Regular readers of this blog know that I have a special interest in Southern Democrats, and believe they must remain somewhat competitive if the national party is to have any serious chance of controlling Congress, and of entering presidential contests on an even plane with the GOP. And unlike some Democrats in and out of the region, I also think that a competitive southern party is not at all a lost cause.
Part of that conviction is historical. There have been three big waves of Republican gains in the South since the Civil Right era. The first began in 1964, with the defection of southern segregationists to the Barry Goldwater campaign, and subsided in 1970, when a host of “New South” Democrats like Jimmy Carter, Dale Bumpers, and Reuben Askew swept key gubernatorial races across the region. The second began in 1980, when Republicans swept Senate races in the South; it was reversed in 1986; and after rebuilding and peaking in 1994, subsided in 1996 and 1998, when Democrats made a modest but unmistakable comeback in both presidential and non-presidential contests. We are now in the midst of the third big Republican wave, and you will forgive me for being persistently skeptical that this one is any more “permanent” than the other two.
The Democratic response to the first two waves of the GOP tide was very simple: Democrats began building biracial coalitions that offset defections among conservative white voters. In the Wave I response, Democrats combined strong and hard-earned African-Americans votes with a partial revival of support among rural white voters, often exploiting Republican extremism and incompetence in governance. The apotheosis of the Wave I Democratic comeback was Jimmy Carter’s presidential campaign of 1976, which drew strong support not only from black voters but from Wallace voters, and–a small detail often forgotten–from self-conscious evangelical Christians attracted by Carter’s outspoken “born-again” identity.
Once both rural conservatives and, most conspicuously, “born-agains,” drifted into the Republican coalition between 1980 and 1994, Southern Democrats created a new bipartisan coalition by continuing to earn 90 percent support from African-Americans, while attracting suburban voters and southern “moderates” generally with a message focused on education and other attractive public-sector agenda items. while insulating themselves from the less attractive aspects of the national party, such as “big government” and cultural liberalism. This new biracial coalition helped Bill Clinton carry four southern states in 1996, and lifted Roy Barnes of GA, Don Siegelman of AL, and Jim Hodges of SC, to upset wins in gubernatorial contests in 1998.
The Democratic response to Wave III of GOP success is uncertain, in no small part because Republicans at both the presidential level and down-ballot have re-established their dominance of the suburban vote, while gradually but steadily increasing their hold on rural white voters.
But the obvious models to look at for a Wave III Democratic comeback are three southern governors: Mark Warner of Virginia ( elected in 2001), and Phil Bredesen of Tennessee (elected in 2002), and Mike Easley of North Carolina (elected in 2000 and re-elected easily in 2004).
Bredesen is profiled by Clay Risen in the latest edition of The New Republic (not up now, but soon to appear on www.tnr.com). Everything Risen says about Bredesen could also be said about Warner (indeed, the Tennessean clearly based his campaign on the Virginian’s electoral strategy). Both men are non-southerners and successful high-tech entrepreneurs who (a) exploited divisions in the dominant Republican Party in their states; (b) found ways to neutralize cultural issues without abandoning progressive principles; (c) used their business experience to establish a reputation of competence and to attract other business people to Democratic policy priorities like education; and most important, (d) convinced conservative rural voters that public sector activism and new technologies could create economic opportunity in regions left for dead by conventional Republican economic development strategies.
Easley’s political appeal has followed many of the same patterns, but the Warner/Bredesen model is especially worth pondering because it has succeeded in states where Republicans appeared to be in a permanent ascendency.
Warner and Bredesen created a whole new biracial coalition, on the fly, based on the political opportunities available to them. Warner, for example, won southwest Virginia, a heavily-white, economically strugging region where our last two presidential candidates just got killed. And he did well in central and southside Virginia, areas where many Democratic elected officials had retired or become Republicans, and where the Democratic Party as an institution had become all but invisible.
The $64,000 question, which Risen implicitly raises in discussing Bredesen’s success, is whether such Wave III Democratic candidates are an aberration; a vestige of the fading past; or perhaps a portent for the future.
Risen cites a compelling analysis of southern voting trends by Ron Brownstein that recently appeared in the Los Angeles Times. Aside from documenting the steady erosion of geographical support for Democrats in post-1996 presidential elections, Brownstein notes the formidable rise in the percentage of southern voters self-identifying as “conservative.”
But a comparison of Bill Clinton’s 1996 performance in the South to John Kerry’s in 2004, makes it pretty clear that the rise–or more accurately, the resurgance–of southern conservatism is not necessarily the only cause of the current Republican ascendency, and is not inevitably an immovable object in the way of a Wave III Democratic revival.
In 1996, the ideological profile of southern voters was: 44% moderate, 39% conservative, 17% liberal. In 2004, it was 43% moderate, 40% conservative, 17% liberal. Not a big difference at all.
Clinton lost southern conservatives in 1996 by 55 points, while Kerry lost them by 73. And Clinton won the plurality group of southern moderates by 20 points, while Kerry won them by 4.
Cutting marginally into the Republican dominance of conservatives, and winning a stronger majority of moderates, is the key to Democratic victories in the South. And that’s not at all a different challenge from the one Democrats face nationally.
To the extent that Warner and Bredesen–and in many respects, Mike Easley as well–represent candidacies that have met that challenge in the toughest possible terrain, and because they have done so without repuduating progressive policies important to Democrats in other regions, I would offer these southern governers not only as examples of how Democrats can remain competitive in the South–but of how Democrats nationally can build a new majority.
In the longer run, I personally believe African-American centrist Democratic candidates–like Mike Thurmond and Thurbert Baker of Georgia, and Ron Kirk of Texas, or for that matter, North Carolina’s Harvey Gantt, who was ahead of his time–offer the best avenue for re-establishing a strong biracial coalition in the South, and as Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois illustrates, a great opportunity nationally as well. Wherever they live, African-American candidates tend to understand and share the cultural values that white Democrats so often have trouble addressing, and also embody the opportunity message that is ultimately the key to Democratic success everywhere. And down south, as I have written about before, a two-way biracial coalition, in which white voters support black candidates, is the right way, and the only way, to keep that coalition alive.

