NEWS ANALYSIS : GOP’s Southern Fortress Crumbles as Issues Change

In Louisiana, a Republican official complains that the religious right “is tearing the party asunder” and jeopardizing President Bush’s chances of carrying the state in November.

In Alabama and Georgia, campaign volunteers for former independent candidate Ross Perot have rejected overtures from the Bush campaign and some say they’ve decided to support Democratic nominee Bill Clinton.

In Florida, polls show Clinton ahead, doing exceptionally well in the northern part of the state and cutting into the President’s support among Cuban-Americans in the southern part. Cuban-Americans, long preoccupied with the threat of communism, voted overwhelmingly for Bush in 1988. Now they see domestic issues as their chief concern.

Those developments, along with an ailing economy that has hit parts of the South especially hard, confront Bush with serious hurdles as he seeks to overtake Clinton in the polls. The South, with 147 of the 270 electoral votes needed to win the White House, has formed the base of Republican presidential support in modern times, and the White House considers the 11 states of the old Confederacy especially crucial this year.

Yet not since 1976, when former Georgia Gov. Jimmy Carter won the presidency and carried all the Southern states except Virginia, have the Democrats had such an opportunity to break the GOP grip on the region.

They don’t expect a clean sweep; the Republicans may have grown too strong for that, though Clinton now leads in opinion polls across most of the region. What hopeful Democratic strategists calculate is that even a handful of victories in the South would hurt Bush and help Clinton enormously in his quest for an Electoral College majority.

“Two or three weeks from now, if we are as competitive as we are today, we’ll be in good shape,” said James Carville, a veteran Democratic strategist and senior Clinton campaign aide.

“If we can keep Bush having to fight for the Southern states, at a minimum it means he won’t be able to spend as much time and resources in other places,” said Carville, a native of Louisiana.

This has been an extraordinarily volatile and unpredictable election year. And with the voting still seven weeks away, almost anything could happen. But while many analysts have concluded that the crucial battleground lies in the Midwest, the South may be even more vital for Bush. Without solid support there, it will be extremely difficult for him to offset possible losses elsewhere in the country--especially in such populous states as California and New York, where Bush’s prospects now look bleak.

Polls have shown Clinton running ahead of Bush in most of the Southern states, including Texas, which the President calls home, and Florida, where Bush’s son Jeb is a major Republican figure. Until recent months, the President had considered Florida in the bag. It is not clear whether the federal response to Hurricane Andrew, which is massive but was criticized as slow to get started, will help the President or hurt him.

In addition to Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Arkansas and Tennessee, the other states of the old Confederacy--Texas, Mississippi, Virginia, South Carolina and North Carolina--also are considered up for grabs this year.

Arkansas and Tennessee, with Sen. Al Gore of Tennessee as Arkansas Gov. Clinton’s running mate, are considered safely in the Democratic column.

Symptomatic of the change in Democratic prospects is the newly cordial attitude of local Democratic candidates toward their national ticket.

In 1988 and 1984, Southern Democrats running for office distanced themselves from--or even criticized--the party’s liberal presidential nominees, Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis and former Vice President Walter F. Mondale. But this year, with two Southerners of moderate persuasion on the ticket and regional pride a factor, it’s a different story.

“They were always running against us before,” said Carville. “Everybody wants to run with us now.”

The Arkansas governor faces his own hurdles in the region, of course. Allegations of womanizing and not being forthright in recounting the story of his Vietnam draft status could prove especially damaging. Not only is the South known for its Bible Belt morality, but it also has more than its share of military bases and war heroes. “The draft issue still hurts, especially in the South, no doubt about it,” concedes one Clinton campaign official.

Moreover, it’s far from certain that Clinton will get the large turnout of black voters he probably will need to beat Bush in some of the Southern states. In fact, Clinton has yet to win the enthusiastic support of the one black leader best known for registering and turning out the black vote: civil rights leader Jesse Jackson.

Although Jackson now says he will be “working hard” to elect the Democratic ticket, he had to negotiate his campaign role with party Chairman Ronald H. Brown, not with Clinton. The Arkansas governor has been treating Jackson like he’s radioactive, although the two held a brief but awkward meeting recently when both addressed the all-black National Baptist Convention in Atlanta.

