This is a good piece on partisan shifts in the South in recent decades.
South now looking solidly Republican by Bill Minor Greenwood (MS) Commonwealth 11/26/04.
The South for seven decades after the Civil War was the reliably solid, one-party fiefdom of the National Democratic Party, and amazingly now it has become the Republican's national majority base.
While not many younger Republicans of today in the South either realize it, or will admit it, race has been the under-girding ingredient in the South's political conversion to the GOP.
More and more, since the 1960s when blacks in the South got the right to vote in significant numbers and were drawn to the party of Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy, Republicans have painted Democrats as the "black man's party" and theirs the "white man's party."
Insidiously, that racial divide even crept into Mississippi's recent supposedly non-partisan Central District state Supreme Court runoff race pitting Samac Richardson, who is white, against the black incumbent, James Graves.
Well-funded and backed by influential business organizations, with back-door Republican support, Richardson waged a campaign that injected old-line racial code words.
Minor was around in Mississippi during the most intense phases of the civil rights battles, so he speaks with experience and confidence on these topics. He's also been covering Mississippi politics for decades. Back during the 1970s and early 1980s, he published a weekly paper in Jackson called The Reporter. Someone burned a cross on the paper's lawn one night. I wish I had saved the editorial where he described what he thought of the type of people who do such things.
For a very different view of politics and race in Mississippi, check out this conservative, sentimental piece: The Past Is Not Dead by Wyatt Emerich Daily Times Leader (West Point MS) 12/09/04. The title is from a famous line of William Faulkner's, which of course he uses clumsily. How could stodgy conservatives be able to understand Faulkner?
John Dean has a good observation on the shift of old-time Southern segregationists from the Democratic to the Republican Party: A Crucial But Largely Ignored 2004 Campaign Issue: The Next President Is Likely to Appoint At Least Three Supreme Court Justices by John Dean Findlaw.com 09/24/04.
With so much at stake, why has the Supreme Court issue merely simmered in this election year? One reason, I believe, is that the Democrats have proven to be poor demagogues, unlike their opposition.
By way of comparison, imagine that a moderate group of five justices of the U.S. Supreme Court had selected Al Gore to be president of the United States last December 2000. Can anyone doubt that conservative Republicans would have been ranting, and attacking both the Court and the legitimacy of that presidency for the past four years?
The Republicans, had they lost this way, would have made the 2000 election the central focus of the 2004 election. But the Democratic Party, once a party of flame-throated cantankerous conservatives, no longer is very adept at the squeaky-wheel politics of incivility.
For decades, Southern conservative Democrats attacked anyone or any governmental entity that insisted on equality for African-Americans. When they lost in their efforts to keep the South racially divided, these social conservatives and radicals (and their successors) joined the Republican Party. There, they have continued to impose their special brand of Southern charm on those with whom they disagree. [my emphasis]
Democrats today have lost that bullying and blustering talent. Indeed, Democratic Senator Zell Miller, the last of the breed, loaned himself to Republicans this year.
Mollie Ivins, with her great instinct for the weirdness of politics, observes in a recent piece something about the bizarre nature of today's Republican coalition: Sometimes, You Just Have to Laugh Texas Observer 12/03/04.
Here’s one of those standard “You’re a redneck if…” jokes: “When your momma gets stopped for speeding, she does not take the Marlboro out of her mouth before telling the highway trooper to [Cheney] off.” That’s funny. Texas rednecks actually are not funny. They are guys who use spotlights for deer-hunting and kittens for shark bait and they’re as funny as a .44. You hear these nincompoop right-wingers pompously lecturing liberals for their supposed “cultural condescension” toward our rugged, salt-of-the-earth brethren here in the Red heartland. I yield to no one in my fondness for most Texans, but wouldn’t you just love to introduce Ann Coulter to Butch, Bubba, and DeWayne? They’re not girlie-men. If she liked DeWayne, we could take up a collection to get his teeth fixed.
Molly Ivins has never been one of those mealy-mouthed, let's-be-nice-to-the-Republicans sort of liberals.
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