Noam Scheiber over at TNR’s &c took a long and thoughtful look at my posts on the possible “bait and switch” strategy underway within the GOP, from Social Security “reform” to tax “reform,” and said he was unpersuaded. He makes some very good points, among them the totemic importance of private retirement accounts to the Bush “legacy,” and to the conservative movement’s agenda of fundamentally wounding the New Deal safety net as quickly as possible.
But I am in turn unpersuaded by the suggestion that conservatives ever, for a moment, stop thinking about their Prime Directive: reshaping federal taxation so that income from work rather than wealth bears the primary burden of financing government. Aside from the Jonathan Chait piece I cited earlier, you should take a look, if you haven’t already, at Nick Confessore’s offering in the New York Times Magazine last weekend, which lays it all out: conservatives are determined to shield all investment and inheritance income from taxation, and are willing to consider a variety of avenues to achieve that goal. Moreover, the Bush administration will without any question offer some sort of tax-cut measure this year, just as it has done for the last four years.
My specific concern, which I probably didn’t articulate that well in earlier posts, is that Republicans, if they are thwarted on Social Security, will exploit legitimate Democratic interest in private retirement savings accounts outside the SocSec system to propose something superficially similar but actually very different: big, general-purpose personal savings accounts available to high earners as a means of sheltering investment income from taxation altogether.
I don’t think Democrats should declare victory on Social Security and then move on to other matters. And for the record, I am agnostic as to whether Republicans are consciously planning a switch from Social Security to taxes in the immediate future. All I’m suggesting is that their likely defeat on Social Security could logically lead GOPers in the direction of another attack on progressive taxation, in a way that will initially be confusing to people who might generally favor new tax breaks for personal retirement savings. And Democrats need to start thinking about that. After all, we should be able to walk and chew gum at the same time.

I’m not calling it Black Thursday or anything, and I don’t endorse protests that suggest Bush stole the 2004 election. But I share the general sense of most Democrats that this is a very different Inaugural Day, definitely more bitter than the one four years ago, despite the disputed outcome of 2000 and the outrageous way it was resolved.
That’s because (a) George W. Bush got re-elected without having to admit a single mistake in his mistake-riddled first term; (b) he won by increasing, not decreasing, the divisions in our country; (c) he enters a second term having systematically undermined any prospect for bipartisanship, and (d) he appears determined to promote the most divisive policies available, domestically and internationally, now that he has survived the “accountability moment” of the 2004 elections.
In other words, he’s done nothing to make this Inaugural event anything other than a gratuitous festival of GOP triumphalism and smug privilege. Predictably, the lines Mike Gerson wrote for his Second Inaugural Address are, compared to the Bush 2001 effort, short on appeals to unity, service and accountability, and long on unintentionally ironic celebrations of America’s reputation around the world as a champion of freedom.
So: this is, more clearly than any Inaugural Day I can remember over four decades, a banquet to which the whole country has decidedly not been invited. As Bush’s partisans celebrate tonight, I will raise a glass to the Uninvited.

