategy) South. He argues that the Democratic Party had always both "personified the political philosophy that long knit white Dixie voters ... populism" and been associated with "us," meaning regular folk from the former-CSA states.
Democrats were us; Republicans were meddlesome, superior, pro-corporate Ivy Leaguers endlessly devising fresh ways to screw us over.... [Republicans were] "a bunch of Republicans yammering their rich man's nonsense" and their minuscule little organization was a "lily-livered cocktail party."
Next, Moser discusses the Republican Southern Strategy led by Richard Nixon and Jesse Helms.
Now Republicans were doing the unthinkable: convincing folks they were on their side. [They] railing against [antiwar] hippies and [pointy-headed intellectual] atheists and other un-American elements holding down the "silent majority" of white working folk. [Republicans used] pietistic appeals for school prayer, nostalgia for "traditional American values," [and] racially coded "law and order" rhetoric....
It was a neat trick, really: Stepping into the void created for white Southern conservatives when the Democrats became the party of civil rights and 1960s-style social liberalism, Republicans were adapting the old rhetoric of populism--the sword so long wielded against them--to "flip" white Dixie and create an electoral stronghold of their own. But Republican populism would be all about white cultural unity, not economic fairness.
Now, Democrats shouldn't then and shouldn't now compromise on civil rights, but Moser argues (correctly I believe) that Republican Cultural Populism can be fought with the Old Religion -- Democratic Economic Populism based on the American (born out of our Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian pasts) notions of fairness. To argue this point, Moser persuasively argues that the Myth of the Solid Republican South is "threadbare from the start." And holy smokes, he's got facts:
Even as Nixon took Dixie in 1972, there were encouraging signs -- none more so than the election of moderate-to-progressive governors in ten of the eleven old Confederate states, most calling for both economic fairness and racial reconciliation [such as Jimmy Carter in Georgia and Reubin Askew in Florida, as well as a "new cadre of black elected officials," especially mayors]....
When a near-solid South propelled Carter to the presidency in 1976, it appeared that the long-delayed dream [of a post-Civil Rights coalition of "coalition of blacks with moderate and liberal whites] might be coming to life. But Carter's White House stint, like Bill Clinton's after it, failed to live up to its populist promise. And while GOP fortunes were being bolstered by a new Christian-right politics that sent another wave of traditional Democrats into the Republican camp, the national Democrats began to beat a retreat from Dixie.
Still, despite their near-abandonment by the national Party and their own structural weaknesses, Southern Democrats remain a vital force in the region and voters were splitting tickets rather than going wholesale over to to the Republicans on all levels.
[W]hile white Southerners were voting in huge numbers for Republicans in "Washington elections" for President and Congress, Democrats did not go extinct.... A poll of Southern voters on election day 2000 found 35 percent identifying as Democrats--just 26 percent as Republicans. Southern Democrats still win more state and local elections, where candidates matter more than party identities. The parity between the parties, unprecedented in the South's history, was neatly symbolized by the total tally of state legislative seats in the old Confederate states after the 2004 elections: 891 Democrats, 891 Republicans. The vast bulk of the region -- including old Confederate states like Florida, North Carolina, Arkansas and Virginia and "border South" states like Kentucky, West Virginia and Missouri -- is more purple than red....
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.... 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.
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.
There is more data that demonstrates that the South is not "solid Republican" in Kos' posting from yesterday, Dems gain in self-identification
Citing a national Gallup polling in 2006, consisting of interviews with more than 30,000 adult Americans, Kos argues that "Democratic partisan self-identification is heading up." He didn't specifically address the South, but looking at the numbers..... I've included how they rank against the other states but Gallup left out Hawaii and Alaska and Kos only listed 45, so 3 others are missing too.
