The Vital South
Black, Earl Black and Merle
B ad as the blows were, the worst thing that happened to Bill Clinton in the Democratic presidential primaries was not being hit with allegations of cheating on Hillary and dodging the draft. Nope,...
...In fact, it has been since at least 1932...
...So why pander to blacks and drive away white Southerners...
...What's missing is Carter's moral probity...
...You can imagine their Fred Barnes is a senior editor of the New Republic...
...Democratic hegemony in the South lasted as long as the party winked at white supremacy there...
...For five straight elections up to 1948, it was the critical ingredient in Democratic victories...
...Nope, the worst thing was the consequence of those allegations, both of which Clinton denies, both of which everyone else believes to be true...
...These conditions don't quite prevail at the moment, but think about it: policy failures, a weak economy, a less-thanmesmerizing Republican nominee—that sounds like the Bush era to me...
...It's a capital crime...
...By the way, I've run my theory of Clinton's fall from grace with Southern voters by the Blacks and they generally agree...
...The appeal of Republicans "goes far beyond concerns about race," the Blacks insist...
...Then Southern states started going Republican, first for Eisenhower, then for Nixon, and finally in landslide fashion for Reagan...
...Draft-dodging is not a venial sin in the South...
...And the Democratic coalition slowly began to unravel...
...military force around the globe, and he's a Southerner...
...Beginning in 1992 the South alone will contain 54 percent of the electoral votes needed to elect a President," the authors say...
...My premise ought to be pretty clear: it's that the South is now the pivotal region in presidential elections...
...In 1984, he took all eleven...
...Political scientists Earl Black of the University of South Carolina and his brother Merle of Emory University are among the few serious chroniclers of this transformation, and they're a lot better than Kevin Phillips...
...And Bush did the same in 1988 (drawing 60 percent of the vote in Georgia...
...And since a Democrat has to win some Southern states to capture the presidency, Clinton is practically a goner...
...And the GOP base in the South is growing in importance...
...The genius of Clinton's candidacy was supposed to be his ability, normally nonexistent among national Democrats, to steal some Southern states from the Republican incumbent...
...The trouble is, a Democratic candidate has to thread the eye of a needle...
...In short, Republicans have been conservative...
...Republican presidential candidates have also benefited from being interventionist and hawkish in foreign affairs...
...In examining the elections from 1972 to 1988, the Blacks calculated that 44 percent of the Southern presidential electorate consists of core Republicans...
...That produced huge majorities...
...The nominee must cleverly appeal to conservative and moderate swing voters and to blacks...
...Obviously that's too big a bloc for Democrats to write off...
...Their 1988 book, Politics and Society in the South, argued persuasively that the South had fundamentally changed in political character (but not ideology...
...And they've been shrewd enough to emphasize "the importance of symbolic conservative values, including the preservation of traditional family values, the importance of religion, support for capital punishment, and opposition to gun control...
...But the pact was abrogated in 1948, when the Democratic convention adopted a civil rights plank...
...There are millions of Baptists and almost as many Pentecostals, all folks with a rigid moral code...
...Also needed for Democrats to win is a Republican catastrophe, "some combination of Republican policy failures, disappointing economic performance, and the nomination of a conspicuously flawed GOP candidate...
...The perennial issue of fostering prosperity has usually worked in favor of the GOP...
...The only Democrat to win the presidency since 1964, Carter, swept every Southern state but Virginia...
...As it turns out, all that isn't enough, given that womanizing and draft evasion strike at the heart of the Southern white vote...
...In presidential elections after the Great Society," the Blacks write, "for the first time in American history, the South led the North as a source of dependable Republican electoral votes...
...He could appeal to conservative white Democrats and other swing voters in a way that liberal stiffs like Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis never could...
...The allegations all but wiped out Clinton's chance to win a Southern state outside Arkansas—and made Arkansas iffy...
...And if there's a region of America more military-oriented than the South, I haven't heard of it...
...There's an irony here...
...Once again, George Bush is a lucky man...
...To the contrary...
...He's likable, he's moderate on some social issues, he's not opposed to the use of U.S...
...But don't jump to the wrong conclusion...
...Republicans don't have an automatic majority in presidential races, but they're THE VITAL SOUTH: HOW PRESIDENTS ARE ELECTED Earl Black and Merle Black Harvard University Press/400 pages/$29.95 reviewed by FRED BARNES 58 The American Spectator July 1992 close...
...Carter got 47 percent of the white Southern vote, compared to 28 percent for Mondale and 32 percent for Dukakis...
...Today there's a built-in GOP advantage in the South that aids any Republican presidential nominee, including a vulnerable Bush...
...view of infidelity...
...And Clinton is Jimmy Carter reborn in his ideological muddiness and appeal to moderates...
...Carter managed this, and Clinton is trying...
...Another 18 percent are swing voters who also vote Republican regularly...
...Core white Democrats are only 24 percent, and blacks, also overwhelmingly Democratic, are 14 percent...
...I'm referring to something more specific: the South...
...Democrats, Franklin Roosevelt especially, made a Faustian pact with Southern segregationists: you support us and we'll let you handle race relations however you want...
...In the last five presidential elections, the median white Republican vote in the South was 67 percent...
...In 1980, Reagan won ten of the eleven states of the Confederacy (Georgia stuck with Carter...
...In 1968, following a decade of civil rights legislation and racial unrest, it shattered completely...
...Without the infidelity and draft-dodging, Clinton would be a formidable threat in the South...
...The Vital South is an even more impressive work, detailing vividly how Republicans took control of presidential politics in the South and how that gives them almost a lock on winning the White House...
...T he Blacks maintain that the barri- ers to a Democratic breakthrough are not insurmountable...
...The consequence I'm referring to isn't the spate of polls showing that a huge chunk of Democrats and a solid majority of overall voters think Clinton lacks the honesty and integrity to be President...
...There is no example in American history of the Democrats losing the entire South but winning the presidency by securing almost seven-tenths of the northern electoral vote...
...T hough largely ignored by aca- demics and the media, the switch of the South from Democratic to Republican is the most significant political event of post–World War II America...
...But race wasn't the main ingredient in the South's transformation...
...Tarred with those, he's not...
...There's also a historical fact to contend with...
...Republicans realized they didn't need black votes to win the South...
...They need 57 or 58 percent of the white vote to win Southern states...
Vol. 25 • July 1992 • No. 7
