NEWS ANALYSIS : South Rises Again as Region Takes Over GOP Leadership

The leadership lineup for the new Republican Congress dramatically underscores the shift in the party’s geographic and philosophic center of gravity toward the South.

The election Friday of Mississippi Sen. Trent Lott to the No. 2 leadership position in the Senate cements the influence of an emerging Southern axis that includes incoming House Speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia, incoming House Majority Leader Dick Armey of Texas, and Texas Sen. Phil Gramm.

These new GOP leaders will elevate to the national level the ideologically conservative and politically confrontational style that has taken the GOP to majority status in the South. That’s likely to produce some conflict with Republican leaders from other regions--like incoming Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole or incoming Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Mark O. Hatfield of Oregon--who are more moderate in their approach, either ideologically or tactically.

But the rise of the Southern Republicans primarily guarantees a much more brass-knuckled approach toward the partisan struggle with the Democrats--a difference symbolized by the transition between the impetuous Gingrich and courtly outgoing House Minority Leader Robert H. Michel of Illinois.

“You’re going to have a difference in style,” said Whit Ayres, an Atlanta-based Republican pollster. “With the Southern Republicans you get a more aggressive, assertive conservatism. This is a conservatism that has been built on confronting Democrats and liberals, not accommodating them.”

Indeed, as the Southern Republicans move into leadership roles, many say the biggest question is whether the polarizing tactics they used to secure a beachhead in unfriendly local territory will prove too divisive for the national stage. Throughout Clinton’s term, it has been Southern Republicans like Gingrich and Armey who have delivered the most pointed barbs at the President--sometimes in language that left them nursing wounds as well.

“The challenge for Republicans will be turning that aggressiveness into a positive governing force,” Ayres said.

In the new Congress, the South will enjoy strength comparable to its influence in the heyday of Southern Democratic leaders such as Sam Rayburn, Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard B. Russell. Though Midwesterner Dole will serve as majority leader, Southerners hold each of the next three ranking positions. On Friday, Lott narrowly defeated Sen. Alan K. Simpson (R-Wyo.), who was backed by Dole, for the position of Republican whip; Sens. Thad Cochran of Mississippi and Don Nickles of Oklahoma were reelected to head the Senate Republican Conference and Policy Committee respectively. Southerners Strom Thurmond of South Carolina and Jesse Helms of North Carolina will chair the powerful Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees.

In the House, the tilt to the South is even more pronounced. With Gingrich and Armey already guaranteed the top two positions, two aggressively conservative Southerners--Reps. Tom DeLay of Texas and Bill McCollum of Florida--are vying with Pennsylvania Rep. Robert S. Walker for the No. 3 post of House whip; House Republicans will pick their choice in a vote Monday morning. Gingrich has tapped two other Southerners for critical posts: Louisiana’s Bob Livingston as chair of the Appropriations Committee and Bill Archer of Texas as chairman of the Ways and Means panel.

The ascendance of the Southern Republicans within the GOP leadership structure appears even more stark when set against the growing frustration of Southern Democrats. Calling for Democrats to chart a more centrist course, Reps. Charlie Rose of North Carolina and Charles W. Stenholm of Texas bid for the party’s top two House leadership positions last week. But they were crushed by the candidates favored by House liberals, Rep. Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri, who was chosen as minority leader, and David E. Bonior of Michigan, who was elected minority whip.

These contrasting fortunes symbolize the historic shift of the South from the foundation of Democratic political strength in the century after the Civil War to the core of the modern Republican coalition in the years since the civil rights revolution.

Consider the change since the last time the Republicans controlled both houses of Congress: the 1953-54 session.

At that point, in the House of Representatives, just four of the 221 GOP members came from the Deep South; another five came from the border states of Oklahoma, Kentucky and Tennessee. (By contrast, the seven largest Northeastern and Midwestern states sent 110 Republican representatives to that Congress.) In the Senate, just one of the 48 Republican senators came from the South--John Sherman Cooper of Kentucky.

But in the 1960s the white backlash against the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act ended the Democratic dominance of the South. The first cracks came in presidential elections with Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon. During the past 30 years, the GOP has slowly but steadily translated that realignment down the ballot, finally achieving a massive breakthrough in November, when white Southern antipathy toward President Clinton propelled the GOP to gains of 19 House and three Senate seats across the 11 states of the Confederacy plus Oklahoma and Kentucky. Fully two-thirds of Southern whites voted Republican in the midterm election, exit polls found.

Today, with 73 representatives, Southern Republicans outnumber Southern Democrats in the House and constitute the largest geographic block of Republicans. In the Senate, the post-election switch to the GOP of formerly Democratic Sen. Richard C. Shelby of Alabama raised the number of Southern Republicans to 16--nearly one-third of the GOP total.

If anything, the South is likely to become further entrenched as the GOP’s political and congressional anchor. Several Southern Democratic representatives only narrowly escaped this fall, and many observers believe that the Republican march across the region may gain more ground in 1996. “We are on the verge of even greater gains,” Gramm said.

Although the Southern Republican Party developed largely in opposition to the civil rights movement, Gingrich, Gramm and the rest of the 50-something and younger generation of Republicans now moving into leadership positions almost entirely avoid the overtly race-conscious politics of the older GOP generation symbolized by Helms.

To the extent the new Southern Republicans reflect racial divisions, it is in the manner of conservatives from other regions: partly in their hard-line positioning on racially tinged “wedge” issues such as crime and welfare, but even more importantly in their hostility toward taxes and government spending.

“They represent the current generation of winners in American life,” said Emory University political scientist Merle Black.

From that perspective, the Southern Republicans by and large bring to policy debates an intuitive hostility toward virtually all forms of government activity, except defense spending and some middle-class entitlements.

The aggressive anti-government agenda of Gramm, Gingrich and Armey may provoke clashes with throwback GOP moderates from other regions who are more cautious about slashing spending and dismantling the social safety net, including Hatfield; his Oregon colleague Bob Packwood, who will chair the Senate Finance Committee; Kansas Sen. Nancy Landon Kassebaum, and perhaps Dole himself.

But these regional differences are less pronounced among younger Republicans, who both in approach and ideology model themselves more on Gingrich and Gramm than Dole, noted one House GOP leadership aide. Indeed, the emerging generation of Republican leaders from the South are shaped as much by suburban values as by Southern ones. That fact makes them less distinctively Southern in style than such Democratic predecessors as Lyndon Johnson, but keeps them in tune with young Republicans moving into Congress from overwhelmingly white suburban districts in Ohio, Michigan and California.

“We have a different flavor from the leadership of a Democratic South because they represented the rural South,” McCollum said. “I represent the conservative views of Middle America.”