Can it be true? Can the party really be finally waking up and smelling the coffee and realizing that going after white Southern males is a waste of time and resources?
I’m talking about the white male voter, or at least a certain long-coveted variety thereof. He is variously known as “NASCAR dad” — that shirt-sleeved, straight-talkin’, these-colors-don’t-run fella who votes his cultural values above all else — or “Bubba,” as Steve Jarding and Dave “Mudcat” Saunders affectionately call him in their book, “Foxes in the Henhouse.” Start looking on milk cartons for Bubba because he has vanished, and not a moment too soon: The Democratic obsession with the down-home, blue-collar, white male voter, that heartbreaker who crossed the aisle to the Republicans many decades ago, may finally be coming to a merciful end.
The simplest explanation for Bubba’s absence to date is that none of the 2008 Democratic presidential contenders provides an obvious home for his vote. Despite accusations that Hillary Clinton is prone to dropping her “g’s” when talking to rural or Southern audiences, it’s difficult to imagine the former first lady making overt appeals to a group that regards her with something verging on rabid disgust. Barack Obama? The former Chicago street activist is not easily mistaken for a good ole boy. Ditto for Christopher Dodd, Mike Gravel, Dennis Kucinich and Bill Richardson.
Indeed, the only white male Southerner candidate, John Edwards, spends his time talking up issues that have very little to do with NASCAR and who-do-you-want-to-have-a-beer-with kinds of stupidity that gave us George Bush for eight years and a DLC that actually listens to a grown man who calls himself “Mudcat” and says hateful shit like this:
I am certain I will get personally attacked for this next statement, but in all honesty, I don’t care what the “Metropolitan Wing” of my party thinks. I don’t like them. The damage the pseudo-intellectuals have done to my party by abandoning tolerance, combined with their erroneous stereotyping of my people and culture, is something that brings out my incivility. In his column, Joe said, “…the smart stuff is being drowned out by a fierce, bullying, often witless tone of intolerance that has overtaken the left-wing sector of the blogosphere.” Amen. I must add that this same intellectual arrogance and intolerance overtook the party years ago, and for that very reason, my people in rural America left the tent.
And that’s by way of introduction during his guest blogging stint at Swampland. Yes, Mudcat, the “Metropolitan Opera Wing” of the party has taken over. That’s why all of the Democratic presidents from LBJ onward have been Southerners. Oh, if only we’d listened in 2004 and didn’t nominate a Northeasterner — good God, a Bostonian! — as the party’s candidate, all those white Southern men who’ve just been waiting for a good reason to pull the lever for a Democrat would have jumped party lines and swung the election our way! Instead, we had to settle for a candidate who came within one state of winning the election and got more votes than anyone ever did in a Presidential election except for George Bush in the same election, and he didn’t miss by that much.
If you can’t tell, I’m a little cheesed off at the idea that Only A Southern Man Can Win, or by the persistent idea that Kerry was a terrible candidate. He wasn’t. He came closer to unseating a sitting president during wartime than anyone else ever has, as far as I know. He got more votes than Al Gore did, and Al Gore won the popular vote. He just got beaten by a couple of percentage points by the incumbent, during wartime, after being smeared relentlessly by Karl Rove and his ratfucking operation, despite Tommy Thompson and his color-coded fearmongering, and with Nader siphoning off support.
But, Jesus, all you kept hearing right after the election, from the likes of “Mudcat,” was how elitist and urban-effete the party was, and how it had to reach out to “Southerners.” How the Coastal Elites looked down on “Southerners,” and how that was going to kill the party’s chances (such intolerance of intolerance, however, only extended so far: the people complaining about how the Northeastern Liberal Sissies looked funny at Southern Culture were quite content to bash urbanites, Northerners and Californians even as they bewailed the incivility of it all).
Except, that “Southerners” thing? Totally meant white men from the rural Deep South. And as we know, they’re not the only people living in the South:
But the underlying reason may be demographics. In 1952, according to calculations performed by Emory University political scientist Alan Abramowitz for Salon, white males were nearly half the American electorate. Thanks to the recent growth in the Latino population, however, the white male share is now dropping about a percentage point a year, accelerating a decline that began with the increased enfranchisement of African-Americans in the civil rights era. In next year’s election, white males may account for fewer than one out of three voters. Bubba is no longer a kingmaker.
