If you look at LA-06 special election Democratic candidate Don Cazayoux’s issues page you’ll note that he wants to bring the troops home, improve education, expand access to health care, and promote fair trade. That’s the form New Populism seems to be taking in the South. But if you look further, you’ll see that he is strongly opposed to ‘amnesty’ for illegal immigrants and he’s staunchly anti-choice. That also seems to be a feature of New Populism in the South. We can see it in the Democratic candidates for MS-01 and MS-03, who are also competing in upcoming special elections, and in some of the senate candidacies in the South.
Their positions on immigration and choice are troubling. But they also seem to have surprising strength. An internal poll shows Cazayoux beating his Republican opponent.
Portions of a GOP poll conducted March 17-18 and obtained by Roll Call showed Jenkins down three points in a head-to-head matchup with Cazayoux. That’s not great math to begin with in a district that gave President Bush a 19-point margin of victory in the 2004 presidential campaign and repeatedly sent former Rep. Richard Baker (R) to Congress by large margins.
But the numbers get worse when looking at specific important voting blocs in the Baton Rouge-based 6th district. Men 55 and older preferred Cazayoux 51 percent to 38 percent, voters who turned out in the special March primary would vote for Cazayoux 53 percent to 39 percent and those voters who said they are definitely going to vote in the special preferred Cazayoux by nine points.
This comes after the shocking results in the recent MS-01 runoff elections, where Democratic voters outnumbered Republicans 36,000-33,000 in a district that voted Republican in 2006 by 66%-34%. These new Democratic candidates are socially and culturally conservative, but they aren’t really Blue Dogs in the common understanding of the term. Fiscal conservatism takes a backseat to better schools, better healthcare, improved infrastructure, and accountable government. The new breed of candidate is likely to oppose free trade, ridicule No Child Left Behind, and to blast the HMO’s, pharmaceuticals, and Big Energy companies. These are not John Breaux’s Democrats.
It’s hard to say how many of these seats are actually going to fall into Democratic hands, but the competitiveness of the special election races is telling. The revival of the Southern Democratic Party appears to depend on jettisoning the pro-corporate business-first policies of the Democratic Leadership Council…or Clintonism. Of course, Clinton lost every southern state except Tennessee and Arkansas.
In the presidential race things are somewhat confused by the racial component which obscures any ideological preference. Clinton and Obama’s blurring strategies on policy also make it difficult for the average voter to see clear distinctions. But when you look at the platforms of the candidates that are running, you can see a clear preference for a populist approach.
What’s really amazing is that the Republicans are this vulnerable in the Deep South. It’s the only place in the country where they are not facing the prospect of giant losses in November. If they lose seats there too, it could be a monumental realignment event.
Part of me is very uncomfortable with more Democrats in the caucus that have bad ideas on immigration and choice. But as long as it is only an add-on to an already realigned Congress, and not the key voting bloc, it will signify that the Democrats are back as the majority governing party for decades to come. And, when it comes to the Bush era, I’d like to see the strongest possible repudiation by the people. The more people, even conservative people, that refuse to vote for or self-identify as Republicans, the better.
How do you feel about it?
I am in favor of the best representation we can get for each congressional district. Of course best is a subjective term, but I would argue that in addition to ethics, and my view on the issues it includes representing their district. That means that if a significant majority of a district is opposed to an issue that I hold I am comfortable supporting a candidate who I otherwise agree with but disagree with on that issues.
If there are too many issues like that then I wouldn’t support them, but chances are they will be better than their general election opponent on some or most issues.
Repubs, if they don’t change, will find themselves extinct based on the growth of the Latino community alone. Lots of folks think the growth is in New York and DC area and the West/West Coast, but our Latino and Latina brothers and sisters are everywhere. They’re just not voting their numbers–yet.
I think we can turn Virginia solidly blue, and Obama can definitely win it. Remember that we voted for the first elected Black governor, and that was done with less favorable demographics. I wouldn’t be surprised to see NC become purple, too–based on demographics and industry needs.
Now places like Alabama and Mississippi? Well, they barely dragged themselves into the 20th century before the 21st began, so it will be slower going. But I think we can have a decidedly less solid South for the repubs, and that is a good thing.
Michael Barone has an interesting column on the primary vote so far.
