Now it is the GOP with the Dixie problem. The Republican Party faces an uphill battle in 2008, defending 21 of 33 Senate seats. Below, Meyerson reflects on the GOP selecting 2 Southerners, Trent Lott and Mitch McConnell as their Senate leadership. Likewise, in the statehouses, Democrats now control 28 Governorships, as well as a majority of state legislatures. So who did the Democrats and Republicans choose as respective heads of their national Governors Associations? The Democrats chose Kansas Kathleen Sebelius, a very successful moderate who not only won reelection with a 58% majority in a Red state, but she persuaded 9 seated Republicans to switch parties and run as Democrats. The Republicans, on the other hand, chose the safety of Georgias Sonny Perdue to head their Governors Association.
When Bush leaves office, the voters, already weary and distrustful of Bush43 key players, will face a field of relatively unknown candidates except for high profile presidential candidates. It is assumed that older Republican lawmakers who do not relish serving in the minority after 12 years of abusing the legislative parliamentary process will retire by 2008. In 2006, the Democrats finally faced this challenge, emerging with a new class of moderates, some leaning progressive, some leaning conservative. With demographics in their favor, they are positioned to dominate national elections for the next 2 election cycles. By comparison, the GOPs identity crises and retreat to familiar Southern ground portends significant retrenchment and possible secessions over the next two years and beyond. Under Bush43s Rovian management, the GOP has marched Back To The Future as the opposition party operating from a regional stronghold that is foreign to many in its traditional base. The loss of Yankee and Sagebrush Republicans seriously undermines the GOPs national appeal and relevance. Bushs incestuous reliance on a small coterie, shuffling trusted loyalists around in various Cabinet positions, further weakens his partys depth of experience in key positions. It shows the isolation and vulnerability of the neoConservative branch, manifested in the Bush Doctrine of Preemption and its disastrously failed Iraq war, but also in a domestic political battlefield littered with legally-challenged policy decisions and a new class war exemplified by twin economies for the wealthy and the rest of us. In politics, a decade is a lifetime. Now it is the Republicans turn to face their Dixie problem, and look to the future: will they do the harder work of rebuilding territorial strength by recruiting moderates with sustainable policies or again choose an iconic Braveheart and Rovian machinations? The GOP's Southern Exposure By Harold Meyerson, Washington Post, Thursday, December 7, 2006; A31 Meyerson is the editor at large of American Prospect and the political editor of LA Weekly. You've seen the numbers and understand that America is growing steadily less white. You try to push your party, the Grand Old Party, ahead of this curve by taking a tolerant stance on immigration and making common cause with some black churches. Then you go and blow it all in a desperate attempt to turn out your base by demonizing immigrants and running racist ads against Harold Ford. On Election Day, black support for Democrats remains high; Hispanic support for Democrats surges. So what do you do next? What else? Elect Trent Lott your deputy leader in the Senate. Sure locks in the support of any stray voters who went for Strom in '48. In case you haven't noticed, a fundamental axiom of modern American politics has been altered in recent weeks. For four decades, it's been the Democrats who've had a Southern problem. Couldn't get any votes for their presidential candidates there; couldn't elect any senators, then any House members, then any dogcatchers. They still can't, but the Southern problem, it turns out, is really the Republicans'. They've become too Southern -- too suffused with the knee-jerk militaristic, anti-scientific, dogmatically religious, and culturally, sexually and racially phobic attitudes of Dixie -- to win friends and influence elections outside the South. Worse yet, they became more Southern still on Election Day last month, when the Democrats decimated the GOP in the North and West. Twenty-seven of the Democrats' 30 House pickups came outside the South. The Democrats won control of five state legislatures, all outside the South, and took more than 300 state legislative seats away from Republicans, 93% of them outside the South. As for the new Senate Republican caucus that chose Mississippi's Lott over Tennessee's Lamar Alexander to be deputy to Kentucky's Mitch McConnell, 17 of its 49 members come from the Confederacy proper, with another 3 from the old border states of Kentucky and Missouri, and 2 more from Oklahoma, which is Southern but with more dust. In all, 45% of Republican senators come from the Greater South. More problematic, so does most of the Republican message. Following the gospel according to Rove (fear not swing voters but pander to and mobilize thy base), George W. Bush and the Republican Congress, together or separately, had already blocked stem cell