John Kerry in Dixieland

The “South” is a region and a state of mind. If the Senator runs for President in 2004 recent history suggests he may have trouble connecting with both

By Robert David Sullivan

WHISTLING DIXIE?: Kerry needs a Southern strategy.

Though he remains coy about his plans, US Senator John Kerry has been getting plenty of press coverage for his tentative steps toward a presidential run in 2004. His August 5 appearance at a fundraiser for the mayor of Manchester, New Hampshire — at which he responded to applause by joking, “I accept the nomination!” — was covered by CNN and noted in the national press. Later that week, in his Beacon Hill home, Kerry hosted a fundraiser for the governor of Iowa. This act of hospitality prompted Boston Globe columnist Scot Lehigh to demand that Kerry “acknowledge the obvious” and admit that he’s making plans beyond next year’s Senate re-election campaign. And Salon.com’s Jake Tapper noted a few weeks ago that Kerry has also made recent speeches in Colorado, Georgia, and Texas, concluding that “to watch Kerry now is to watch a man who appears to be sounding out to himself his own reasons for running.”

If Kerry does run for president, he’ll be the fourth Massachusetts politician in a quarter-century to be a serious contender for the Democratic nomination, following Ted Kennedy, Michael Dukakis, and Paul Tsongas. But he’ll be on the wrong side of a deep geographical split in the party. Put him against a white Southerner — if not former vice-president Al Gore, then most likely North Carolina senator John Edwards — and his chances may well evaporate.

A Southern candidate for the Democratic nomination starts out with a geographical advantage that extends far beyond the 11 states of the Confederacy. In presidential primaries, the constituency for such contenders includes border states such as Kentucky,

Missouri, and Oklahoma. It also includes the underbellies of Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio, which are all geographically closer to Louisville than to the Great Lakes. It has outposts in African-American neighborhoods in Chicago, Detroit, and other major Frost Belt cities, where many voters responded to Jimmy Carter’s and Bill Clinton’s histories of working with civil-rights leaders. And it includes the hinterlands in many Northern states, where voters may resent their lack of influence in gubernatorial elections and the winner-take-all Electoral College system. Since Democratic convention delegates are awarded on a proportionate basis, it can be profitable for Southern candidates to mine these mostly rural areas. For example, there’s Coos County, on New Hampshire’s Canadian border, which Bill Clinton easily carried in 1992 even as Paul Tsongas won that state’s primary. Or take Pennsylvania, which the New York Times last year described as “Philadelphia and Pittsburgh with Alabama in the middle.” In 1980, Ted Kennedy narrowly defeated Jimmy Carter statewide, thanks to his strength in the cities; but Carter was able to walk away with more convention delegates because of his appeal in the more culturally conservative parts of Pennsylvania. (Unfortunately for Kennedy, he was equally weak in both the urban and rural parts of the South.)

All these pieces can add up to a majority coalition in the Democratic primaries. When there’s been at least one white Southerner among the major Democratic candidates, this coalition has been amazingly stable — ranging from 48.8 to 51.8 percent of the total primary vote from 1976 through 1992. Northern and Western candidates, by contrast, seem to top out with percentages in the low 40s. Last year, of course, Tennessee’s Al Gore got almost 80 percent of the primary vote against the hapless Bill Bradley — a New Jersey resident who futilely tried to emphasize that he grew up in Missouri. In a Boston Globe story on Kerry’s recent visit to New Hampshire, a supporter is quoted as saying, “He’s the heir apparent to Bill Bradley’s voters.” I’d ask to be written out of that will.

Michael Dukakis may have thought he was reaching moderate Democrats with his “good jobs at good wages” mantra, but he really got nominated in 1988 because the Southern vote split among Gore, Missouri’s Richard Gephardt, and South Carolina native Jesse Jackson. Dukakis’s 41 percent in the least Southern of Southern states, Florida, made him the front-runner. (Four years later, Tsongas got 35 percent in Florida — not a huge drop from the Dukakis benchmark. Because he faced only Clinton, however, he lost by such a wide margin that his campaign never recovered.) Kerry can hardly hope to be so lucky in 2004. Gore isn’t going to risk his reputation by groveling for another chance against George W. Bush; if he can’t wrap up the nomination before the primaries begin, he’ll settle for a place in the history books as the guy who got screwed by the Supreme Court in 2000. Gephardt isn’t any more likely to prolong the agony; if he faces a fight in every Southern primary, he’ll step aside and return to his leadership post in the US House with his dignity intact. If neither runs, there may be a battle for the South among Edwards, Indiana senator Evan Bayh (whose state dips into Southern terrain), and a late entrant, but that battle will take place before the primaries begin. Remember that the party’s last crowded and dragged-out primary race put Dukakis at the top of the ticket — the kind of mistake that most Democrats don’t want to repeat.