Now, I’m all for making common cause with the rural Southern voter on issues that matter to everyone in the party. What I’m not down with is “Mudcat’s” strategy of kissing their asses by kowtowing to their precious Southern culture while throwing all the other constituencies that make up the Democratic voting base under the bus. I get realllllly nervous when I start hearing centrist types talking about how it might be better strategically to downplay issues of racial equality, of reproductive justice, of queer rights, to allow Roe to be overturned, all the better to attract those elusive Southern men and their extra-special votes.
Well, guess what? They’re voting Republican anyway. So why bother?
Tom Schaller‘s been arguing for quite some time that the Democrats can win without the South, and that Democratic consultants who say otherwise (and in particular, “Mudcat” hisself) are full of it:
What’s neither amusing nor ironic, but rather sad, is the state of political advice when it comes to the Democrats’ problems in the South. Saunders’ consultancy career, after all, depends on solving the following riddle: How is it that working-class whites — especially those in the rural parts of the South who sit side by side with similarly situated working-class southern blacks at high school sporting events on Friday nights, shop at the same businesses on Saturday afternoon, attend similar (if different denominational) Christian churches on Sunday morning, and send their kids to the same public schools the following Monday — troop to the ballot box on the first Tuesday every other November vote and pull the lever for the Republicans while their black neighbors are voting overwhelmingly Democratic? The answer is complex but, of course, is rooted in race.
When I asked Saunders if he could think of any other two sets of Americans who are otherwise so similarly situated yet vote so differently, he had no answer. Probed for a solution to this stultifying racial bifurcation, he mumbled something about how every white southern guy has at least “one black friend.” The soporific Trippi — himself freshly demoted by former NAACP President Kweisi Mfume, whose U.S. Senate campaign in Maryland had been listing badly in 2005 before Trippi was replaced by a new team — had little to add. Apparently, this is what now passes for serious analysis about southern politics from high-priced political consultants, which is why I flew home feeling a strange sympathy for the man who heckled me, even if he was screaming at the wrong panelist.
The problem with listening to people like Mudcat is that they’d have you believe that the Southern Man Vote is yours for the taking, if you just act enough like a Republican. Which completely ignores the fact that most people inclined to vote Republican, when faced with the choice between a faux-Republican and the real thing, are more than likely going to pick the real thing.
So why look there for votes? Especially when you have black and Hispanic voters in the South who will listen to your message of opportunity and justice and not require you to whistle Dixie and affect a Southern accent to get their vote. You have single women staying home from the polls, you have many, many groups who feel that their voices are not represented and don’t bother to vote.
I don’t know, could be that they couldn’t hear anything over all the macho posturing and YEE-HAWs emanating from the Democrats as they tried so desperately to get Joe Six-Pack to love them best.
I know some people get really, truly offended when you start talking about writing off the South in Presidential elections for some years to come. What about the liberals? they ask. Well, folks, the numbers just aren’t there right now, given the Electoral College and its ugly realities. But that doesn’t mean that the party shouldn’t promote the issues that matter to you — because they’re the issues that matter to Democrats anywhere. And, in the meantime, work on getting Democrats elected to local and state offices (you know, kind of like the Republicans have been doing since Goldwater’s time) and building up the local organizations.
Besides, nobody bothers to campaign very hard in New York or California, either. Maybe because the Republicans have written them off.
UPDATE: Gah! You really have to check out the Salon letters to this one. Here’s a prize example:
One must wonder how anyone can write an article about the massive changes in demography without taking a moment to reflect. Schaller should find his topic “sobering” for it documents major change in what has been the most successful democracy in the history of the world. There is no proof that Hispanics or Blacks are capable of building a nation that rivals those built by Europeans or Asians. How anyone can write an article, which more or less, praises the loss of the white male vote is beyond me. Who will do the work of government and society into the future? Asians may do a great job, but there are not enough Asians to fill in the blanks.
People should pause. Maybe losing the white vote indicates a change in the country that will prove just as bad for blacks and hispanics as for white males? Maybe a society where blacks and hispanics dominate demographically will prove to be less kind to them than a society with a dominant white population? To date, there is no evidence that blacks and hispanics (as a groups) will magically improve in matters of civilization as soon as white males are excommunicated from the USA. However, there is lots of proof that diversity will increase white pride and white hatred towards others, and that is something everyone should fear.