Many pundits say President Bush is sitting pretty, but this year began
with new poll data telling a very different story. A national Harris
survey, completed on Jan. 1 for Time magazine and CNN, found that just 51
percent of respondents said they were “likely” to vote for Bush in
November, compared to 46 percent “unlikely.” When people were asked to
“choose between Howard Dean, the Democrat, and George W. Bush, the
Republican,” the margin for Bush was only 51-43, and when the survey
focused on “likely voters” the gap narrowed to 51-46.
While other polls have some different numbers, clearly the race for
the White House could be quite close. But one of the obstacles to
Democratic success is the pretense of having a chance to carry a bunch of
Southern states. Actually, for a Democratic presidential campaign in
2004 -- in terms of money, travel time, rhetoric and espoused ideology --
Dixie is a sinkhole.
In 2000, the Bush-Cheney campaign swept all of the South, albeit with
electoral thievery in Florida.
The percentage margins were double-digit in Alabama, Georgia,
Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and Texas. But
leading Democrats show no signs of acknowledging what ought to be
self-evident: They should not exert their presidential campaign to troll
for electoral votes in such states any more than the Bush team will push to
win in Massachusetts or Hawaii.
During the Jan. 4 debate in Iowa, responding to a question about how
he plans to “reach out” to “particularly white Southern voters who no
longer even consider Democratic candidates,” Sen. John Kerry offered
patriotic-sounding flourishes. “I am a veteran,” he said. “I’ve fought in a
war. They particularly respect service to country in the South.”
Then Kerry added a real doozy: “And in the end, if I’m the nominee, I
could always pick a running mate from the South, and we’ll do just fine.”
But in 2000, even with a Southerner at the top, the Democratic ticket
did not get a single electoral vote from the South. So this year, in the
South, how could a ticket headed by Kerry “do just fine”?
Such posturing is partly a charade for the primary season. Several
Democratic candidates are concentrating appreciable resources on the South
Carolina primary, for instance, because they could win some early delegates
there. Yet, come November, the likelihood of South Carolina’s electoral
votes going to the Democratic ticket is on a par with the chances that
Laura Bush will publicly express a fervent desire to marry Dennis Kucinich.
At the risk of riling some political journalists, the Democrats should
stop kidding themselves about the South in this year’s presidential
campaign. “The 2000 election left us with a map split between blue states
and red states,” Joe Velasquez and Steve Cobble write in the Jan. 5 edition
of The Nation magazine. “The conventional wisdom is that a Northern
nominee, to win, will have to find a way to convert some of the old
Confederate gray from red to blue. But most Southern states are burial
grounds for Northern Democrats, not battlegrounds.”
Velasquez and Cobble make a persuasive case. “For almost 40 years
now,” they point out, “the white South has been moving steadily into the
Republican ranks. Indeed, white Southerners now run the GOP and provide a
very high proportion of its cultural shock troops. Given these facts, we
believe it’s past time to target the electoral map in a different way. The
new path to the White House runs through the Latino Southwest, not the
former Confederacy, especially for a Northern nominee. Hope blooms as a
cactus flower, not a magnolia blossom.”
Longtime progressive electoral strategists, Velasquez and Cobble
single out three states with booming Latino populations -- Arizona, Nevada
and Colorado -- carried by Bush in 2000 but within striking distance for
the Democratic ticket in 2004. Also, they note, New Mexico was “essentially
a dead heat” won by Al Gore.
“When considering the Latino vote,” they write, “reflect on this
potentially empowering statistic: There are as many unregistered Latinos
who are American citizens as there were Latino voters in 2000 -- more than
5.5 million. These potential voters are not likely Bush voters, despite
Republican rhetoric.”
According to Velasquez and Cobble, “re-defeating George W. Bush in
2004 hinges on holding blue states on both coasts, making gains in the
Midwest from West Virginia through Ohio to Missouri and adding New
Hampshire -- and registering and mobilizing massive numbers of Latino
voters in the Southwest and Florida.” They conclude: “Mobilizing the
fast-rising Southwestern Latino population around the same progressive
economic issues that can also unite poor whites and African-Americans is
the ticket to ride in 2004.”
The notion of carrying several Southern states is often encouraged by
media pundits eager for a more “moderate” Democratic standard bearer. But
the Dixie trip is a dead end. And a fixation on the conservative
sensibilities of white Southerners is apt to tilt the ticket away from the
kind of political message that could resonate sufficiently elsewhere to
mean victory.
_________________________________
Norman Solomon’s weekly syndicated column is archived at
www.fair.org/media-beat.
