GOP's Power Shift to South Brings Change in Priorities

By JANET HOOK

June 7, 1996 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

WASHINGTON —

With Republicans ready to anoint a Southerner to succeed Bob Dole as Senate leader, Congress is arriving at a watershed in the shifting terrain of American politics.

Once Republican senators choose between Mississippians Trent Lott and Thad Cochran--a contest that appears virtually certain to go to Lott--Southern Republicans for the first time will hold the top jobs in both the House and Senate, thus completing a gradual consolidation of power that is changing the style and substance of both Congress and the GOP.

It is a transformation that has been a generation in the making, and its consequences are written all over the Republican agenda in Congress. From gun rights to regulatory reform to the minimum wage, the Republican Party increasingly champions positions that play well in the rural and suburban regions of the South, but are political poison in many Northern precincts where moderate Republicans remain the party’s mainstays.

The change marks the clear end of an era in which the GOP was led and dominated by lawmakers from the Northeast and Midwest--moderates and pragmatic conservatives such as Dole, a Kansan, former House GOP leader Robert H. Michel of Illinois and the late Senate leader Everett M. Dirksen, also of Illinois.

“The party has taken a different tone to its collective voice,” said Rep. Ray LaHood (R-Ill.), who succeeded Michel in representing the Peoria area. “It is more conservative, more shrill, more unabashed.”

“It is an amazing change,” said Barbara Sinclair, a political scientist at UC Riverside. “This Senate election really does ratify the change in the Republican Party’s ideology.”

Southern domination of the GOP leadership will become official by Wednesday, when the secret ballot election to choose between Lott and Cochran is scheduled. The competition may be settled sooner because insiders say Lott already has enough committed votes in hand to win and Cochran has suggested he would drop out before the election if he was sure he would lose.

The new Senate leader will join another Southern Republican--House Speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia--as the dominant figures in their respective chambers. Their principal deputies also are Southerners.

Dixie Transformation

This change comes at a time when a pair of Democratic Southerners--Bill Clinton and Al Gore--sit atop the executive branch. Clinton and Gore, though, often seem at odds with voters in their home region. On the Republican side, the rise of Southern leaders in Congress is an emblem of the transformation of Dixie from the once-solid bedrock of the Democratic Party into a core constituency of a new, more conservative GOP.

The fault lines created by the shift of GOP power from the Frost Belt to the Sun Belt were evident when Gingrich and House Majority Leader Dick Armey of Texas and other GOP leaders in Congress took a hard line against increasing the minimum wage--despite the objections of many Northern Republicans.

“I think people like Newt Gingrich and Dick Armey see money and power in the country moving to the South and Southwest,” says Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.). “That’s a real problem in the Northeast. There’s a real bias Southerners have toward the North.”

Dole is the last of a generation of Midwestern and Northeastern Republicans who dominated the party leadership while the South was an impregnable Democratic stronghold. When Dole first came to Congress in 1961, all but two of the Senate’s 26 Southerners were Democrats. In the House, 111 of the 120 Southerners were Democrats.

GOP Has the Numbers

Today, Southern Republicans outnumber Democrats in both the House and Senate: 16 of the 26 Southern senators are Republicans; 73 of the 137 House Southerners are Republicans.

Democrats’ hold on the region began to break down in the mid-’60s, when politics was transformed by the civil rights movement. White Southerners increasingly shunned the Democratic Party as too liberal, especially on race issues. Also, the rapid population growth in the South’s suburbs was fertile territory for the kind of anti-tax, anti-government conservatives who came to dominate the GOP.

Said Merle Black, a political scientist at Emory University in Atlanta: “Suburban conservatives in the South want to make money and keep their money, and they think Republicans are more likely to let them keep it than the Democrats. They want to be left alone.”

The increased number of Southern Republicans in Congress has translated into the highly visible clout in Congress. Other Southerners in the GOP’s Senate leadership besides Lott and Cochran include Don Nickles of Oklahoma and and Connie Mack of Florida.