research, disparaged nonmilitary statecraft, exalted executive wartime power over constitutional niceties, campaigned repeatedly against gay rights, thrown public money at conservative churches and investigated the tax status of liberal ones. In the process, they alienated not just moderates but Western-state libertarians. The one strategist who fundamentally predicted the new geography of partisan American politics is Tom Schaller, a University of Maryland political scientist whose book "Whistling Past Dixie: How Democrats Can Win Without the South" appeared several months before November's elections. Schaller argued that the Democrats' growth would occur in the Northeast, the industrial Midwest, the Mountain West and the Southwest -- areas where professionals, appalled by Republican Bible Beltery, were trending Democratic and where working-class whites voted their pocketbooks in a way that their Southern counterparts did not. Al Gore carried white voters outside the South, Schaller reminded us; even hapless John Kerry came close. The challenge for Republicans -- and for such presidential aspirants as John McCain, Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney in particular -- is how to bridge the widening gap between their Southern base and the rest of the nation. The persistence of Southern exceptionalism is clear in the networks' exit polls, in which fully half of Southern voters identified themselves as born-again or evangelical Christians, while just one-third of the entire nation's voters did so. It's clear from the fact that in a period of broad economic stagnation, the populism of working-class Southern whites, like a record stuck in a groove, remains targeted more against cultural than economic elites. Indeed, scratch the surface of some of our current hot-button issues and you find age-old regional conflicts. Wal-Mart's practice, for instance, of offering low wages and no benefits to its employees begins in the rural South, where it's no deviation from the norm. Only when Wal-Mart expands this practice to the metropolises of the North and West, threatening the living standards of unionized retail workers, does it encounter roadblocks, usually statutory, to its entry into new markets. So: A Southern low-wage labor system is cruising along until it seeks to expand outside its region and meets fierce opposition from higher-paid workers in the North. Does that suggest any earlier episode in American history? The past, as William Faulkner once wrote of the South, isn't even past. And now the persistence of Southern identity has become a bigger problem for Republicans than it is for Democrats. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/06/AR2006120601 671.html <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/06/AR200612060 1671.html> Compounding the problem for moderation and balance going forward, the 2006 Blue Wave further eroded the ranks of GOP moderates. Two prime examples of this moderate sacrifice were the defeat of Sen. Lincoln Chafee in Rhode Island, who not only did not vote for Bushs reelection but his negative vote sank the John Bolton nomination as UN Ambassador in committee, forcing Bush to install the controversial ideologue via recess appointment. Another moderate sacrificed to the Blue Wave against Bush Republicanism, Rep. Jim Leach of Iowa was defeated despite being judged well by his constituents for his integrity and fairness. He also did not accept PAC money. Nevertheless, voter anger at Bush43 overcame his 30-year career in a DEM-leaning district. In a twist of irony, Leach is a long-straw candidate for the UN post to replace the benched Bolton, although it appears that Bush43 may choose former oil consultant, and now twice Ambassador to Afghanistan and Iraq, the versatile Zalmay Khalilzad as the new Ambassador to the UN. Bushs myopic preoccupation with his own legacy has been at the expense of party and continuity. The Grand Old Party has much work to do if it intends to regain leadership in a nation hungry for checks and balances amidst concerns for new global realities. "The irony of this election is that the public, in seeking change, has . . . weakened the center," Leach said recently. "In a sense, what has occurred is the strengthening of the edges of the parties." The decline in moderates has had a greater impact on Republicans than Democrats. According to Poole's calculations, almost half of House Republicans were moderates 30 years ago, compared to well under 10% today. The professors argue that the decline of moderates in Congress has increased polarization. To some moderate Republicans, the message of the Nov. 7 election was clear: The only path back to the majority is through the political center. With a small and shrinking membership, however, it is unclear whether the moderate wing will have much influence over the future direction of the GOP Since the 2002 midterms, support for the GOP has declined 7% among moderates and 9% among independents, according to exit polls. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/06/AR2006120601 954.html <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/06/AR200612060 1954.html>
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