Democrats' battle plans point South
Region is viewed as decisive in '04
boston.com
By Patrick Healy, Globe Staff, 9/5/2003
CHARLESTON, S.C.-- Only three Democrats have won the White House since 1964 -- and Lyndon B. Johnson, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton were all from the South.
That's why state Senator Robert Ford, a backslapping Democrat with little taste for Yankee politicians, has begun delivering a blunt message to other African-Americans in South Carolina: Only a white Southerner will bring back enough white Southerners to the party to beat President Bush next year.
"White voters in the South who are Democrats tend not to vote for Northerners for president," Ford argues in a campaign brochure passed around at rallies last week for his chosen candidate for the Democratic nomination, Senator John Edwards of North Carolina. "This was not only true for Michael Dukakis, but we also lost the South when John F. Kennedy ran for president." Edwards, who was born in South Carolina, is counting on a native-son victory in the state's Feb. 3 primary as part of his campaign's calculus to pull votes from moderates, blacks, and Southerners to win his party's nomination.
But the Northerners in the race, who lead Edwards in most polls, are hardly writing off the region. They are busy devising strategies for the South, which proved decisive for Bush in 2000 and Bill Clinton in 1992, and might seal the Democratic nomination next year.
On Tuesday, Senator John F. Kerry took the unusual step of formally kicking off his presidential campaign in Mount Pleasant, S.C., dockside with the USS Yorktown. Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont, is pledging to fight for Southern votes, recently began discussing race relations in America, and broadcast his first television ads in South Carolina last Friday. Edwards went on the air in Charleston two weeks ago. Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut went to a Spartanburg, S.C., gas station Aug. 27 to talk about high fuel prices, then visited a textile mill where hundreds of workers have lost jobs in recent years.
The Democratic contenders are sounding similar notes with Southern voters, mostly on the economy, decrying the loss of manufacturing jobs and the hard times for textile mills. Edwards has mentioned being the son of a textile mill worker at every campaign stop, sometimes two or three times.
The candidates also are promising expanded health care coverage, a prescription drug benefit, and cleaner air and coastlines. As part of their heightening attention to civil rights, Lieberman, Edwards, and several other candidates issued "reflections" recently on the 40th anniversary of the March on Washington, and have courted Southern black politicians to help reach African-American voters.
"We will run hard in South Carolina and throughout the South, very hard. We're not taking any region for granted," said Tricia Enright, a spokeswoman for Dean, who recently completed a nine-city tour that went as far south as Falls Church, Va., near the nation's capital. "Regardless of regions, people are struggling over the same things: Will you have a job tomorrow? Will your family have health care?"
For now, down-home issues are more appealing to voters than are the conflicts in Iraq or the Middle East.
"I'm glad he's not just talking about Bush's war," said George Adams, a Charleston longshoreman who came to hear Edwards at a local union hall last week. "The working people of America are getting the raw end of the deal right now. This country's lost 2 million jobs under Bush. We need a president who cares about that."
A black Democrat, Adams said he is choosing between Edwards and two rivals, Representative Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri and the Rev. Al Sharpton. "I like a Southerner -- Bill Clinton is from the South -- but I'll probably go with the guy who's winning," Adams said.
Rafe Westbrook, a senior at the University of South Carolina, which Edwards visited Aug. 26, applauded when the North Carolinian criticized Bush for overseeing a "jobless economic recovery," which has seen a net loss of 2.7 million jobs. He, too, likes Edwards's Southern roots but worries the first-term senator is inexperienced compared with Kerry, Gephardt, and Dean.
"Edwards was dead-on about the economy," Westbrook said. "He's a great guy, but he's only served five years in office. I mean, is that enough?"
No first-term senator won the Democratic nomination, let alone the White House, in the 20th century, says Merle Black, a political scientist at Emory University who is highly skeptical of Edwards's chances.
But Black agrees with the senator that South Carolina will be decisive -- not only determining Edwards's future, but also crowning a front-runner if the New Hampshire victor wins here as well.
The Edwards campaign is trumpeting its 57 endorsements from South Carolina officeholders and politicos, while outsiders like Kerry are playing catch-up with 24 prominent South Carolinians on his side.
Southern Democrats have a history of supporting their own in primaries but voting Republican on Election Day if a non-Southerner is the party nominee. In 1960, Kennedy won Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, and West Virginia, and five of 11 electoral votes in Alabama -- thanks, in good part, to having the Texan Johnson as his running mate. But he lost five Southern states to Republican Richard M. Nixon and Harry F. Byrd of Virginia, a Democrat who ran as an Independent.
In 2000, George W. Bush swept the South, even winning Tennessee, the home state of Democratic nominee Al Gore, who found that voters tilted Republican when the major parties nominated two Southerners.
Since then, Northern Democrats such as George McGovern of South Dakota and Dukakis of Massachusetts have fared poorly in the South against native sons like George Wallace of Alabama in 1972, and in 1988, Gore and Jesse Jackson, who was born in South Carolina. McGovern and Dukakis became their party's nominee but lost all or most of the 13 states of the old Confederacy to their Republican rivals, Nixon and George H.W. Bush.
Black, from Emory, notes that a Democrat can win the White House without carrying any Southern state, as long as the nominee nets 70 percent of the electoral votes in the rest of the nation -- "a high threshold, with no room for error."
Instead, Democrats usually try to take a few Southern states where the party is strong, such as Arkansas, Florida, and Louisiana.
But Black predicts that Dean will be seen here as a "liberal Yankee Democrat," while Kerry must start looking like a winner by overtaking Dean's lead in New Hampshire polls to attract attention here.
Ford, the state senator, was in Kerry's corner until early this summer, when his sister called from California and asked, "Have you heard about Edwards?" Ford said no. As soon as he heard Edwards was a local boy, Ford gave up on the Massachusetts senator to hedge his political bets on history.
"We don't go for Yankees here, man," Ford said. "They don't know how to talk to us."
Patrick Healy can be reached at phealy@globe.com.
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