In the House, Gingrich and Armey are joined by House Majority Whip Tom DeLay of Texas in the top tier of leadership. And Southern Republicans head such key committees as House Appropriations and the tax-writing Ways and Means panel.

The South once enjoyed comparable power when Democrats were in the majority. The congressional leadership over the years included such legislative giants as Texans Sam Rayburn and Lyndon B. Johnson and an array of powerful committee chairmen from the region. But this new generation of GOP leaders from the South is very different--and not just in ideology.

For one thing, Dixie’s GOP leaders tend to be less clearly identified with their region than were Democratic barons like Rep. Jamie Whitten of Mississippi, long-standing chairman of the Appropriations Committee whose legislative interests tended to the parochial, or former House Speaker Jim Wright (D-Texas), whose oil-patch roots were unmistakable.

Gingrich and Lott, by contrast, are national conservative leaders first and Southerners second. Indeed, many of these “Southerners” are not even natives. Gingrich was born in Pennsylvania. Armey came from North Dakota. Mack spent most of his childhood in Philadelphia.

The career paths of these new GOP leaders also differ from those of their Democratic predecessors, who tended to come from legislative and political backgrounds that usually bred a pragmatic approach to politics. Gingrich and Armey were college professors. DeLay was a small businessman who still bristles when he remembers the federal red tape he encountered as a pest-control executive.

“These people came with a broader agenda and ideological purposes were foremost,” said Rep. Vic Fazio (D-West Sacramento).

Different Breed

The GOP leaders also are a vastly different breed from the old-school Republicans they have supplanted--old-line conservatives with a less strident, confrontational brand of Republicanism. Michel, who was House GOP leader for more than a decade before he retired in 1994, was a prototype.

Having spent his entire congressional career in the minority party, Michel was inclined to look for ways to accommodate the Democratic majority, to reach compromises on bills that would leave some GOP imprint. A pillar of get-along-to-go-along pragmatism, Michel played golf with liberal icon Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill Jr., the Democratic House speaker from Massachusetts. He shared long car rides back to Illinois with former Rep. Dan Rostenkowski, a product of the Chicago Democratic machine.

That kind of chumminess is almost unimaginable for Gingrich and company, who rebelled against Michel as they pursued a take-no-prisoners, confrontational style.

But the rise of the South in the GOP leadership has brought more than just a change in technique. It has brought a shift in priorities in the party’s legislative agenda.

The minimum wage fight was emblematic. The last time the minimum wage was increased, in 1989, Republicans supported the bill by a 135-35 margin. This year, GOP leaders fiercely fought the wage hike, and House Republicans voted against it, 93-138. Of the Republicans who supported it, only 17 came from the South, where wages tend to be lower and more states have right-to-work laws that make it harder for unions to organize.

Northeastern Republicans--who often have to court organized labor to survive politically--complained that their leaders’ opposition to the wage hike was part of a broader anti-union agenda that smacked of regional parochialism.

“I have a real problem with the anti-labor tone--it’s an anti-New York and anti-Northeastern tone,” said King, who represents a suburban Long Island district. “It’s giving a Southern coloration to the party.”

House GOP leaders this year also threw their weight behind a top priority of the gun lobby--repealing the 1994 ban on assault weapons--that did not sit well with Northern moderates.

Michel, who is now associated with a Washington law firm, warns that the party may suffer if the GOP’s congressional leadership is heavily concentrated in one region.

“It’s good to have the leadership represent roughly what the complexion of the entire membership is,” Michel said. “When it gets tilted too much one way, you’re bound to run into some trouble.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

GOP’s Shift

The Republican Party is shifting to the South, in its leadership and its ideology.

OLD GUARD

Bob Dole, Kansas

Everett Dirksen, Illinois

Bob Michel, Illinois

Gerald Ford, Michigan

****

NEW GUARD

Tom DeLay, Texas

Dick Armey, Texas