The national numbers of Americans identifying themselves:
Democrat 34%
Republicans 30%
Independents 34%
Difference: +4
The Southern State Numbers and Their Ranking
Rank -- State -- Democrat --Independent -- Republican -- Difference
- Arkansas 60 -- 6 -- 34 -- +26
- West Virginia 58 -- 8 -- 34 -- +24
- Missouri 55 -- 8 -- 37 -- +18
- Kentucky 54 -- 6 -- 41 -- +13
- Florida 51 -- 9 -- 40 -- +11
- North Carolina 52 -- 7 -- 41 -- +11
- Virginia 51 -- 8 -- 41 -- +10
- Georgia 48 -- 8 -- 44 -- +4
- Alabama 49 -- 5 -- 46 -- +3
- Louisiana 47 -- 10 -- 44 -- +3
- Tennessee 47 -- 9 -- 44 -- +3
- Mississippi 44 -- 7 -- 49 -- -5
- South Carolina 44 -- 6 -- 50 -- -6
- Texas 42 -- 8 -- 50 -- -8
Now, I know some of these are "conservative Democrats" and maybe even DINOs, but many, especially in those with a 10 or more Democratic edge (and therefore above the national average), are splitting tickets and could be won over by the right candidate with the right message.
Back to Moser:
So there is an opportunity to win back large sections of the South. And this is absolutely vital since the Republican "solid South" since if it is ceded to the Republicans it gives them "nearly two-thirds of the electoral votes its presidential candidates need every four years."
But the way to win back Southern whites is not through "republican lite" DLC-centrism:
National Democrats have leaned on the myth, too, using it to justify their drift from economic populism toward a Clinton-style, Wall Street-friendly centrism. Coming off three straight Democratic wipeouts in the 1980s, Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council persuaded many in the party that their only chance to compete in the vote-rich South was by "neutralizing" distinctions with the omnipotent Republicans. The "Republican Lite" strategy led to some statewide Democratic victories in Dixie in the 1990s, and Clinton used it to win eight Old South and border South states in both his 1992 and '96 presidential victories. But Republican Lite gave Democrats an eerie resemblance to the old mushy, stand-for-nothing Republican Party, and the strategy has paid diminishing returns over time....
And things have only gotten worse since Clinton. Though no Democrat has ever been elected without winning a chunk of the South, there is a movement to write-off the South in presidential elections, which Moser calls a "suicidal strategy."
Since 1972 most Southerners' image of the two parties had flipped, even if their voting habits hadn't; now it was Democrats who entered every campaign suspected of being wine-and-cheese elitists out to screw the folk. Kerry was the very personification of that image. [In January 2004, Kerry told a Dartmouth College crowd], "Everybody always makes the mistake of looking South."... [And he carried through with this strategy despite picking a Southerner as Vice Presidential nominee], 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.
And we lost five Senate seats and the White House on Kerry's Ohio-gambit.
As a frustrated John Edwards told Moser:
"In most of the South, and most of the country for that matter, 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."
(If you want to read more about how the Edwards were frustrated with the Kerry campaign's decision to write-off the South, read Elizabeth's Saving Graces, page 258.)
So, how do we reach out to the South? Moser looks to Howard Dean, Jim Webb, Larry Kissell, John Yarmuth and John Edwards for inspiration and as models.
First, he notes that Howard Dean backs Edwards call for engagement with the South.
There was one hopeful sign of a wake-up call after 2004, when Howard Dean was elected chair of the Democratic National Committee, declaring in his acceptance speech, "People will vote for Democrats in Texas, in Utah, in West Virginia if we knock on their doors." Dean's election had been assured by enthusiastic support from Southern and Western delegates .. [because of] his new approach -- to join whites and blacks around a common economic agenda of good schools and healthcare.
Still there were many powerful critics of Dean's 50-State Strategy.
In the 2006 midterms, national Democratic campaign committees shunned the fifty-state approach and backed only a handful of Democrats in the South. The chosen Southerners fit the "Republican Lite" mold to a T: social conservatives who emphasized "fiscal responsibility" and steered clear of calling for troop withdrawals in Iraq. The ideal Southern campaign, agreed Begala and his ilk, was Harold Ford Jr.'s lavishly financed Senate bid in Tennessee. Aiming to "out-Republican" his opponent, Ford spent the campaign bashing "illegals," waving the flag, ridiculing the very notion of gay marriage and calling up a quote from the Bible to address every issue. [Ford lost soundly]
Moser sees Ford's loss "as a lesson in the limitations of Clintonian compromise" and the DLC politics of "Republican Liteism" in the South.
