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Tiger Beer
Joined: 07 Feb 2003
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 Posted: Fri Nov 14, 2008 8:00 pm Post subject: A New, Blue Dixie |
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http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081201/moser
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It was hot as Hades on June 5 in the little mountain town of Bristol, Virginia. But that didn't stop hundreds of southwest Virginians--in the most staunchly Republican part of a state that hadn't voted Democratic for president since 1964--from streaming into the local high school gym to whoop it up for a liberal, mixed-race fellow from Chicago with a mighty suspicious moniker. Fresh off his lopsided, nomination-clinching primary victory in North Carolina, Barack Obama had chosen--to the mystification of political experts--to launch his general election campaign not in the "battlegrounds" of Pennsylvania or Ohio but in a remote Southern backwater containing 17,000 souls who'd given George W. Bush 64 percent of their vote in 2004.
Strangest of all, he spoke to these people in exactly the same way he had addressed stadiums full of urbanites in Philadelphia or Cleveland. "It's not just struggles overseas. It's also struggles here at home that are causing so much anxiety," he declared without the merest hint of a drawl. "Everywhere I go, I meet people. They are struggling to get by. We just went through an economic expansion period...where corporate profits were up, the stock market was up...and the average family income went down by a thousand dollars. The first time it had ever happened since World War II where the economy's growing, but you have less money in your pocket."
The folks in Bristol cheered at that, and they listened attentively as Obama detailed his healthcare plan. But what brought them to their feet was this: "When I announced [my candidacy] I was convinced the American people were tired of being divided--divided by race, divided by religion, divided by region."
From the start of his campaign, when he brashly promised to compete and win in Southern states, Obama grasped something that only Howard Dean, among Democratic heavyweights, had recognized: not only was the South changing fast, demographically and culturally, but nobody had more reason to be sick to death of all those artificial divisions than Southerners themselves. For forty years, the South had been shunned and denigrated by national Democrats who looked at the country's largest chunk of voters and saw nothing but a uniform sea of racist, fundamentalist, xenophobic dimwits.
Efforts to appeal to these mental and moral midgets, Democratic pundit Tom Schaller argued in his much-cited 2006 book, Whistling Past Dixie, had only watered down the party's progressive message. "When Democrats give the president authority to start a preemptive war in Iraq, they accede to Southern bellicosity," Schaller wrote. "When Democrats go soft on defending social policies, they lend credence to the Southernized, 'starve the beast' mentality of governance. When Democrats scramble around to declare that they, too, have moral values, they kneel in the pews of southern evangelism. This absurdist catering to the worst fitting, least supportive component of the Democratic coalition must cease."
"Everybody always makes the mistake of looking South," John Kerry repeatedly huffed during the 2004 primaries. Like Al Gore before him, Kerry avoided that "mistake" with a vengeance, shutting down his campaign efforts in every Southern state but Florida before Labor Day and refusing to set foot, even once, in Democratic-trending states like Virginia during the general election campaign. The South? Republicans could have it.
Obama begged to differ. Conventional wisdom advised Democratic presidential candidates to bend over backward to look like "regular" Southern guys--tote a gun, adopt an accent, pretend to be a NASCAR freak, run around with a Holy Bible tucked under each arm and, if all else failed, campaign atop a hay bale (as Michael Dukakis once did in North Carolina). Obama, precisely the kind of Democrat who was supposed to be an impossible sell in the South, eschewed such fakery. He looked South and saw not stereotypes but--wonder of wonders!--Americans.
The Senator from Illinois showed up to campaign not just in exploding urban and suburban areas (where he won big) but also in towns like Bristol. He talked--seriously, soberly, in detail--about healthcare, the climate crisis, education and kitchen-table economics. He understood that while most Southerners remain cultural traditionalists, they are also increasingly progressive on economic and environmental issues. That insight best explains why Obama won three of the region's five largest states (Virginia, North Carolina and Florida), and earned the fifty-five electoral votes that lifted him from a narrow victory to a landslide.
And voil�! The wedge issues that had fueled the GOP's Southern successes ever since Richard Nixon became afterthoughts, not obsessions--try as the Republicans did to stoke the same old fires. It was in Guilford County, North Carolina, where Sarah Palin made her controversial proclamation that she was happy to be in "Real America." On election day, Guilford County went 59 to 41 percent for Obama, a nine-point swing from 2004.