There are some parts of the country where a Southern accent seems to pose a liability — and they happen to be where Kerry is raising almost all his money, according to finance reports released two weeks ago. In early August, the Boston Globe reported that Kerry raised $2.18 million in the first half of 2001, including $900,000 from Massachusetts, $492,000 in California, $200,000 in the Washington, DC, area, and $164,000 in New York City — all areas where primary voters were cool toward Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton even after it was blindingly obvious that their nominations couldn’t be stopped. (Jerry Brown’s defeat of Clinton in Connecticut, another state that often rejects Southerners, was the biggest upset of 1992, but it came too late to mean anything.) Depending on how the primaries are scheduled in 2004, Kerry could probably win scattered victories against any Southern candidate (except Gore) all through the spring, but they wouldn’t be nearly enough to net him a majority of convention delegates.

Then there’s the issue of electability in November. In the August 6 issue of the New Republic, Franklin Foer describes — and ridicules — attempts by the Democratic National Committee to make the party more palatable to rural areas, where Gore won only 37 percent of the vote last fall. Foer argues that moving the party to the right on gun control and other “cultural issues” will only jeopardize recent Democratic gains in suburban areas. This is not a new concern: as far back as 1976, Jimmy Carter came within two points of blowing what was supposed to be an easy victory over unelected president Gerald Ford. The near-catastrophe came because the born-again peanut farmer was surprisingly weak in affluent, well-educated Northern suburbs — losing states that John F. Kennedy had won in 1960, such as Connecticut and New Jersey, and even doing worse than George McGovern did against Richard Nixon in places like Lincoln, Massachusetts, and Marin County, California.

On the face of it, Carter’s weakness in suburbia (which got worse in 1980, contributing to his massive defeat) would seem to strengthen the case for a nominee with a track record of winning suburbanites, such as Kerry or Connecticut senator Joseph Lieberman. But this argument failed miserably in 1988: Dukakis, who had no problem winning suburbia in his Massachusetts races, got only 43 percent of the suburban vote against George H.W. Bush. By contrast, Gore won 55 percent of the suburban vote against Bush the Younger last year, and was far stronger than Dukakis even in Northern states like New Jersey. (These figures come from Ruy Teixeira and John B. Judis’s forthcoming book The Emerging Democratic Majority, quoted in Foer’s article.) Perhaps Kerry can do even better than Gore’s 55 percent, but the Democrats have certainly been going in the right direction with Southern nominees. Why tamper with success?

Besides, a contemporary Southern candidate like Edwards doesn’t seem to threaten the urban-suburban coalition that gave Gore a popular-vote win last November. He doesn’t have Carter’s pious demeanor, or Clinton’s unfortunate association with the phrase “trailer trash.” Until recently, Southern Democrats tended to win elections by combining rural votes with those of the urban poor. Pro-choice and anti-gun, Edwards won in North Carolina by winning the cities and suburbs, and by winning both the most-educated and the least-educated voters — the same way Democrats now win in the North. Assuming that he’s not a complete stiff on the campaign trail, it’s hard to argue against Edwards on the grounds of electability; if he holds on to all the states that Gore won and adds his own North Carolina, he’s got an Electoral College majority.

Back in the primaries, the question is whether Kerry could accumulate delegates against Edwards (or Gore or Bayh) anywhere in the South. He might score some delegates against the more populist Gephardt, whose support for farm subsidies and opposition to free trade could bomb in the suburbs. But it’s hard to imagine any scenario in which the cautious, patrician Kerry does well among rural voters and big-city African-Americans, and you still need one or the other to win Southern primaries.