Publicly, Jackson has contented himself with saying Clinton has ignored him. Privately, he has accused the governor of insulting him and following a high-risk strategy of holding blacks at arm’s length, which could cost him the election.

Several black leaders, including Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), Atlanta Mayor Maynard Jackson, former Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young and Rep. Mike Espy (D-Miss.), say they’ll campaign hard for Clinton and expect Jesse Jackson to help spur a large turnout of black voters regardless of whether his relations with Clinton improve. But black leaders concede that if Jackson continues to criticize Clinton privately, it could hurt the turnout.

Still, at least for the present, Clinton strategists see reason for hope.

Louisiana offers an example of the kinds of difficulties Bush faces in the once-secure South. Presently lagging in the polls, he faces what some analysts see as an uphill struggle to hold onto a state he won in 1988 with 54.3% of the vote.

Peg Wilson, a member of the New Orleans City Council and one of the state’s most prominent Republicans, says the religious right, which Bush and other officials appealed to during the GOP convention, is a big part of the President’s problem in Louisiana.

“The religious right dominated our delegation to the convention and has taken over the state party,” said Wilson, who served as a delegate. “They are ready to go down with the ship, fighting against abortion and for their other beliefs. They are tearing the party asunder and making it a very hard road for the President to win.”

In Alabama, which the President won with 59.2% of the vote in 1988, the Bush campaign has tried without success to recruit some of Perot’s 57 county coordinators.

“They’ve tried to get Perot supporters to jump ship, and it hasn’t worked,” said George Phillipi of Birmingham, who supported Bush in 1988 and now heads Alabama’s Perot organization, which calls itself United We Stand, America. “They offered to have them meet with (Vice President) Dan Quayle when he came through, but they had no takers,” Phillipi said.

Phillipi still plans to vote for Perot but said he would vote “for either of the other candidates if he would face the bitter medicine” and propose a serious program for dealing with the budget deficit. “A healthy to massive protest vote for Perot can be expected,” he said.

The Bush campaign did manage to recruit Phillipi’s predecessor as Perot’s state coordinator, Jim Parsons, a Mobile businessman. Parsons is now co-chairman of the President’s Alabama campaign.

Parsons, sounding less than enthusiastic about his new role, said: “People are sick and tired of politics as usual, and Perot touched a nerve and excited people. People really want to see a change. But you can’t reform from the outside, so I went back into the party.”

Another Perot campaign volunteer in Birmingham, Betty Stone, who supported Bush in 1988, said that with Perot not actively campaigning, “I might vote for Clinton, but there’s no way I’d vote for Bush. I have never seen such venom and hatred as I saw at the Republican Convention.”

In Georgia, state Rep. Killian Townsend, a staunch Republican for at least four decades, helped the Perot campaign collect 135,000 signatures--almost five times the number needed to put Perot on the ballot--but now plans to vote for Clinton and believes the governor will win “unless he stumbles badly.”

“I’ve always been pro-choice, and I was disgusted with the Republican Convention,” Townsend said. “The party has taken an amazing turn.”

A decisive break for Clinton among Perot supporters would be especially bad news for the Bush campaign. “These people just came out of the woodwork and weren’t involved before, but they are very serious people, not housewives looking for something to do,” Townsend said. “They want to stay involved.”

Nisbet Kendrick III, Georgia coordinator for the Perot organization, agreed. People of all political persuasions had backed the Texas billionaire before he decided against running, he said. “The Perot supporters cut across all economic and social lines. . . . We had supporters of Pat Buchanan and Jerry Brown working side by side in the phone banks.”

Kendrick described himself as an independent who has not decided how he will vote, but said: “There may be a substantial protest vote for Perot if neither candidate speaks out on the deficit and other main issues.”

Bush carried Georgia with 59.7% of the vote in 1988, and Warren Tompkins, the Bush campaign’s senior adviser for the South, expressed confidence that the President will win it again, along with most of the South, in November.

“As the South goes, so goes the nation, and the Democrats are addressing that,” he said, “but we are progressing along schedule, starting to move, and Perot supporters are coming back to us.”