As soon as the incongruous results from Dixie came in, the pundits and pols began scrambling to explain them away. Surely something fluky had happened. Obama had won, some said, on the strength of record black turnout and support--eliding the fact that he'd won considerably more white votes in the region than Kerry, and that the most heavily black states in the South had remained Republican. It had been such a historically lousy year for Republicans, others insisted, that they were bound to lose even some Southern turf--ignoring the fact that Obama made his gains by out-organizing Southern Republicans for the first time in modern history. (In North Carolina alone, the campaign had fifty field offices and more than 20,000 volunteers.)
Regionwide, Obama won the majority of the under-35 vote from all races. He doubled Kerry's vote among young white evangelicals. He blew McCain away among Latinos--the South's swing vote of the future. And he did it with the same message and same organizing that fueled his victory in the rest of the country. America, he said shortly before the election in another Virginia town, Roanoke, "will rise or fall as one nation."
As we say in the South, it's about damn time.
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ReeseDog
Joined: 05 Apr 2008
Location: Classified
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| Posted: Fri Nov 14, 2008 8:24 pm Post subject: Re: A New, Blue Dixie |
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| Tiger Beer wrote: |
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081201/moser
| Quote: |
It was hot as Hades on June 5 in the little mountain town of Bristol, Virginia. But that didn't stop hundreds of southwest Virginians--in the most staunchly Republican part of a state that hadn't voted Democratic for president since 1964--from streaming into the local high school gym to whoop it up for a liberal, mixed-race fellow from Chicago with a mighty suspicious moniker. Fresh off his lopsided, nomination-clinching primary victory in North Carolina, Barack Obama had chosen--to the mystification of political experts--to launch his general election campaign not in the "battlegrounds" of Pennsylvania or Ohio but in a remote Southern backwater containing 17,000 souls who'd given George W. Bush 64 percent of their vote in 2004.
Strangest of all, he spoke to these people in exactly the same way he had addressed stadiums full of urbanites in Philadelphia or Cleveland. "It's not just struggles overseas. It's also struggles here at home that are causing so much anxiety," he declared without the merest hint of a drawl. "Everywhere I go, I meet people. They are struggling to get by. We just went through an economic expansion period...where corporate profits were up, the stock market was up...and the average family income went down by a thousand dollars. The first time it had ever happened since World War II where the economy's growing, but you have less money in your pocket."
The folks in Bristol cheered at that, and they listened attentively as Obama detailed his healthcare plan. But what brought them to their feet was this: "When I announced [my candidacy] I was convinced the American people were tired of being divided--divided by race, divided by religion, divided by region."
From the start of his campaign, when he brashly promised to compete and win in Southern states, Obama grasped something that only Howard Dean, among Democratic heavyweights, had recognized: not only was the South changing fast, demographically and culturally, but nobody had more reason to be sick to death of all those artificial divisions than Southerners themselves. For forty years, the South had been shunned and denigrated by national Democrats who looked at the country's largest chunk of voters and saw nothing but a uniform sea of racist, fundamentalist, xenophobic dimwits.
Efforts to appeal to these mental and moral midgets, Democratic pundit Tom Schaller argued in his much-cited 2006 book, Whistling Past Dixie, had only watered down the party's progressive message. "When Democrats give the president authority to start a preemptive war in Iraq, they accede to Southern bellicosity," Schaller wrote. "When Democrats go soft on defending social policies, they lend credence to the Southernized, 'starve the beast' mentality of governance. When Democrats scramble around to declare that they, too, have moral values, they kneel in the pews of southern evangelism. This absurdist catering to the worst fitting, least supportive component of the Democratic coalition must cease."
"Everybody always makes the mistake of looking South," John Kerry repeatedly huffed during the 2004 primaries. Like Al Gore before him, Kerry avoided that "mistake" with a vengeance, shutting down his campaign efforts in every Southern state but Florida before Labor Day and refusing to set foot, even once, in Democratic-trending states like Virginia during the general election campaign. The South? Republicans could have it.
Obama begged to differ. Conventional wisdom advised Democratic presidential candidates to bend over backward to look like "regular" Southern guys--tote a gun, adopt an accent, pretend to be a NASCAR freak, run around with a Holy Bible tucked under each arm and, if all else failed, campaign atop a hay bale (as Michael Dukakis once did in North Carolina). Obama, precisely the kind of Democrat who was supposed to be an impossible sell in the South, eschewed such fakery. He looked South and saw not stereotypes but--wonder of wonders!--Americans.
