Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/072792/07279925.000

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                                                                                THE CAMPAIGN, Page 45

Courting Dixie


Forget California or New York -- the South is a prize the Democrats
must win to claim the White House

By STANLEY W. CLOUD


    Like Katharina and Petruchio in Shakespeare's The Taming
of the Shrew, the Democrats and the South have long had trouble
deciding whether they would rather fight or make love.
Beginning in 1948, Southern voters, traditionally Democratic,
became increasingly embittered by the national party's liberal
tendencies. As a consequence, while the South remained more or
less true to local and congressional Democrats, it began playing
the field where presidential candidates were concerned. The
Democrats toyed with the idea of a divorce, hoping to capture
the White House with just the North and the West. But the
landslide defeats of 1984 and 1988 put an end to that, and last
week the chastened party turned southward again by nominating
Southerners for both President and Vice President. Said Georgian
Jimmy Carter, as he prepared to address the delegates: "I think
I've heard more Southern accents here this week than at the
convention that nominated me in '76."

    The strategy is not complicated. The 11 states of the old
Confederacy control 147 of the 270 electoral votes necessary to
win. Just three border states -- Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri
-- would add 34 votes to the equation. Better yet, for
candidates who can appeal to it, the South has often voted as
a bloc. A candidate who carries the region can pick and choose
among the rest of the states to put together a winning
combination. The South, plus New York, California, Ohio and
Michigan, for example, yields an electoral-vote total of 307.
Carter's election in 1976 was a textbook illustration of how the
arithmetic works. The former Georgia Governor carried the entire
South (except Virginia) and defeated Gerald Ford by 57 electoral
votes, even though Carter won only one non-Southern state west
of the Mississippi River and had only a 2-percentage-point edge
in the popular vote. Says Carter: "I don't think that
mathematically the Democratic Party has much of a chance to win
this year without carrying most of the South."

    The team of Bill Clinton and Al Gore aimed to repeat the
Carter performance by using Clinton's strong base among Southern
blacks, while benefiting from a three-way split of the white
vote with George Bush and Ross Perot. Clinton, says senior
strategist James Carville, "is the first candidate since Carter
to have significant black support in his own right. He has the
network. He has the record." Some key Southern Democrats,
including Carter's former press secretary Jody Powell, estimate
that with Perot in the race they needed only about 20% of the
white vote, plus the black vote, in order to carry the South;
with Perot out, the same experts estimate that Clinton-Gore will
have to get at least 30% of the white vote.

    Another problem -- for Republicans as well as Democrats --
is that the old "Solid South" has begun to lose some of its
solidity. As more and more Northerners have moved to the Sunbelt
in search of jobs, warmer winters, cleaner air and affordable
suburbs, and as telecommunications have bound the nation closer
together, the region has become more diverse, its citizens more
cosmopolitan.

    Thus, it is no simple matter to devise a political
campaign that can appeal to Southern blacks as well as whites,
to Florida motel operators as well as Texas bankers, to South
Carolina cotton growers as well as Virginia lawyers, to
blue-collar as well as white-collar workers. The South, once
derided as a cultural and political backwater, has come to
resemble the rest of America, both physically and in its social
and political attitudes, more closely than at any other time in
the country's history. "Today," says Carter, whose candidacy
helped end the South's isolation, "Oregon doesn't have a much
different philosophy from, say, Florida."

    That is overstating things a bit. For all the changes
during the past two or three decades, the modern South -- about
a third of whose population lives in rural areas -- remains more
conservative than the country as a whole and is more likely to
be turned off by such things as the gay-rights and pro-choice
movements. Understanding that, Republican presidential
candidates from Richard Nixon to Bush have targeted white
Southern voters by stressing economic and social conservatism
-- including thinly veiled appeals to racism, like the notorious
Willie Horton ads of 1988. The results have been divisive but
spectacular. Since 1968, except when Carter won in '76, G.O.P.
presidential candidates have owned the South and the Democrats
have seen their once secure Southern base shrink until its
mainstays were blacks and poor whites. This year the task facing
Clinton and Gore is to reach out to the mostly white voters who
defected during the past quarter-century while remaining true
to their party's civil-rights and economic traditions.

    The South has played a major role in electing Presidents
since the founding of the Republic. In the 20th century, few
candidates have made it to the White House without strong
Southern support. The news from Madison Square Garden last week,
as Clinton and Gore delivered their acceptance speeches in the
soft, rolling accents of the South, was that the Democrats were
back on their old flame's front porch, roses in hand, hoping to
rekindle the spark of passion in her fickle heart.