It’s long and poorly written and filled with snide barbs at effete academics, but it details a truth I noticed as well.
Obama is doing atrociously with Appalachians. Barone calls them Jacksonians, and we might call the Scots-Irish. Whatever you call them, they live in Appalachia and then spread out across northern Alabama and Tennessee, go into Oklahoma, and even fill-up Bakersfield, California (Grapes of Wrath, and all that).
Barone thinks it is more cultural than racial. In his opinion, these folks would support a more martial black man (like Colin Powell) and like Clinton’s combativeness. I think there is something to his thesis, but racism plays the biggest part, in my estimation.
The question is: would Jim Webb do enough to help Obama with this demographic, or should he just give up on them and look for votes elsewhere?
I doubt it but Webb could put Virginia out of reach for McCain. Given the electoral map that for me is reason enough to take him. Another option for this consituency may be Ohio’s Senator Brown.
Overall, I think Democrats who don’t share some of my cultural views on immigration for example or abortion may simply be the price for achieving a governing majority. If they’re populist enough to be with me on healthcare and ending government rule by corporatist fiat – I’ll take ’em. We can stil have enough culturally progressive Democrats to promote sensible policies on immigration and abortion. And perhaps in a few years after the GOP has received a seminal beating, the return of Lincoln Chafee type Republicans as well.
I was a strong advocate of Webb as VP with Obama. Then I started reading his book about the Scots-Irish, “Born Fighting.” I also read the profile of Webb in Tom Brokaw’s “Boom.”
Webb actually personifies the Scots-Irish. He’d rather fight than win. Even worse, he’s never learned the lesson of Vietnam. In fact, he still believes in the Domino Theory!
Webb would be a loose cannon in an Obama administration. In fact, I have serious doubts as to whether he’d accept an offer to be Obama’s VP.
Webb isn’t so much the antithesis of Obama– although you could make a good argument for that– he’s a grenade compared to jet plane.
I think Webb is more nuanced than that. It impressed the hell out of me when early in his term, on ABC’s This Week he spoke about how many people are incarcerated in our prisons. He further indicated that was an issue politicians tended to ignore but he felt deserved some attention. He’s more conservative than me and many here but I think he’s far more nuanced and thoughtful than a caricature. Of course you may be right about his temperment also and that has to be taken into consideration. Ulitimately I expect Obama to select a white male from a red state.
I think Obama can win VA with or without Webb. That said, I think Webb could be a huge help to Obama. They have different styles, but both are perceived to be honest. I’m sure there are other similarities, but that’s what comes to mind now.
I wish Tim Kaine was running, but the Lt. Gov is a rethug and IIRC a pretty wingnut one. That sucks, especially since Gov. Kaine endorsed him last year.
I’d be happy with him, or with Govs. Sebelius or Richardson.
I doubt that an Obama/Webb ticket would pull AL, TN, or OK.
However, a populist campaign with an a VP candidate attractive to Scots-Irish/Jacksonian/etc. could very well swing other states. North Carolina might come into play and don’t discount adding FL panhandle voters to traditional Dem voters in Miami.
Booman, I think Webb would be an awful choice for Obama, and I worked to get Webb elected here in VA. He’s a good guy and a good senator, but Obama really needs to go in another direction. While Obama won’t write off any group, he is going to have a LOT of trouble with Scots-Irish types, and Webb’s not hugely popular here in VA (no coattails). He’ll probably get reelected, but he won because George Allen blew up his own campaign (“macaca”) and even then Webb only barely won.
Besides, I think Obama should accentuate his strengths and not his weaknesses. If I were Obama I’d probably go with Gov. Sebelius from KS – it fits better with his personal narrative, gets a woman progressive on the ticket, and is a way of reaching out to the Midwest and to Republicans (she’s converted a ton of them to Dems in KS).
Not all conservatives are Republicnns. Not by a long shot.
The South is likely to remain culturally distinct for the foreseeable future. Like it or not — and not all of it is bad — it is something that any national party will have to recognize and adapt to. Even a more liberal South is going to be discernably different in countless ways from any other liberal section of the country.
