The Siren Song of ‘Dixie’ Lures Democrats to Another Fall

In the early spring of 1983, as John Glenn kicked off his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, “Dixie” was the No. 1 tune on the hit parade of American political commentary. In the South, ran the catchy refrain, Glenn would be invincible. As the embodiment of the region’s characteristic ideals of order, fiscal austerity, morality and a bristling defense, the Ohio senator with the Eisenhower-like smile would win back moderate white “swing” voters. These, the chorus insisted, had been put off by the donkey’s leftward meanderings since the ‘60s, and were now otherwise lost to the party.

As often happens in the world of popular songs, however, reality proved refractory. The former astronaut’s campaign failed to get off the launching pad. Soon the only feature about it that was even vaguely reminiscent of the South was that it was gone with the wind.

During the media buildup to the 1986 congressional elections, a strikingly similar tune again caught on. For months the media ran riot with speculation that a dramatic realignment of American politics was imminent. The general picture painted was a sort of political Merrill Lynch ad, with Southern white voters on the verge of a headlong stampede to the GOP. Many analysts also identified the Democrats’ lingering identification with the New Deal as a leading cause of this stampede and hinted broadly that the party’s liberal legacy constituted excess baggage that it would have to jettison.

On election night, of course, the Democrats won back control of the Senate, riding a wave of liberal victories that stretched from Georgia to the Dakotas.

This year the siren’s song, and promises of substantial campaign support advanced by a patriotic group of mostly Northern businessmen with a solicitous interest in Dixie, induced Sen. Albert Gore Jr. of Tennessee to repudiate the glittering New Deal past of his famous father and run as an avowed hawk in the Glenn mold.

Once again, however, the electorate refused to go for it.

One might think that in politics, as in baseball, three strikes mean out. Yet no sooner did the Gore campaign stagger to its ignominious end in the New York Democratic primary than the same old Dixieland jazz started filling the airwaves once again.

The chorus is now serenading Sen. Sam Nunn of Georgia as the natural inheritor of the mantle of Jefferson Davis and Woodrow Wilson. Otherwise nothing has changed from the earlier cases of Glenn and Gore. The words and the music--all the talk of swing voters and conservatism, the need for reassurance on foreign policy and defense--are precisely the same. And so will be the result if the Michael Dukakis camp is silly enough to fall for this Southern-fried foolishness.

It is true that the South remains a bit more conservative than the rest of the United States in religious conviction, morals and some “social” attitudes. Yet how much of a difference all this will make to the 1988 presidential campaign is debatable. Though it surprises many people, it is a fact that, until he became vulnerable on what might be termed the 7th Commandment issue, Gary Hart was taking the largest share of the evangelical vote in the South--far more than Gore and, it appears, much more than Pat Robertson.

But to see how shallow the roots of this latest Dixieland revival really are, it is instructive to examine the distribution of opinions concerning the workaday political questions that usually fill presidential polls. Here one discovers a fact that, considering all the caterwauling about the distinctiveness of the South, is truly remarkable: The differences between the South and everywhere else are minute--seldom big enough to attain statistical significance.

Particularly instructive in the light of the recent Nunn boom is a poll released by the World Policy Institute. Asked whether the United States should spend more or less money on a set of policy areas, 82% of the total sample (and 84% of Southerners) said that they preferred the country to spend more on promoting economic growth at home. Similar landslide percentages (82% overall, 80% in the South) registered in favor of additional spending on education. In stark contrast, only 28% of the total sample (27% in the South) favored more defense spending--a result consistent with a Gallup poll taken in January that showed exactly 6% of registered voters listing defense as the most important campaign issue.

It is not even true that swing voters are uniquely concentrated in the South. Indeed, unpublished polls suggest that more might be found in the Midwest.

It is true that Southerners are often a bit more likely than the rest of the country to approve the way President Reagan is handling his job. But the difference, again, is not large, and in some recent Los Angeles Times polls it virtually vanishes when one combines responses for what The Times distinguishes as the “new” and the “deep” South.

Southerners are also less likely to call themselves “liberals,” by about 3%. It is well known, however, that in American politics labels predict very little about behavior--that, for example, many Americans who shy “instinctively” from identifying themselves as liberals in ideological terms nevertheless are deeply attached to liberal policies.

This brings us to the real choice that Dukakis must now make, and that accounts for the insistent Bourbon Street beat in the Democratic Party.

The most accurate evaluations of the sources of the recent Democratic decline in public esteem stress that public support for “New Deal” issues has not diminished at all in recent years. What has changed is the public’s perception of the Democrats on these questions. Put bluntly, after the brutal austerity of 1980 and the fiasco of 1984, when the Democrats promised to do nothing for anyone except raise taxes, the party squandered most of the good will that it derived from the New Deal.

If the Democratic elites persist in their determination to put Nunn or some other conservative Southern foreign-policy wizard onto the ticket, instead of someone who can identify convincingly with the economic problems of ordinary Americans, they had better be prepared to face the music: essentially no appeal to swing non-voters, the loss of many of Jesse Jackson’s supporters and no cross-cutting reply to the inevitable GOP symbolic appeals--in short, another self-induced electoral disaster.

So, as they get set once more to come before the public empty-handed, let them ponder again the meaning of 1986 and the fate of Glenn and Gore. In the words of the most memorable slogan to come out of the 1988 campaign, this time there had better be no excuses.