Unless you spent Election Night and The Day After ignoring the whole thing, you probably know there was, er, ah, a bit of a problem with the official exit polls conducted by Edison Media Research/Mitofsky International. Basically, the exits showed Kerry winning the popular vote by about the same margin that Bush actually won the popular vote; and also showed Kerry ahead and likely to win in Ohio and Florida, thus clinching the electoral college.
This discrepency obviously created a lot of embarrassment (and in the case of Democrats, soon-to-be-dashed victory expectations) for the millions of people who got access, via personal contacts or the internet, to the exits during the afternoon and early evening of election day. And it also helped feed the conspiracy theorists who decided that the actual vote count, not the exits, must be screwed up thanks to the devilish ministrations of GOP election officials or the Diebold Corporation or whatever.
To their credit, the people who conducted the exits didn’t retreat into a technical haze, and intone, like a parochial school teacher asked by a student to explain the Holy Trinity: “It’s a mystery; let’s move on.” The Edison/Mitofsky combine did an internal study, and have now released a 77-page analysis of What Went Wrong. Turns out, they say, it wasn’t a poor selection of sample precincts, or erroneous weighting of results, but mainly a skewed response level to the requests for interviews that led to a slightly higher percentage of exit poll participants among Kerry voters than Bush voters. And that, in turn, was partly caused by access problems in some precincts, and also by the youthfulness of exit poll interviewers, who may have unconsciously over-selected their peers.
The study suggests remedial steps to avoid bad exits in the future (mainly uniform access rules for exit poll interviewers and better training), but I have a different proposal: getting rid of the Election Day/Night predictive function of exits altogether.
Lest we forget, exit polls are conducted for two very different reasons: (a) to make sure news organizations can “call” states and elections as quickly as possible after the polls close, and (b) to provide empirical data to support interpretations of why voters chose this candidate over that.
The civic value of the first function is nil, and perhaps negative. The second does matter, and not only to political scientists or pundits, because without exits, how could we immediately and confidently tell the president he’s full of crap when he says the electorate endorsed his Iraq policies?
So the obvious thing to consider is to get rid of the first function of exit polls, and preserve the second (the latter goal being easy since they can be adjusted to reflect the actual weighting of actual votes, as they were a few days after this election). A flat ban on distribution of exit poll data until the day after the election should do the trick, since all the leaks invariably come from subscribing news organizations rather than the exit poll firm. Maybe a hefty fine for leakers would help as well.
What, specifically, would we lose from ending exits as we know them? News organizations would have to use actual voting data, measured against historic performance and census data, to “call” states and elections. But they already moved in this direction after the 2000 Florida fiasco, using actual votes to “correct” exits; that’s why the networks did not erroneously call Ohio, Florida, and the country for Kerry this last time.
Sure, America’s political junkies would have to abandon the election day game of searching for and then widely disseminating (often distorted) exit poll findings in the middle of the day. But believe me, O ye junkies, it was actually a lot more fun way back in the pre-lapsarian, pre-exits era when you actually had to wait to figure out what had happened. Instead of sitting on your butt and expecting the results to land in your lap at 4:00 p.m., you did your homework, looking for oracular signs of trends in the early votes from long-time bellweathers like Campbell County, Kentucky. With all the resources now available on the web, election day sleuthing could become a lot easier, and a lot more entertaining–without exits.

His description of the president’s social security proposal as a “dead horse” rightly got most of the attention, but House Ways & Means Chairman Bill Thomas covered a lot of strange turf in his comments yesterday on retirement and taxes. Most notably, he wondered aloud if we ought to downwardly adjust Social Security benefits for women because they tend to live longer.
The idea that women are unjustly sapping the Social Security Trust Fund by perversely refusing to die as fast as men raises the broader question whether all benefits should be “adjusted” based on longevity. Why not incentivize cost-effective early deaths instead of parasitical dotage?
As my friend the political consultant Dan Buck pointed out to me today, if women are to be punished for living too long, it follows that those with shorter average lifespans, like, say, African-Americans, should get a boost in monthly benefits. Maybe this could become Karl Rove’s prize wedge-issue for expanding the GOP share of the black vote.
But why stop at racial or gender categories? Why not just come right out and reward behaviors that tend to shorten life and thus protect the solvency of Social Security? By his own logic, Bill Thomas should start talking about higher benefits for smokers, heavy drinkers, and the obese, and lower benefits for careful eaters and regular exercisers. After all, good health and a buff physique are their own rewards.
It’s time to stop coddling oldsters and giving them more of their share of what they earned before retirement than they actually deserve. Anyone who can echo Casey Stengal’s late-life self-appraisal–“Most people my age are dead. You could look it up”–needs to shuffle on in the great cattle drive of life and get off the public dole. Right, Mr. Thomas?