One thing Dems need to be careful about is demonizing the South. All that does is harden the position of our reactionaries and turn off potential allies. The 1850’s were full of incredibly hateful rhetoric from Northerners, and the end result was estrangement and alienation so severe that it led to secession and war. The South didn’t secede because it feared a ban on slavery — something Lincoln was not going to do — but because the starkly sectional results of the 1860 elections meant that the South no longer had much of a voice in the federal government. Slavery was an underlying issue, but equally important — and generally neglected in the victor’s account of history — were taxes and trade tariffs, which were already draining a disproportionate amount of money from the South to subsidize industrial development in the North. It didn’t take a crystal ball to see that the situation was going to get infinitely worse under the Republicans.
This is relevant to the present day because many Southerners see the federal government as the enemy. Conservative Southerners see it as culturally alien, and many liberal Southerners see it as almost inhumanly indifferent to the welfare of the people. Southern poverty was, after all, the result of the War and the plundering that passed for “reconstruction” followed by a century of malign neglect for both blacks and poor whites, and the Katrina debacle only underscores the fact that nothing has changed. If Democrats want to make inroads into the South, they need to be prepared to spend money to help people.
As for the Scots-Irish, I recommend you read W.J. Cash’s classic The Mind of the South. Poor whites suffered a great deal under slavery as well, since it essentially shut them out of what could have been paying jobs. The planter class put a lot of energy into manipulating poor whites, encouraging racial solidarity to get the poor to identify with the interests of the rich instead of their natural allies, the black slaves. A poor white man might not have much, he was told, but at least he wasn’t doing “nigger work”. It’s the same dynamic that leads the poor to vote for Republicans against their interests today, though it is as often religion and culture that serve as tools of deception for the rich as it is race. If you want progress, this is the key divide that must be healed. As long as poor whites and blacks in the South view each other as other, they will remain pawns of the rich.
Fantastic comment! Comprehensive and informative. Thank you.
Overall I agree with you assessment– especially about NOT DEMONIZING THE SOUTH.
We could argue the rest of our lives about THE major cause of the Civil War but the minutes of secession conventions (which led to secession) are pretty clear that the threat to slavery was the fuse that blew the powder keg. In the minds of Southerners, restricting slavery from new territories meant the end of slavery.
On to today. Color-blind populism is the key to being competitive in the South. In fact, I think Obama really needs to run a populist campaign to pick up southwestern, mid-western and northwestern states. A well-executed populist campaign would make him surprisingly competitive in certain southern states, eg. NC, and tie down GOP money where they thought McCain was safe.
Where Obama stands on affirmative action will be a major sticking point.
Heh. No kidding. Entire careers have been built on the subject.
Indeed. The transcripts of the debates in the Georgia state legislature are particularly clear on that point, going on at length about the unparalleled wealth in the slave trade itself, never mind the economic value of slave labor.
I only mention the other issues because they tend to be obscured in the official histories. I think it’s pretty clear that without slavery, there would have been no war, and probably — though not certainly — no secession. But I also think it can be reasonably argued that without the other issues, slavery alone would not have been enough to sunder the Union. The importance of slavery, as opposed to issues like the tariff and the division of power between the states and the federal government, is that it was such a polarizing issue that it drove both sides to irreconcilable positions. Once North and South reached the point they could not even speak to each other as equals, secession and war became inevitable.
That’s what’s scary to me about the current highly polarized state of the nation as a whole and of our party. No good comes out of divisions as strong and deep as we have now. As we heal the divisions that face us today, we have to take care not to create new ones. And that’s what’s so promising about Dean’s 50 state strategy: it doesn’t write off any part of the country as irrelevant, and it doesn’t set one section of the country against another. If Barack Obama can add to that the beginnings of a reconciliation between the races, we might have a bright future indeed.
I don’t think that you can separate the issues. If there had been no slavery then, in all probability, southern states would have evolved similarly to northern states. Therefore, the tariff issue would have been at least less troublesome in that it wouldn’t have set entire sections of the nation against each other. (Admittedly, I’m theorizing a little blindly here. It’s been a while since I studied the causes of the Civil War.)
With that quibble aside, I absolutely agree with your warning against further polarization and alienation.