But 2006, also showed the way forward. Moser's study of the elections this past November leads him to agree with John Yarmuth (who won a startling upset in Kentucky-3), "The voters are way ahead of the Democrats and way ahead of Washington," in wanting a Democratic Party that provides sharp contrasts and pushes economic populism.
Moser looks at netroots hero and 2008 candidate Larry Kissell and how Kissell ran a grassroots campaign stressing blue-collar populism to come within 329 votes of four-term incumbent and uber-wealthy Roben Hays, then he turns to the Senate races.
Democrats who bucked the script and offered Southerners a frank, unqualified brand of economic populism in 2006 were more successful than the Clinton clones--none more than Jim Webb, the Republican turned Democrat who unseated Senator George Allen in Virginia.... While antiwar sentiment boosted his chances, especially in the increasingly "blue" burbs of northern Virginia, Webb's campaign was fired by an old-fashioned pocketbook populism similar to the messages that won for Yarmuth, Claire McCaskill in Missouri, Jon Tester in Montana and Sherrod Brown in Ohio. Webb believes a strong, clear economic message is the only way for Democrats to reconnect with working-class and middle-class folks who started voting Republican in the 1980s. "The natural base of the Democratic Party looked at both parties and saw they had both been taken over by elites," Webb told me in September. "They could see they weren't going to get helped on economic issues. The one place they thought they could make a difference was on these divisive social issues manipulated by the Republicans. But now they know that's not going to happen. If they can be reached out to with respect, and in terms of fundamental fairness, I think a lot of them will come back."
The populist resurgence of 2006 suggests a way past the false dilemma Democrats have long believed they faced: Either ditch the South, or try to compete there with a "me too" message.
And so, with a "fresh, progressive "moral populism," and a return to the economic message of William Jennings Bryan and the New Deal, Democrats can take back the South (not to mention solidify the Midwest and push the Republicans back into the deepest recesses of the Deep South, Great Plains, and Texas).
And we've got to act, not just for 2008, but because air conditioning is not on our side:
By the 2032 elections, the South is expected to control almost 40 percent of the electoral votes for President--more than the shrinking Northeast and Midwest combined.
And yet a stubborn belief in the poor, backward, reactionary cracker South of myth still shapes and distorts American politics. By surrendering the region, Democrats have simultaneously abandoned the old hope of a durable national progressive majority. They have passively allowed right-wingers to build a mighty fortress for the defense of free-market excess in a region that is home to almost half--47 percent--of the Americans who call themselves populists. They have allowed economic, racial and cultural divisions to fester. And now, even with the Republicans' Southern strategy wearing thin, they are lurching toward an even more dramatic break with the South.
It ain't wise, and it ain't right....
Amen Bob!
And Moser isn't alone. Christopher Hays wrote about The New Democratic Populism in the 4 December 2006 issue of The Nation.
Hays was surprised that while everyone wanted Jim Webb "to talk about Iraq," Webb stated that:
"I decided to run because of my concern...with the economic breakdown that's happened in this country along class lines."
Hays then goes on to interpret the results of the 2006 elections.
[Webb] is part of a broader trend that has been obscured by the fast-congealing conventional wisdom that the election results were driven chiefly by the ongoing disaster in Iraq.
As Webb suggests, the hidden story of the election was the appeal of economic populism in a country whose middle class is increasingly feeling the squeeze. Coast to coast, Democrats running for local and national office campaigned on raising the minimum wage, repealing welfare for Big Oil and opposing trade deals lacking protection for workers and the environment, and their message resonated with an electorate anxious about the economy. Half of all voters rated the economy not good or poor, and a full 69 percent said their family's economic situation had either gotten worse or stayed the same since the last election. Democrats won both these groups by wide margins....
Aside from opposition to the war, the Democrats focused on attacking subsidies to Big Oil, blasting the corruption endemic to a system in which corporate special interests call the shots and advocating for "fair trade" over the so-called "free trade" agreements that benefit capital over labor....
