by Jerelyn Eddings; Jill Jordan Sieder; Katia Hetter
When Rep. John Spratt Jr. came to the Cotton Pickin' Festival this month to greet voters in the one-traffic-light town of Clio, S.C., the six-term Democrat was confronted by one of his Republican opponent's more aggressive supporters. "Did you serve in the military?" demanded the man, who identified himself as a Vietnam veteran. When the congressman politely responded that he had worked in the Pentagon during Vietnam, the veteran snapped that he knew "our coward-in-chief didn't."
Bill Clinton is only one of the Democratic Party's problems this year in the once solid South. Republican strategists are hoping a wave of victories in November will transform the region's political landscape -- and propel the GOP to control of Congress. Republicans are expected to make gains this year in every state of the Old South, with the possible exception of Bill Clinton's native Arkansas, as the region demonstrates both its own political evolution and a stronger-than-average desire to send the president a midterm election message. "The stakes in the 1994 election are enormous for the South," says Earl Black, a Southern politics expert at Rice University in Houston. "For the first time in history, Republicans are so competitive they are looking at a majority of Senate seats, House seats and governorships in the South."
The South, which elected no Republican officeholders in the post-Reconstruction era and a paltry handful in the civil rights Sixties, is now arguably the strongest Republican growth area in the country. There are three Republican governors in the region's 11 states, and the GOP is hoping to hold on to the Statehouse in South Carolina and pick up as many as four additional governorships. In Florida and Texas, Democratic incumbents Lawton Chiles and Ann Richards face challenges from two sons of George Bush, Jeb and George W. (story, Page 35). Georgia Gov. Zell Miller is locked in a tough fight with a political novice, Guy Millner, whose daily ads show Miller endorsing Bill Clinton for president in 1992. There are hotly contested races in Alabama and Tennessee, too.
GOP strategists also hope to gain at least 10 to 15 congressional seats in Southern districts such as Spratt's Fifth District in South Carolina and retiring 27-term Rep. Jamie Whitten's First District of Mississippi, which have sent only Democrats to Washington in modern times. And there is at least a fighting chance that Republicans could unseat well-known Sens. Charles Robb in Virginia and Jim Sasser in Tennessee.
In South Carolina, gleeful Republicans are hoping to become part of the GOP tide by retaining the governor's office, which they have held for eight years; picking up the lieutenant governor's and attorney general's offices; gaining two new congressional seats, which would give the state a majority Republican delegation, and achieving the heretofore unthinkable in the South: control of the state legislature. "We hope to take it back to one-party rule -- our party," beams Trey Walker, executive director of the state Republican headquarters in Columbia.
The impact of this shift is national as well as sectional, as the South begins producing strong national Republican leaders. Haley Barbour of Mississippi is chairman of the Republican Party; Rep. Newt Gingrich of Georgia is sure to be the next House Republican leader, and prominent Southern Republicans such as Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas and Gov. Carroll Campbell Jr. of South Carolina are mentioned as 1996 presidential hopefuls.
From Virginia to Florida and west to Texas, the story is much the same. While Southern GOP leaders are hot tickets in this fall's congressional campaigns, Democrats are running scared from their own president, particularly in the South with its pro- military, fundamentalist Christian bent. The president has made enemies even among Democrats who backed him two years ago.
Albatross. "I voted for Clinton, but he hasn't filled the seat as he should have," says Bill Thurmond, a security officer from Sumter, a town at the southern end of South Carolina's Fifth District. "I called people in five states and asked them to support Clinton in 1992. If there was an election tomorrow, I'd call the same people and ask them to vote against him." Asked to list his complaints, Thurmond summarizes his disgust by telling a reporter: "You ain't got enough paper."
Part of the problem is that many voters think Clinton campaigned as a neoconservative Southern Democrat -- stingy with tax dollars and tough on crime -- but that he has pursued a liberal agenda in office. Southern legislators who voted with the president on his 1993 economic stimulus bill or this year's crime bill, which banned 19 types of semiautomatic assault weapons, have become particular targets of voter wrath.
Those like Rep. Don Johnson of Georgia's 10th Congressional District, who ran as conservatives but switched their votes under pressure to support the president, are particularly vulnerable. "We had a major Sunday lead editorial that said Johnson had sold out," says Phillip Kent, editorial page editor of the Augusta Chronicle, which endorsed the Democrat in 1992. "The Clinton thing is really hurting Don Johnson."
But there is a mix of other factors, as well, behind the Republican optimism. Among them: disaffection among whites with the Democrats' policies, often associated with government spending on unpopular social programs; an influx of industries and workers who came South to escape big government and high taxes in the North; the arrival of well-off retirees who come for the sun and don't want higher taxes to eat up their fixed incomes; the political emergence of the Christian right, and the Democrats' stand on an eternal issue in the South -- race. "The Democrats are becoming the party of blacks and liberal-to- moderate whites," says Merle Black, a political scientist at Emory University in Atlanta. "As the party becomes more black, the people who originally belonged to it don't feel it's their party anymore."
Losing two ways. The presidential campaigns of Jesse Jackson and the increased number of black Democrats in Congress, elected largely from black-majority districts drawn under voting-rights guidelines, have strengthened that impression among whites, although Southern blacks still complain of being taken for granted by the Democrats. And the creation of 12 new black- majority congressional districts in the South after the 1990 Census also had the unintended effect of making surrounding districts whiter, further improving Republican chances outside the black districts.
"I don't want to be indelicate or appear racist, because I'm not," says Tom Gettys, an 82-year-old moderate Democrat who represented South Carolina's Fifth District in Congress from 1965 to 1975. "But one of my former colleagues once said that when Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves he guaranteed that the South would be Democratic for a century, and when Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, he guaranteed it would be Republican for the next century."
A Spratt supporter, Gettys doesn't attribute the entire movement toward the Republicans to the Democrats' embrace of civil rights and black advancement. But political experts observe that the GOP's improving fortunes among white Southerners have coincided with the advancement of blacks in the Democratic Party. What they describe amounts to political white flight.
At the Cotton Pickin' Festival in Clio, Fran and Jerry Robinson, a middle-aged couple selling oil paintings, explain why they will vote Republican this year. "My family was Democratic, but a lot of issues changed us from the Democratic Party," says Jerry, who retired early from his job as a utility maintenance worker at the Rockwell International plant in nearby York. "We have certain religious beliefs," adds Fran, a transplanted New Yorker, "and the Democratic Party doesn't stand for them. I guess we consider ourselves the religious right, because that's what they call us