Thanks to Josh Marshall, I just read the Wednesday WaPo piece in which Rep. Bill Thomas (R-CA), the chairman of the House Ways & Means Committee called the Bush Social Security “reform” proposal a “dead horse” and suggested–well, a whole bunch of possibilities, ranging from a “broader review of the problems of an aging nation” to a replacement of the Social Security payroll tax with something or other. It was clear that Thomas hoped Bush would change the subject from Social Security to taxes, pronto.
Thomas is, of course, notorious for self-regard in a city and a Congress where the average time spent in front of a mirror each day is extremely high. But it’s a bit hard to believe the congressional GOP leadership and the White House have somehow forgotten to send Thomas, whose committee has primary jurisdiction over Social Security, the talking points on this subject, with a few pointed reminders that going “off-message” might incur some serious wrath. So his sudden “dead horse” comment represents either a general GOP admission, or at least an honest assessment of the politics of the thing at the moment.
What makes me itchy (perhaps because I blogged about it just a few hours ago) is the suspicion that Thomas, whose committee also governs all of us through the Internal Revenue Code, is signalling a long-planned GOP shift from Social Security “reform” to tax “reform,” with the intention of resuming the Bush administration’s Long March towards relieving wealthy Americans of any real tax obligations at all.
Ah, but it’s important to wield the wooden stake at the monster most at hand before picking up another, so I guess it’s an unambiguously good thing that Thomas has so quickly bailed on a proposal to do us dirt when we retire before considering what he has in store for us in the meantime.
POSTSCRIPT: Guess I’m really tired to have missed this point, but as the indefatigable Josh noted in an email, this stuff with Thomas is happening two days before Bush’s inaugural speech, which was probably put to bed more than a week ago so that W. could rehearse it to a fine, non-smirking state of resolute perfection. Unless we are really dealing with a GOP bait-and-switch plan that’s been laid out in (Mayberry) Machiavellian detail for months, Thomas has probably stomped all over Bush’s message at the worst possible time. Look for a retraction, in the form of a correction, by Thomas by sundown today, and then for a resumption of whatever he’s up to once the inaugural risers have come down.

With all due deference to my vigilent Democratic blogger colleagues who are afraid that one defection on Social Security will lead to enactment of Bush’s plan, the political climate for privatizers looks prohibitively stormy.
Big changes in long-established elements of American society require a lot of public opinion lift. Polls consistently show sizeable majorities of Americans, including the young Americans who supposedly vibrate at the idea of getting to deposit payroll taxes in personal accounts, don’t like the idea.
Whether or not one or two or three or four House or Senate Democrats are willing to negotiate on partial privatization, there’s nothing remotely in the air like the pressure on Democrats to compromise on tax cuts this time four years ago, when huge budget surpluses created a strong argument (if not, from the DLC’s point of view, a good argument) for some kind of fiscal relief.
Republicans are far from being united in favor of Bush’s plan, which is losing momentum every day.
And finally, the chattering classes, whatever they think about Social Security, can be expected to consistently heap contempt on the idea that an administration that is deliberately engineering an immediate fiscal crisis is really worried about a Social Security solvency problem that’s decades down the road.
At present it looks to me like it’s a matter of when, not if, Bush has to step back from his SocSec “reform” drive. And given the extreme predictability of how this issue is playing out, you have to ask: what are they really aiming at?
That brings me to a very important article on Bush tax policy by Jonathan Chait that was posted by The New Republic about a week ago. I didn’t read it at the time because I read the headline and thought: “Tax reform–let’s think about that later.” But Chait’s article was a reminder that the overwhelming, preeminent, obsessive, redundant fiscal and economic priority of this administration has been to unburden the wealthy of tax obligations altogether.
Read Chait yourself, but his main point is that the administration is about midway through an effort to eliminate federal taxation of corporate and personal investment income. Creating large new loopholes for sheltering investment income from taxation is part of the GOP strategy, especially insofar as they fail to succeed in eliminating taxation of capital altogether.
You have to wonder if the purpose, if only the fallback purpose, of the Bush SocSec campaign is to suddenly shift the debate from personal retirement savings accounts financed by payroll taxes to personal general savings accounts stuffed with sheltered upper-crust investment income. If there’s any chance of that, Democrats needs to start preparing for it.
I have no doubt the conservative movement’s “starve the beast” ideologists would prefer a direct frontal assault on everything the federal government does other than coinage and national defense. But as they have so abundantly shown in the past, they are more than happy to follow the easier route favored by Republican politicians: to attack government by (a) deliberately engineering budget deficits that eventually force spending cuts, and (b) to shift the federal government’s tax base from income derived from wealth to income derived from labor, so that Democratic constituencies become the first to demand cuts in spending, while Republican constituencies laugh all the way to the bank.