In fact, the minimum wage just might have been Tuesday night's most underreported story. Not only has the Democratic Congress pledged to raise the minimum wage within the first 100 hours but in the six states that featured ballot initiatives to raise the minimum wage above the national--Ohio, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, Arizona and Colorado--every one passed. In Montana it took 73 percent of the vote, and in Missouri 76 percent. Consider that the much-publicized stem-cell-research initiative passed in Missouri by only a few percentage points. That means hundreds of thousands pulled the lever for an increased minimum wage and against funding for stem-cell research....
If there's going to be a center-left majority in this country, its electoral strength is going to rest on a coalition bound by a shared interest in economic justice.
Still, Hays, echoing David Sirota's The People Party vs. The Money Party theory, believes that populist Democrats will have some trouble in their attempts to retake the Party:
First, the infusion of corporate cash that's about to flow into the now-majority party will provide a disincentive to go after corporate power in ways that voters clearly want. In the past, when caught between the interests of their donors and of their constituents, too often Democrats have advocated for the former: Just look at the vote on the bankruptcy bill.
So, that is one of the major splits in our Party: Which side are you on?
Edwards campaigned with Webb in September 2006. At the rally Webb stressed that he was running on three themes: To Reorganize American Foreign Policy, to Check the Abuse of Power by this President Since 9/11, and
Economic Fairness and Social Justice:
We need to focus on basic issues of economic fairness and social justice. We are splitting into Three Americas. The average CEO of a Fortune 500 company is making more than $8 million per year while workers' wages are at their lowest point as a share of national wealth in history. There's something wrong with that. The poor leadership in this country is not taking care of working people in this country, and we need to.
Beyond the South
As a Michigander, I can tell you even the Republicans have gone fair-trade and many in the industrial Midwest are waiting for a Democrat to push economic populism.
And it's not just here, but throughout the country. In his Sunday piece Middle-Class Appeal: Looking for the Angry Populists in Suburbia in the New York Times, David Leonhardt, discusses that a more cautious "Suburban Populism" has taken hold even among some of the neoliberals:
[Democrats] say, the economic shocks of recent years — technological change, globalization, the decline of labor unions and business icons like Ford Motor Company — have left many swing voters feeling anxious and insecure about the future.
After years of fighting losing battles against tax cuts, Democrats argue that this economic anxiety has altered the political landscape, making swing voters open to a new role for government — a form of what Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois has called "suburban populism."
With issues like energy policy, immigration and health care having gone largely unaddressed in recent years, Democrats see a way to define themselves as the party that can help Americans survive the 21st-century economy.
See, the message isn't just for the poor, it's for the middle-classes too -- in fact it's for everyone in the Second America (the 98% of us). And it isn't just for the South or the Midwest, it's for all of America (witness Tester in the Great Plains).
David Greene at NPR's All Things Considered, has an interesting piece today where he compared Bush's upbeat talk on the economy and high-fives on the Wall Street floor with Democratic hearings on the economic difficulties of most Americans (sounds a little like the Two Americas I once heard someone talk about).
And now to John Edwards.
In the early (and shorter) "Johnny Populist" piece in The Nation, Moser wrote that
Edwards's harder-edged populism could be ideally attuned to the political moment.
and that Edwards was now embracing big initiatives that will likely make him the Populist in the 2008 race:
In New Orleans, Edwards sketched out a purpose-driven politics aimed at combating economic injustices and human atrocities both at home and abroad in places like Uganda and Sudan. "We need to ask Americans to be...patriotic about something beyond war," he said. With considerable input from his campaign chief, powerful former Congressman David Bonior of Michigan, Edwards is rolling out an ambitious plan for universal health insurance while calling for a new spin on Lyndon Johnson's "War on Poverty," creating a million federally funded jobs with nonprofit or government agencies and making the first year of college free for kids.
Jason Zengerle has a cover story in The New Republic, "The Accidental Populist: How John Edwards Became a Working Class Hero" from 16 January (it's now out from behind the subscription wall).
