Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 25, 1995 TAG: 9507030115
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ROBERT SHOGAN LOS ANGELES TIMES
DATELINE: RALEIGH, N. C. LENGTH: Long
``But what I should have said to people,'' she told a party gathering here earlier this month ``was that I got stepped on by an elephant.''
She wasn't the only one. The Republican stampede through the South last fall trampled Democratic officeholders on every rung of the political ladder. And the meeting that Ward addressed here was part of a massive, agonizing and ongoing Dixie-wide reappraisal, as Democrats from the grass roots to the White House scramble to figure out what went wrong and how to set matters right in time for the next election.
Exacerbating their difficulties is the escalation of the divisive political debate over affirmative action, bound to go up another notch in the wake of the recent Supreme Court opinion that cast doubt on the legality of race-based preference programs. A continuing focus on affirmative action threatens Southern Democrats most of all because it polarizes the racial tensions that have kept them on the political defensive for almost three decades.
Democrats in this region also have to come to terms with a ticket headed by President Clinton, who despite his own Southern heritage is viewed more negatively below the Mason-Dixon line than anywhere else in the country. A Los Angeles Times Poll taken this month showed Clinton's approval rating over 50 percent in every region except the South, where his support reached only 39 percent.
The stakes are high for the president and his party. What political analysts call the Greater South, which includes the 11 states of the Old Confederacy plus Oklahoma and Kentucky, supplies nearly one-third of the nation's total electoral votes.
``Clinton has to come out of the South in 1996 with a certain amount of support or he won't win nationwide,'' said Mark Gersh, who has been helping plot political strategy for the White House.
Looking further ahead, Democrats fear that unless they can reverse the GOP advancement in the South in the next election, Republicans will have established such a powerful foundation that they will dominate the region's politics at all levels well into the next century.
``My opinion is that we are at true crossroads,'' said Wayne McDevitt, chairman of North Carolina's Democratic Party. But McDevitt and other Democratic leaders say they see no easy way out of their current morass. ``We didn't get into this mess overnight, nor are we going to get out of it in that short a time,'' he said.
Added Merle Black, an Emory University professor who is a leading authority on Southern politics: ``It's the worst picture for the Democrats in the South that I've seen for 30 years.''
Black notes that as recently as 1990, Democrats held 77 of the 116 House seats in the Old South. But today, with the number of seats in those Southern states grown to 125, it is the Republicans who for the first time since Reconstruction have a majority - 65. The GOP gained 19 Southern seats in last November's vote, then picked up another with the subsequent defection of former Democratic Rep. Nathan Deal of Georgia.
The Democratic Party is ``out of touch with mainstream America,'' Deal contended when he broke ranks.
What worries Democratic strategists is that there are other Southern House members who are pondering making the same shift Deal did. Some may do so in hopes they will avoid being swept out of office in 1996, when Black and others believe that the Republicans stand a good chance of picking up another 10 to 15 House seats.
The effort by some Southern Democrats to distance themselves from their party was illustrated recently, when four House members - two from Louisiana and one each from Mississippi and Texas - quit the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. The four complained that the committee does not tolerate differences of opinion within the party.
All this makes it hard to remember that for nearly the first half of this century, the Democratic Party owned the South from the Florida Everglades to the Texas prairies.
Democratic power was derived from the party's defense of white supremacy and administered by a crew of cunning demagogues, among them Tennessee's Boss Ed Crump, who once said of a political opponent: ``In the art galleries of Paris there are 27 pictures of Judas Iscarot - none look alike but all resemble Gordon Browning.''
The rupture of the ties binding the once-Solid South to the Democratic Party began with the drive to end racial segregation laws, launched by a border-state Democratic president, Harry S Truman of Missouri, and fulfilled by a Southern Democratic chief executive, Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas.
The consequences of this were seen first in presidential races, as white Southerners started deserting the Democratic candidate in droves. From 1968 to 1988, with one exception, Democratic presidential candidates were virtually shut out in the South, often failing to carry a single state in the region. The exception occurred in 1976, when Jimmy Carter, in his initial presidential campaign, swept every state in Dixie except Virginia.
And though the combination of Clinton, the former Arkansas governor, and Vice President Al Gore, the former Tennessee senator, carried four Old South states - Arkansas, Tennessee, Louisiana and Georgia - in 1992, that success likely will turn out to be a similar aberration. Instead of leading a Southern renaissance for his party, Clinton is blamed by many Democrats and independent analysts for helping the Republicans in 1994 to finally transfer the dominance they had long enjoyed in presidential politics to local and congressional races.
``In every year since 1964, the Republican vote for House seats (in the South) has been going up and the Democratic vote has been going down,'' said Curtis Gans, head of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate. ``That trend climaxed in the last election, and it essentially took the perception of an unpopular and failed president for it to happen.''
As for Clinton's prospects next year, most Democrats privately concede that he will have a hard time matching even his modest Southern success of 1992, barring another White House try by Ross Perot or a similar candidate who would drain away white voters from the Republican standard-bearer.
Still, some believe that Clinton will boost his stock once he gets back on the campaign trail.
``He's one of the most inadequate presidents we've ever had, but one of the best campaigners,'' Sen. Ernest F. Hollings, D-S.C., remarked with characteristic bluntness.
Keywords:
POLITICS
by CNB