The Senator from Illinois showed up to campaign not just in exploding urban and suburban areas (where he won big) but also in towns like Bristol. He talked--seriously, soberly, in detail--about healthcare, the climate crisis, education and kitchen-table economics. He understood that while most Southerners remain cultural traditionalists, they are also increasingly progressive on economic and environmental issues. That insight best explains why Obama won three of the region's five largest states (Virginia, North Carolina and Florida), and earned the fifty-five electoral votes that lifted him from a narrow victory to a landslide.
And voil�! The wedge issues that had fueled the GOP's Southern successes ever since Richard Nixon became afterthoughts, not obsessions--try as the Republicans did to stoke the same old fires. It was in Guilford County, North Carolina, where Sarah Palin made her controversial proclamation that she was happy to be in "Real America." On election day, Guilford County went 59 to 41 percent for Obama, a nine-point swing from 2004.
As soon as the incongruous results from Dixie came in, the pundits and pols began scrambling to explain them away. Surely something fluky had happened. Obama had won, some said, on the strength of record black turnout and support--eliding the fact that he'd won considerably more white votes in the region than Kerry, and that the most heavily black states in the South had remained Republican. It had been such a historically lousy year for Republicans, others insisted, that they were bound to lose even some Southern turf--ignoring the fact that Obama made his gains by out-organizing Southern Republicans for the first time in modern history. (In North Carolina alone, the campaign had fifty field offices and more than 20,000 volunteers.)
Regionwide, Obama won the majority of the under-35 vote from all races. He doubled Kerry's vote among young white evangelicals. He blew McCain away among Latinos--the South's swing vote of the future. And he did it with the same message and same organizing that fueled his victory in the rest of the country. America, he said shortly before the election in another Virginia town, Roanoke, "will rise or fall as one nation."
As we say in the South, it's about damn time.
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Virginia's only the northern titty-tip of the land of cotton, there, Tiger. The rest of Dixie is pretty solidly conservative. Check your map.
How's China, by the way? |
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Tiger Beer
Joined: 07 Feb 2003
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| Posted: Fri Nov 14, 2008 9:00 pm Post subject: |
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I'm not the author of the article, or the editor of that newspaper.
You might want to direct your comments to them for geography, not to me. |
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Milwaukiedave
Joined: 02 Oct 2004
Location: Goseong
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| Posted: Fri Nov 14, 2008 10:51 pm Post subject: |
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| One of the reasons Obama was able to compete in Virginia and North Carolina is because he had a strong presence in those two states during the primary and built an organization that was better and more well funded then McCain's. I wouldn't say Florida is really a "southern state" per se since it seems to have more of a diverse population. |
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bucheon bum
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
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| Posted: Sat Nov 15, 2008 8:33 am Post subject: |
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For South, a Waning Hold on National Politics
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What may have ended on Election Day, though, is the centrality of the South to national politics. By voting so emphatically for Senator John McCain over Mr. Obama � supporting him in some areas in even greater numbers than they did President Bush � voters from Texas to South Carolina and Kentucky may have marginalized their region for some time to come, political experts say.
The region�s absence from Mr. Obama�s winning formula means it �is becoming distinctly less important,� said Wayne Parent, a political scientist at Louisiana State University. �The South has moved from being the center of the political universe to being an outside player in presidential politics.� |
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Tiger Beer
Joined: 07 Feb 2003
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| Posted: Sat Nov 15, 2008 5:49 pm Post subject: Re: A New, Blue Dixie |
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Some of the things I found most interesting about the article:
BRISTOL, VIRGINIA: This is the town that Palin said she was happy to be in the "REAL" America....but then Bristol voted for Obama 59-41. Kinda funny.
It was also interesting that Obama just approached the southern states much like he would approach any other state. They made a reference that other politicians try to make themselves look and act as southern as possible when approaching the region.
I also didn't realize that KERRY shut down his campaign efforts in every Southern state except for Florida (if that is even counted as a southern state). |
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mises
Joined: 05 Nov 2007
Location: retired
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| Posted: Sat Nov 15, 2008 11:13 pm Post subject: |
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| Florida is the South. Miami-Dade, maybe not. But the rest of it is. |
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