If his recent speeches are any indication, Kerry will try to run for president as a balanced-budget hawk, presumably hoping to avoid the “Massachusetts liberal” stigma that has hurt other Bay State candidates in the South. He’s now bragging about his “tough vote” for the 1993 Clinton budget (which included both a tax increase and spending limits), as well as his early support for 1985’s Gramm-Rudman-Hollings deficit-reduction plan. He may also try to blur his liberal image on law-and-order issues; he’s not likely to repeat Dukakis’s mistake of touting a membership in the American Civil Liberties Union.

But such moves to the center may not matter when none of the other major candidates seems ready to raise the liberal banner. The problem for Kerry is that presidential-primary voters have to base their decisions on something, and if none of the major candidates will own up to an ideological label, then other factors — such as geography — will determine the race.

Looking at the most frequently mentioned possibilities for 2004 (Gore, Lieberman, Gephardt, Edwards, and Kerry), I’m reminded of a Web site I recently visited. The “Belief-O-Matic” (see www.beliefnet.com/story/76/story_7665_1.html) is a questionnaire that supposedly determines which religions most closely match your beliefs. I took the test and discovered that if you punch in liberal views on abortion, homosexuality, and protecting the environment, the Unitarian Universalist Association registers a high score even when those views are combined with a variety of different beliefs on the creation of the earth and the existence of an afterlife. The UU church, the site explains, tolerates “diverse” beliefs on many basic theological questions. Looking at Kerry and the other Democratic contenders, I get the sense that they’re all trying to be the Unitarian Universalist candidate — keeping the faith on a few narrow issues but trying to fudge the really big questions about the roles of government, corporations, and the individual in society.

Of course, Kerry doesn’t have to run as just another noncontroversial UU candidate. Theoretically, there is room for a candidate rooted in the left wing of the Democratic Party, and Kerry’s overall voting record, if not his rhetoric, puts him pretty squarely in that wing. (His threat to mount a filibuster if the Senate tries to approve oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge shows that he still has some promise as a left-wing fighter.) One argument for staying to the left is that if the supporters of Jesse Jackson in 1988 and Jerry Brown in 1992 were combined, they would make up a sizable block — probably more than 40 percent — of the primary vote. The problem is that their constituencies barely overlapped. Jackson and Brown both carried San Francisco, but aside from a few college towns, they didn’t carry the same areas anywhere else in the country. The majority-black counties across the South that supported Jackson’s attempts to shake up the system ignored Brown when he tried some of the same rhetoric. (The same thing happened in New York City’s minority neighborhoods.) Conversely, most of the Northern counties that backed Brown’s pro-environment, anti-NAFTA crusade in 1992 — affluent suburbs and a few union strongholds such as Scranton, Pennsylvania, and Sheboygan, Wisconsin — had no use for Jackson when he read off the same page. In both cases, geographic roots trumped ideology: Bill Clinton may have dissed rap singer Sister Souljah and voiced disagreements with Jackson, but he had no trouble connecting with African-Americans (a majority of whom, as a recent poll showed, disapprove of the music anyway) across the political spectrum, and with Southerners of both races. Mike Dukakis may have put everyone to sleep by emphasizing “competence” over ideology, but he owned almost all the voters who would support the more explicitly liberal “Governor Moonbeam” four years later.

Jackson and Brown each tried to slice off half the Democratic cake — only to discover that the cake had already been divided lengthwise. They could get the left half of the South or the left half of the North, but not both. Emphasizing health care and campaign-finance reform, Bill Bradley tried to put both pieces together in 2000, but his failure will probably dissuade anyone from renewing the attempt in three years.

Still, Kerry could surprise us all by trying to develop a new liberal philosophy for the Democratic Party, one that would stop the party’s swing to the right on economic issues that began under Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council. Such a campaign would face long odds, but it would force the presidential-primary candidates to deal with substantive issues, and it might put a few cracks in the Southern coalition that has determined party nominees for most of the past three decades. More likely, though, we’ll get a Kerry campaign that tries to please everyone — and if that’s the case, it just might wilt in the heat of Dixie.

Harvey A. Silverglate, a partner at the Boston law firm of Silverglate & Good, writes about criminal law, students’ rights, and civil liberties for the Phoenix. He is also the co-author of The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America’s Campuses (HarperPerennial, 1999) and co-founder of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. He can be reached at has@world.std.com.