Southern Democrats face rout
By Edward Luce in Washington
Published: October 29 2010 19:09 | Last updated: October 29 2010 19:09
Gene Taylor, a Democratic lawmaker from Mississippi, this week issued what was perhaps the loudest alarm bell of his party’s shrinking prospects in the Deep South when he told voters he voted for John McCain, rather than Barack Obama, in 2008.
In spite of endorsements from anti-abortion groups and the National Rifle Association, Mr Taylor is apparently too liberal for many of his district’s voters. The same applies to most of his white Democratic colleagues in the south. An endangered species, the southern Democrat faces worse than decimation in next week’s midterm elections.
“Endangered is probably the right word,” says James Carville, aka the “Ragin’ Cajun” for his outspoken southern ways, who was Bill Clinton’s campaign manager in 1992. “But you shouldn’t write them off too easily. The southern Democrat is a hardy species who has found ways to survive.”
The slow death of the white Democratic southerner began in 1964 when President Lyndon Baines Johnson pushed through the Civil Rights Act that gave African-Americans the rights of full citizens. A southerner himself, Mr Johnson told an aide: “We have lost the south for a generation.”
But it was not until 1994, when Mr Clinton’s party lost heavily in his first midterm elections, that Republicans became a majority party in the south – led by Newt Gingrich from Georgia. When Democrats regained control of the House in 2006, they were aided by the victory of socially conservative Democrats, such as Heath Shuler, a former football star, in North Carolina.
Now Mr Shuler and most of his colleagues are facing probable defeat. Among others expected to lose are John Spratt, chairman of the House budget committee and a stalwart southern Democrat. Of the five Democrats nationwide to promise voters they would next time vote against the liberal Nancy Pelosi as House speaker, four are from the South.
“I don’t know how I can be any clearer,” Mr Shuler said in a debate this week when he put himself forward as an alternative to Ms Pelosi, who is the representative for San Francisco. “I can do as good a job as anybody in the US Congress because I can actually bring people together.” Pollsters doubt, however, that Mr Shuler’s long shot will be enough to stave off defeat.
Many southern districts will continue to be represented by African-American Democrats, among them James Clyburn from South Carolina and Georgia’s John Lewis. Both are heroes from the civil rights movement and reliable liberal votes in Congress.
The passing of the typically centrist, and fiscally conservative, white southern Democrat is likely to lead to further polarisation on Capitol Hill. In the mid-1970s, roughly a third of lawmakers were classified as “moderate”. That number had fallen to 8 per cent by 2008, according to the American University in Washington. It is now heading towards zero.
In what political scientists call “asymmetric polarisation”, conservative southern Democrats will be replaced by even more conservative southern Republicans – often backed by the Tea Party movement. Meanwhile, it is liberal Democrats who generally occupy their party’s safest districts elsewhere in the country.
“The outgoing Congress was the most polarised in history,” says Bill Galston at the centrist Brookings Institution. “The next one – the 112th – is likely to be off the charts.”
The changing of the guard has also brought about a decline in civility on Capitol Hill. Known for their courtly manners and readiness to work with Republicans, white Democratic southerners were often the reason legislation got enacted.
Bart Gordon, a 14-term Democrat from Tennessee who decided not to seek re-election this year, says he fears for the future. “There are still a few friendships across the aisle and some old-style civility, but I fear it will be in very short supply in the next Congress,” he said.
“Things have gotten more polarised than I can recall.”
Earlier this year, Joe Wilson, a Republican from South Carolina, attained notoriety when he shouted “You lie!’ at Mr Obama during his annual state of the union address to Congress. Within hours Mr Wilson had raised hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign funds.
“My fear about the next Congress is that it will be dominated by Republicans who want to stop the train from derailing by blowing up the rail tracks,” says Mr Galston.
“The decline of the southern Democrat comes with a heavy price.”
Comedian’s political rally has serious undertones
By Anna Fifield in Washington
Published: October 29 2010 17:35 | Last updated: October 29 2010 17:35
The “Rally to Restore Sanity” was supposed to be a joke, a liberal parody of the huge “Restoring Honour” march organised in August by Glenn Beck, the conservative Fox News commentator and patriarch of the Tea Party movement.
But for the thousands of progressives and moderates expected to descend on Washington on Saturday, three days before the midterm Congressional elections that are expected to hand the House of Representatives back to Republicans, the rally has a serious point.
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It has fast become a magnet for those alarmed at the Tea Party juggernaut, an assertion of leftwing values not seen since President Barack Obama was inaugurated 18 months ago.
“We are going to make history, fellow ralliers,” one of the attendees, John Hoover, wrote on the rally's Facebook page. “We are going stop the madness!”
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Southern Democrats face rout - Oct-29
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The event is the brainchild of Jon Stewart, the liberal comedian-meets-biting political commentator who fronts the satirical Daily Show, who has described the rally as “Woodstock, but with the nudity and drugs replaced by respectful disagreement”.
“We’re looking for the people who think shouting is annoying, counterproductive, and terrible for your throat; who feel that the loudest voices shouldn’t be the only ones that get heard,” Mr Stewart says on the rally website, “and who believe that the only time it’s appropriate to draw a Hitler mustache on someone is when that person is actually Hitler. Or Charlie Chaplin in certain roles,” he added, referring to the Tea Party practice of adding facial hair to Mr Obama's photo.
His fellow comedian Stephen Colbert is holding an “opposing” rally at the same time, called the “The March to Keep Fear Alive” – but essentially the events are one.
The march will certainly have a comedic feel. There is a competition to come up with the funniest placard, with contenders including “Obama is a muslin” showing a picture of a white cloth – a play on the Tea Party accusation that president follows Islam – and “God Hates Hommos (it's too garlicky)”.
The Huffington Post, a liberal news website, is providing “sanity buses” from New York, and satellite rallies are being held as far afield as Chicago, San Francisco and Seattle.
A slew of American news organisations have even banned their journalists from attending in a personal capacity, something they probably did not have to do with Mr Beck's rally, perhaps underlining the Tea Party's point about liberal bias in the media.
The rally received the kind of advertising that money cannot buy this week, when Mr Obama appeared on the Daily Show. The interview, however, merely served to underscore how sensitive the president remains about liberal criticism that his administration's reforms have been too “timid”.
Indeed, while both men have pilloried the Tea Party movement and associated organisations – Mr Stewart has taken great delight in going after Fox News in particular – that is not to say that they have gone easy on the president.
But some commentators say the rally will only serve to enrage conservatives.
“There's still a lot we don't fully understand about the Tea Partiers and the political independents who have lost faith in Obama,” according to Timothy Noah, a commentator for the Slate website. “But one thing we should all be pretty clear on by now is that they hate, hate, hate anything that smacks of elitism. The spectacle of affluent 18-to-34-year-olds blanketing the Mall to snicker at jokes about wingnut ignoramuses and Bible thumpers will, I fear, have the effect of a red cape waved before a bull.”
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