If an Obama Presidency comes to pass then we have the potential to move into the long-delayed last stage of Reconstruction: Peace and Reconciliation. I don’t hold Obama to be the Second Coming but he does represent the possibility of breaking with the social and political dynamic that has been skewing American politics since Reconstruction Interruptus.
Should Obama pursue the theme of his Philadelphia speech– recognizing the discontent of whites with what they view as “reverse discrimination” and offering equitable, color-blind populist solutions– then I think that he can win over many working class and middle class whites.
As you point out, race, economics and class can’t be treated as separate issues in America.
No “color-blind” populism will succeed in the South.
The reason America does not have universal health care is that working class whites are afraid that the government is going to give free benefits to blacks and make the white workers pay for it. The same is true for every needed government benefits. That’s the source of the whole “I did it myself with no help” ideology.
The corporate elites can split the working class whites and blacks on a race basis every time (and religion is another proxy for race in the South.)
Until the race issue is surfaced and dealt with, progressivism is a dead letter in the South. End the Iraq war, get economic stability back (both possible within two years, though my bet is that the economic mess will continue getting worse the rest of this year and will not start getting better until 2010 at the earliest) and the rest of the progressive platform will end at that point.
“Color-blind” means leaving race as the elephant in the room where it has been since the end of the Civil Rights movement in the 70’s. No one will speak of it without being shouted down by the frightened conservatives for “being racist” and politics will return to paralysis except when big money wants something.
Chicken or egg?
Let’s get Obama elected and then hope that he can create a peace and reconciliation movement.
My point is that progressives can’t try to get their wish list enacted without simultaneously addressing the racism that is being used to sideline progressive actions.
Chicken or egg implies a sequence – that’s a sure failure. Both have to be addressed simultaneously. Hard? Yeah, but trying to go sequentially with whatever progressive platform is the priority and then later or separately dealing with racism will lose.
The elites have been doing that to the rest of us since the 17th century.
“The planter class put a lot of energy into manipulating poor whites, encouraging racial solidarity to get the poor to identify with the interests of the rich instead of their natural allies, the black slaves.”
Sounds like the approach of today’s planter class, the Repukeliscum Party.
It’s the same dynamic that leads the poor to vote for Republicans against their interests today, though it is as often religion and culture that serve as tools of deception for the rich as it is race. If you want progress, this is the key divide that must be healed.
You’re right, but I have to ask this decidedly un-PC question and I sincerely apologize in advance: Are there enough who want that divide healed? Because they’ve been getting punked on this for the better part of 200 years, and it’s frustrating. Folks don’t have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of, but by God, they
have white skinare Americans!I mean, really…can you eat that flag lapel pin? And don’t let the flag hit you in the face while you’re waving it, either, because it was probably made in China.
Those are the issues, and yet…
What’s the best way to get folks to focus on what’s in their wallets (or not) than a social construct designed to distract?
It’s most important to destroy the Republican Party. Right now, the Repubs are no more than a crime syndicate that is looting the country for all they can. As long as someone is willing to fight that crime syndicate, they are OK with me.
As a progressive, I want the most progressive representative I can get for that district. In a D+10, I want a diehard liberal. In a D+0, I want a decent progressive. In a R+7, I’m just happy if we can get the seat and the Dem is willing to fight against Republican treachery. I think Cazayoux fits the bill.
I don’t think it’s right to tell southern Democrats what kind of Democrats are acceptable. However, I think Cazayoux is a pretty good Democrat. I won’t be donating to his campaign, but I definitely hope he wins.
If we do attain a large majority in 2008, there will be a power struggle within the party to set the agenda. The good news is that progressives will have a huge advantage on that front with President Obama and Speaker Pelosi. Reid will be outmatched. We do have to make an effort to defeat the blue dogs come 2008. If we don’t defeat them, we might end up with a center-right agenda. Even so, I think we’re way ahead of them. We’re the favorites to win the struggle.
I can already see the divide on the internets. The primary has been long and annoying, but a more interesting controversy has arisen. Blogs like MyDD have become partisan Democratic blogs, and there is a contingent on Swing State Project that is more partisan than liberal. Open Left and Daily Kos (not unanimously at DKos) are more left-wing. The SSP’s commenters are already annoyed that we support “unelectable liberals” in competitive elections. We’re going to have to become less partisan and more progressive in the future: “better and better Democrats.”