A Tale of Two Southern Presidents

Last month, Jimmy Carter scolded fellow Southerner Bill Clinton for misleading the American people about his improper relationship with Monica S. Lewinsky. Carter’s remarks came on the 20th anniversary of the Camp David accords, his greatest achievement as president and the stimulus for his highest approval rating during his four years in office. It is a tad ironic that Carter’s 75% approval rating then, after he had facilitated a giant step toward peace in the Middle East, is roughly equivalent to Clinton’s today, after he has been nailed for adultery and quite possibly perjury and obstruction of justice. The story of the public’s reaction to these two Southern presidents tells us a great deal about what has happened in U.S. politics, society and culture in the last quarter of the 20th century.

At the outset, Carter’s conquest of the presidency reflected a Watergate-rocked nation’s willingness to seek leadership from the risen and at least partly redeemed South. Although his election set off a Southern love feast, Carter was soon sent home from the picnic. When, in true Southern Baptist fashion, he began to preach about the need to lower expectations, his sermons fell on the deaf ears of a generation steeped in self-indulgence and instant gratification. His uninspiring oratory and his inability to deal with the Iranian hostage crisis sealed his bitter fate. He ultimately lost the presidency to an opponent whose jingoistic rhetoric and advocacy of states’ rights and religious fundamentalism made him seem far more Southern than Carter himself. Indeed, both Ronald Reagan and George Bush, who put many a Southern demagogue to shame with his flogging of the Willie Horton episode, seemed much more traditionally Southern in their political styles than did Carter or does Clinton.

In the years between Carter’s departure from and Clinton’s arrival at the White House, much was heard about the Southernization of America. But the implication is decidedly negative. Instead of the affirmative message of reconciliation, tolerance and humility preached by Carter, the nation, it is said, has fallen captive to the dark underside of Southernness: the thinly veiled bigotry, intolerance and self-righteousness exemplified by House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) and Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.). It is a convenient but misleading generalization.

For starters, Gingrich and Lott are Republicans, not the race-mongering, Yankee-baiting, Democratic “Dixieland band” who once dominated Congress. Furthermore, the “Southern strategy,” adopted by Richard M. Nixon and used by Reagan and Bush, which targeted Southern white males fed up with the Democratic Party’s racial and socioeconomic liberalism, is increasingly difficult to distinguish from the campaign tactics Republicans employ elsewhere in the nation.

If this suggests the dangers of relying on old regional stereotypes, it doesn’t mean that they are totally invalid, however. In his 1941 classic, “The Mind of the South,” W.J. Cash described the white Southern male as “one of the most complete hedonists ever recorded. To bite off the nose or gouge out the eye of a favorite enemy . . . , to love harder than the next man, to be known eventually far and wide as a hell of a fellow--such would be his focus.” On the other hand, the white Southerner’s moral code was absolutely “mosaic in its sternness.” Thus, his uncontrolled hedonism served constantly to “exacerbate the sense of sin in him and keep his zest for absolution always at white heat.”

In his statement to the nation following his testimony to independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr’s grand jury, Clinton might have been thinking about how great it would be to chomp down on Ken’s schnoz. Soon after, however, he was biting his lip, huddling with preachers and seeking forgiveness not only from God but from practically every other mortal on the planet. If Cash’s description seems to fit Clinton well, it is less appropriate for Carter, who had puritanism aplenty but lacked even a redeeming smidgen of counterbalancing hedonism.

Neither Carter nor Clinton seems to exhibit what Cash called the obsessive “attachment to racial values” that typified white Southern males in general. In fact, both showed remarkable appeal with black voters, and it was a good thing, for despite claims that Carter had restored the old “solid” Democratic South, he actually received less than 50% of the white vote in the region. Clinton has fared even worse among white Southerners, gaining only roughly one-third of their votes. Until recently, Clinton would have had considerable difficulty defeating the Antichrist in a head-to-head vote among white Southern men.

Since the Lewinsky eruption, however, a subtle shift in attitudes toward the president and the first lady seems to be underway. Ironically, some of Clinton’s recent rise in support may be coming from Southern white males, in what Washington Post columnist Mary McGrory calls a “Bubba bounce.” Despite his Arkansas roots, for many white Southern men, Clinton always has seemed a bogus Bubba, a slick-talking, draft-dodging, protest-marching pantywaist, effectively emasculated by his power-mad, overbearing wife. Now, many Southern white males grin and shake their heads in a manner that suggests empathy, even envy. Whatever else may be said about Clinton, he darn sure isn’t emasculated.

Male chauvinism may have played a role in softening Southern attitudes toward Clinton, but if part of this reaction is pure testosterone, some of it is also pure New Testament. In the Bible Belt South, there is nothing worse than sinning, and nothing better than seeking forgiveness for that sinning. Even the most hard-core, hellfire-and-damnation preachers, deacons and deaconesses have shown more sympathy for Clinton since he, however belatedly and grudgingly, confessed and asked for forgiveness.

As is often the case, what is true for Southern whites is truer still for Southern blacks. Clinton is the beneficiary of blacks’ inclination to worship a God who loves and redeems rather than punishes and destroys. This vision of God as mindful and tolerant of human frailties has induced a powerful capacity for forgiveness among African Americans, a capacity that has been tested continually throughout their experience on this continent. Hence, they are, of all Southerners and all Americans, the group most ready to forgive Clinton for his transgressions.

Clinton’s behavior, and that of his kin and friends, brings to mind exactly what we in the South used to call “common white trash.” Still, although Clinton comes from Arkansas, this whole sordid business and the reaction to it have a lot less to do with the Southernization of America than with the Americanization of white trash. We should have realized where we were headed back when television viewers first embraced “Married . . . With Children” and Roseanne Barr. Soon we were engulfed in a flood of depraved and obnoxious behavior that eventually washed Jerry Springer up on our doorsteps. In the midst of all this, it is easy enough to see how the merry antics of Bubba and the whole Clinton gang might be taken no more seriously than your typical trashy sitcom offered on any network on any night.

The national embrace of white-trash culture is difficult to fathom, although revolts against prevailing standards of public morality and decency are not uncommon in times of relative prosperity and complacency. Yet, this sorry state of affairs (pun intended), like the contrasting public reactions to Carter and Clinton in general, transcends regional identification and stereotypes. As a somewhat defensive Georgian and Southerner, I resented it when we offered the nation Carter, a president who felt he had sinned by simply “lusting in his heart” after other women, only to see him mocked and rejected. Nearly 25 years later, however, I feel no corresponding sense of elation as I observe overwhelming national approval of another Southerner for whom only lusting in his heart would represent an unprecedented act of virtue and self-control.