Local Politics Trip Up GOP Takeover of South

Going into Tuesday’s elections, it looked like Georgia voters were set to make a little history by electing the state’s first Republican governor since Reconstruction. South Carolina voters also seemed to be in a history-making frame of mind: The long senatorial career of Ernest F. Hollings, the last of an exceedingly durable but ultimately doomed breed of Southern Democrat, was teetering. The South would fully be in the grip of the Republican Party come Wednesday morning.

Yet, not only did Democrat Roy Barnes win the Georgia gubernatorial race rather handily, but the 76-year-old Hollings also retained his seat with surprising ease. Beyond that, there was the ouster of Jesse Helms protege Sen. Lauch Faircloth in North Carolina and the defeat of Republican Govs. David Beasley in South Carolina and Forrest “Fob” James Jr. in Alabama.

Was this the beginning of a Democratic comeback in the South?

What happened on election day was not so much a significant long-term reversal of Republican fortunes in the South as a reminder that here, even more than elsewhere, all politics are indeed local.

In Georgia, for example, Republican megamillionaire Guy Millner spent a reported $11.5 million of his own money on his campaign, but when visiting the University of Georgia, he laid himself a little trap from which all his money could not free him. Millner hinted that he wanted to stop granting tenure to the pointy-headed professors in the state’s institutions of higher learning. When a few profs expressed alarm, Millner backed off, assuring them that he was really talking about ending tenure in the public schools. Thus, in a single stroke of political genius, Millner tried to pacify one small, generally cloutless constituency by angering a huge and powerful population of elementary- and secondary-school teachers. Millner also had to contend with the Miller factor, the endorsement of his Democratic opponent by the phenomenally popular incumbent, Democratic Gov. Zell Miller, whose lottery-financed Hope scholarship program has made him a favorite even in the most staunchly Republican Georgia households.

The issues of the lottery and education also figured prominently in the South Carolina and Alabama gubernatorial races. Both these states border Georgia, and many of their citizens are tired of seeing millions of dollars go to the higher educations of Georgia students from South Carolinians and Alabamians who cross state lines to buy lottery tickets by the handful. The victorious Democrats in both these states supported lotteries as a means of keeping this cash at home and generating the revenue needed to address the abysmal conditions in their own schools.

In Alabama, throw in the Fob factor. Even the state’s conservative business establishment had had enough when the incumbent governor ventured the thought that the Bill of Rights might not apply to his state and insisted on defying the U.S. Supreme Court in the matter of displaying the Ten Commandments in courtrooms and other public spaces. Folks are partial to the Ten Commandments in South Carolina, too, but when Bible-thumping Beasley supporters attacked the video-poker industry, they crossed the fine line between preaching and meddling for lots of people who might otherwise be pillars of the church but either enjoy risking a quarter or two now and then or are proprietors of crossroads stores and other businesses where these machines are a big draw.

Finally, in the South, perhaps as nowhere else, politics remain intensely personal. Nobody understands this better than Hollings, who began his career as a segregationist and union buster and who once vowed, “We are not going to have labor unions, the NAACP and New England politicians blemish the Southern way of life.” Though he was elected governor of South Carolina on a segregationist platform in 1958, before he left office, Hollings was quietly instrumental in preparing for the peaceful integration of Clemson University in 1963.

Soon after the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965, Hollings “discovered” hunger in South Carolina and conducted a high-profile “hunger tour” of blighted areas in 1969. Realizing that the age of segregation was over, he also sensed that antiunionism remained a very respectable prejudice in textile-laden and union-light South Carolina. Hollings always has been tight with the state’s textile barons, and he received a public endorsement this year from none other than Roger Milliken, the richest and far-rightest mill man of them all. Milliken doubtless contrasted the ideologically flexible Hollings with his doctrinaire, free-trade, antiprotectionist challenger, Bob Inglis.

Like all the successful Southern Democrats in Tuesday’s races, Hollings distanced himself from President Bill Clinton. Realizing Clinton’s minimal appeal to South Carolina whites, Hollings reportedly joked as early as 1996 that if the president’s polling numbers kept going up, his handlers would probably allow him to start dating again. Suffice it to say, being a clever and appealing politician certainly helped Hollings. On the other hand, just to the north, the rejected Faircloth has never been known as the sharpest knife in the drawer, and, at age 70, his lack of personal appeal clearly hurt him in his race against his vigorous and youthful challenger, John Edwards.

What, then, do the Republican setbacks on Tuesday really tell us about the GOP’s hold on the South? First, they certainly don’t mean that traditionally conservative white Southerners are on the verge of an ideological conversion. Victorious Democrats such as governors-elect Donald Siegelman in Alabama or Barnes in Georgia are a long way from being left of almost anybody’s idea of center. In South Carolina, Beasley’s unsuccessful efforts to remove the Confederate flag from atop the state capitol doubtless translated into more white support for his Democratic challenger, Jim Hodges. Such liberal influences as may arise in Southern politics emanate primarily from the black community, and no Southern Democrat would have been making a victory speech Tuesday night without the overwhelming support of black voters.

By the same token, the fact that Southern whites are no longer Democrats does not mean that they are now “yellow-dog” Republicans willing to turn out, as their Democratic ancestors once did, to vote for whomever the party nominates for whichever office and in whatever context. Consequently, an appealing, moderate Democrat armed with adequate funding and the right set of issues still stands a fairly decent chance in the South, especially against a GOP opponent who lacks charisma and savvy and wants to ban the children’s classic “Goodnight Moon” because of its obvious sexual and satanic implications.

In their rush to celebrate last week’s surprising triumphs, however, Democrats should realize that the fact that white Southerners have not yet become thoroughly partisan Republicans does not mean that they never will or that they are ready, at this point, to return to the Democratic fold for anything more than an occasional brief and often unexpected visit.*