However, Bill Shipp, veteran Georgia political analyst, thinks Bush still faces an uphill fight. “Clinton profits by the fact that in every congressional primary where there was a runoff, the Republicans chose the right-to-life nominee, including a guy whose TV spots included dead fetuses,” said Shipp, who publishes a political newsletter. “Democrats chose three women and three black nominees, which assures a big turnout of the Democratic vote.”

Young people in the South, like those nationwide, have increasingly voted Republican in recent years, but many now appear to be moving toward Clinton, according to polls and several sources.

In Atlanta, Tom Parner, 27, an attorney and a Democrat, says 90% of his former classmates at Vanderbilt University in Nashville supported President Ronald Reagan and then Bush, “but a lot are unemployed now or can’t get the job they thought they would, and now they’re for Clinton. He plays their music and talks their talk.”

In Jackson, Miss., Wilson F. Minor, the state’s premier political commentator, said young people are flocking to the Clinton banner. “A lot of people realize that 12 years of Republicanism hasn’t gotten us anywhere,” he said, adding that the Democrats have “a good shot” at winning Mississippi. Bush carried the state with 59.9% of the vote four years ago.

The Clinton campaign contends it has been “in good shape” in Florida since before the Democratic Convention. The campaign’s own polls show Clinton drawing the support of about 42% of the Cuban-American vote, for example, which one Clinton aide called “astonishing” in view of Cuban-Americans’ near-solid support for Reagan and Bush in the last three elections.

Juan Felipe Ruiz, 67, who fled to Miami from Cuba in the early 1960s, has voted for every Republican presidential candidate since Richard M. Nixon. But he plans to vote for Clinton.

“I believed Republicans had the best program to liquidate communism,” Ruiz said, “but communism is finished and the economy is going down day after day, and the Republicans aren’t doing anything about it.”

Ruiz, who helped lead a campaign that named a street in Miami for Reagan, said he knows many Cuban-Americans in Miami who voted for Bush in 1988 but now plan to support Clinton. Max Santana, a Democrat and Ruiz friend who works in a Miami restaurant, says that while Bush still has strong support in the Cuban-American community, “many people think we need a change in the Administration.”

“Mr. Bush is losing ground here,” he said. “The Democrats are getting stronger among Cuban-Americans in areas that have been very Republican.”

Clinton strategists say they believe their candidate is so strong in other regions that if he can break the GOP grip on the South--even by winning as few as two states in addition to Arkansas and Tennessee--he will defeat Bush.

Florida, Texas, Virginia and Mississippi are considered the states least likely to desert Bush, even though polls have shown Clinton leading in all four states. With Arkansas and Tennessee the states most likely to abandon the President, surveys have shown the Democratic ticket ahead in Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia and North Carolina. South Carolina is rated a tossup.

In his Southern campaign swings, Bush has bashed Clinton as soft on defense and portrayed him as lacking the character to be President. Usually, those are cutting issues in the South, and they may yet help Bush salvage the region.

However, the economy remains the main issue, with most of the Southern states showing personal income lagging behind rising prices in 1991 for the first time in nine years.

In a recent Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll, for instance, Southerners overwhelmingly selected the economy as the major issue, and 70% of them disapproved of the way Bush is handling it.

Today on the Trail . . .

Gov. Bill Clinton in Little Rock, Ark.

President Bush campaigns at El Toro Marine Corps Air Station and Yorba Regional Park in Orange County.

TELEVISION

Vice President Dan Quayle is a guest on a live “This Week With David Brinkley” at 11:30 a.m. on Channel 7.

The Struggle for the South

White House strategists consider the Old South crucial to Bush’s reelection chances. Except for Arkansas and Tennessee, which are considered safely in the Democratic column, the region is considered up for grabs. This comes despite the GOP’s solid showing in 1988: The Score in ’88

Bush Dukakis ’92 electoral votes Alabama 59% 40% 9 Arkansas 56% 42% 6 Florida 61% 39% 25 Georgia 60% 40% 13 Louisiana 54% 44% 9 Mississippi 60% 39% 7 North Carolina 58% 42% 14 South Carolina 62% 38% 8 Tennessee 58% 42% 11 Texas 56% 43% 32 Virginia 60% 39% 13 Average 59% 41% U.S. Average 53% 46%

Some totals do not add up to 100% because of write-in votes