Walter Jones is a special name in east Carolina, a region that stretches from the tobacco fields of North Carolina's Piedmont to the beaches of the Outer Banks. Jones, a lifelong member of the Democratic Party and one of its leaders, represented this area in Congress for 26 years, until he died in 1992.
Last week, east Carolina voters sent another Walter Jones to Congress -- 51-year-old Walter Jr., a businessman and former state legislator. But the younger Jones personifies the political upheaval that is transforming the once solidly Democratic South: He is a Republican and he ousted a four-term Democratic incumbent as North Carolina voters sent GOP majorities to Congress and to the state legislature.
Jones served in the state legislature for 10 years as a Democrat while his father represented North Carolina's First District, heading the House Merchant Marine and Fisheries Committee. But about five years ago, the younger Jones says, he began to question his allegiance to his father's party. "The Democratic Party in my 30s and 40s was a party of moderates to conservatives," he explains. "But I didn't see much room in the party for conservatives anymore. ... It came down to the question, `Do I fit in?'"
Sitting at the desk that once graced his father's congressional office, the soft-spoken congressman-elect insists that the Democrats were drifting in the wrong direction. "People are just tired of so much government," says Jones, who runs an insurance business and a lighting-fixture company. "When you're in business for yourself, you have to be conservative."
When his father announced plans to retire at the end of 1992, Jones ran for the First District seat. The district was one of two in the state that had been created under a federal court order to give African-Americans a better chance to be elected. Jones lost the Democratic primary to Eva Clayton, who went on to become the first black woman ever elected to Congress from North Carolina.
After that loss, he switched parties -- and districts. This time around, he ran from the Third District, a mostly white area of tobacco and hog farms in the Piedmont and fishing and resort communities on the coast that had voted Republican in presidential and U.S. Senate races. Reapportionment had given Jones's new district many of his father's old voters and considerable name recognition. Jones signed Newt Gingrich's conservative "Contract With America," linked his opponent, H. Martin Lancaster, to Bill Clinton and advocated term limits for members of Congress, an idea he readily admits his father did not endorse.
But Jones says his father would understand: "The last time I saw him conscious, he said he understood my decision. He felt the party had become too liberal for him and me."