In a postcript to the MLK holiday, Garance Franke-Ruta notes in Tapped today that the King commemoration coincides with a state-recognized Robert E. Lee holiday in several southern states.
There are a couple of other states (including my home state of Georgia) where the Lee birthday of January 19 only coincides with the King commemoration when it happens to fall on a Monday (otherwise, it becomes a movable feast that enables state employees to get the Friday after Thanksgiving off work).
I guess you could say this compromise reflects a decision by some southern legislatures to give equal time to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But it gets really confusing in Virginia, where the King holiday is celebrated in conjunction with a state holiday commemorating not only Robert E. Lee but Stonewall Jackson–hence, Lee-Jackson-King day.
But in some cases, there may be a very slowly creeping commemorative progressivism underway. When the Georgia legislature made Lee’s birthday a (little-known) state holiday, it did so to replace Jefferson Davis’ birthday, which was a source of huge embarrassment back when I was a Georgia state employee. And given Virginia’s deep obsession with the Civil War (which is a bit understandable when you consider the state’s incredibly bloody experience in that war), we should consider ourselves lucky that a day hasn’t been set aside to commemorate Lee’s horse, Traveller.

Probably like a fair number of other people, I decided to spend part of the weekend prior to MLK Day reading Nick Kotz’s new book, Judgment Days, about the complex relationship between King and Lyndon Johnson, who together helped achieve the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act breakthroughs in the mid-1960s.
I’ve just finished the section on the Civil Rights Act, a tale dominated by Johnson’s familiar legislative genius and King’s agonizing balancing act over how to keep pressure on Congress without creating a national backlash. But what really stands out is the common conviction of MLK and LBJ that the drive for civil rights legislation had to be cast in moral, not legal terms–a conviction that both expressed to John F. Kennedy prior to his first big national civil rights speech.

“I know the risks are great, and we might lose the South [in 1964], but those sorts of states may be lost to us anyway,” [Johnson] told Kennedy aide Theodore Sorensen. “The difference is, if your president just goes down there and enforces court decrees, the South will feel it’s yielded to force. But if he goes down there and looks them in the eye and states the moral issue and the Christian issue, these southerners will at least respect his courage….”
Six days after Johnson had given his counsel to the White House, the president received strikingly similar advice from Martin Luther King. A front-page article in the June 10 New York Times quoted King as saying that the president must begin to address race as a moral issue, in terms “we seldom if ever hear” from the White House. The following evening, with little preparation and against the advice of his staff, the president went before television cameras with a sketchily drafted text and committed himself to the main issues of the civil rights struggle. “We are confronted primarily with a moral issue,” he declared. “It is as old as Scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution.”

The importance of using “values language,” you see, did not just arise in 2004.

More than thirty-six years after the assassination of Martin Luther King, it’s still common to think of his commemorative day as a sort of ethnic holiday–an acknowledgement of the particular suffering and protracted struggle of African-Americans in achieving formal recognition as full citizens.
But even a cursory understanding of King’s ministry and public career shows otherwise. He had every opportunity, and every justification, to limit his message to one of racial grievance, but he didn’t. He could have rested on his laurels once the worst injustices of southern segregation had been overturned, but he wouldn’t. He might have retired from the Christian ministry to become a politician, or retired from civic activism to become a religious leader, but he never did, and never would have even if his life had not been cut so short.
What Martin Luther King did as effectively as anyone in our history was to hold up the civic and religious values of America and demand that his country, its institutions, and his fellow-citizens live up to them. And he held up a mirror and forced us to measure ourselves by what we pretended to believe. For all his eloquence and strategic and tactical leadership, that remains his most important legacy today, for all of us.
He didn’t just play a crucial role in the liberation of “his people.” As a white southerner, I am convinced he helped redeem me, and “my people” as well. And as a Christian, I am sure he helped redeem our faith community from decades of passive, and sometimes active, defiance of the Gospels.
We are at another time in American history when it would be useful to compare our contemporary civic life with our professed ideals, and our religious life to the divine commandments of selflessness, peacefulness, mutual respect and love so many of us claim as the center of our lives. In memory of Martin Luther King, we should pause a moment today to hold up a mirror, and again measure ourselves by what we pretend to believe.