Last October, the United Steelworkers of America went on strike against Goodyear, leading some 13,000 of its members to walk off the job. Once they did, it was only a matter of time before John Edwards went to see them. Like a moth to a flame ... Edwards of late seems inexorably drawn to labor strife. As he has laid the groundwork for his 2008 presidential campaign, he has become a fixture at union rallies and on picket lines across the country. Striking janitors at the University of Miami; disgruntled Teamsters at a helicopter plant in Connecticut; beleaguered hotel workers campaigning for better wages and health insurance in Chicago, Los Angeles, even Honolulu--Edwards has visited them all, offering words of encouragement and solidarity at every turn. "When I hear of a group of courageous workers engaged in a historic struggle," he told the janitors in Miami last spring, "it is important to me to show that I am with them."...
But now, Edwards is trying to turn that smile into a snarl, or at least a frown of concern. Since losing the vice presidential race in 2004--and subsequently leaving the Senate and Washington--he has spent his time focusing on the forgotten and neglected corners of the United States and, to a lesser extent, the world. Acting as a sort of latter-day Tom Joad, he has visited not just picket lines but homeless shelters, disaster zones, and refugee camps. And, in his current quest for the presidency, he intends to make the plight of the people he has encountered in those places his central issue. Accordingly, he has ditched his past commitment to fiscally restrained Rubinomics and now favors universal health coverage and an expensive raft of other policy initiatives to lift Americans--and even people in other countries--out of poverty. When he officially announced he was running for president in late December, he did so not sitting next to his wife in the comfort of their family home in a Raleigh neighborhood called Country Club Hills--as he had in the 2004 campaign--but standing by himself in the debris-strewn backyard of a hurricane-damaged house in New Orleans's Ninth Ward. "This campaign," he declared, "will be a grassroots, ground-up campaign, where we ask people to take action."
It's a campaign that seems off to a promising start. Edwards's reinvention has moved him to the left of Hillary Clinton, which, in the Democratic primaries, should be a good location....
There's much more (though some of it is silly), check it out.
For more on Edwards' work for the minimum wage and labor unions, thoughts on economic populism, College for Everyone program, and work to eliminate poverty in America, see my December 2006 diary John Edwards Announcement Tour: People Get Ready.
By Way of a Conclusion
And even one of the Wicked Witches of the Right are afraid of the resurgent Democratic Populism.
Jambon, in his diary yesterday, Ingraham to the GOP: Beware of Jim Webb, includes a closely paraphrased transcript of comments Laura Ingraham made at a National Review Institute conference last Friday (the video is here)
"This might shock some of you, what I'm about to say, but I think James Webb's response to President Bush's [State of the Union] speech, was, if you're a Democrat, you've got to be very pumped up to hear that speech. He said America's the greatest country on the face of the earth. He's quoting Eisenhower, quoting Teddy Roosevelt, focusing on his military background and his family's military background.
The one thing he was doing, which John Kerry could never do, he was talking about the little guy. And if the Republican party goes down the road, back to the country club, focusing on what's best for only the business community and the people who want cheap labor in the United States, and forget about the working class people who became Republicans, because they were fed up with the elites in the Democratic party, then the Republicans are going to deserve what they get which is a lot of time in the wilderness.
My view is, which ever party comes off as the party that represents the American worker is going to be the party that wins in 2008."
It's always interesting when their pundits get honest. Ingraham is a hack, but she does know that politics in America is a struggle of the populisms.
So, let's listen to David Sirota, Thomas Frank, and Paul Krugman and embrace our inner populist.
PS: Bernie Quigley has an interesting diary on the Webb Response to the SOTU and Southern Populism that is worth reading (even if I think he's mistaken to think Webb started this movement), The Southern Insurgents: Jim Webb, John Edwards, Wes Clark.
Yesterday, Anglico also had a post at BlueNC on how Moser's publicist is trying to get the word out in the South: I'll take this kind of sucking up any day
Crossposted at
Michigan for Edwards: http://michiganforedwards.blogspot.c...
BlueNC: TBA http://www.bluenc.com/
John Edwards 2008 Blog: TBA http://blog.johnedwards.com/
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