The Dirty South's Gonna Do it Again
This Super Tuesday, America is Dixie
By Ron Garmon
Ground Game
A proud Dixie expatriate and lifelong political junkie, I’m seldom less pleased to be away from home than the weeks before Super Tuesday. Although first coined to describe the three contests it took the doomed Fritz Mondale to put away his opposition in 1984, the ballyhoo term came to refer to yet another of the underhanded means the back half of the Mason-Dixon line uses to rig political life in the Republic to its favor. By 1988, the idea of frontloading the primaries of eight ex-Confederate states onto the first Tuesday in February looked good to Southern Democrats eager to catapult Al Gore into the White House. The net result was nomination of a Joe Friday cop from Massachusetts named Dukakis who lost the entire South to a snowbird Texan pundits now carefully distinguish as “Bush Senior.”
Again and again, we’re asked by benighted non-Southrons why we do these things to America. Well, the short answer is we hate you. Events at Appomattox Courthouse figure into this. For a few nuances more, you can grapple with the curious historical paradox of a defeated, insular and violent people coming to dominate so much of American culture. Certainly, the region’s political literature breathes little save defiance, from George Fitzhugh’s antebellum tracts asserting white supremacy and slavery as a natural order, to the twilight musings of I’ll Take My Stand; a 1930 manifesto dedicated to preservation and extension of the Dixie way of life by the usual whatever means necessary. Poet John Crowe Ransom urged the region to go to cultural war against Yankeedom to subvert it. “It could be nasty,” he cooed with ancient ferocity. “And it could be effective.”
Ransom’s wider of the mark elsewhere, declaring, “No Southerner ever dreams of Heaven, or pictures his Utopia on earth without providing room for the Democratic Party.” This was before the GOP inherited the regional Heaven’s mandate of white supremacy in accordance with the divisive and dirty Southern Strategy of Richard Nixon, a Californian so little revered in the South that Watergate-era House Republican counsel (and diehard Tricky Dickist) Fred Thompson had to chloroform his campaign well in advance of this Super Tuesday. The onetime Tennessee senator (and Law & Order TV actor), trailing badly in all polls and a narcolept on the stump, swore he’d let South Carolina decide his fate and withdrew after Palmetto State voters found him ineffective and insufficiently nasty on January 26.
Last Saturday’s results leave doubts about how the South will jump in the February 5 contest, touted as “Giga Tuesday,” “Tsunami Tuesday” or “the Tuesday of Destiny,” but sadly diluted of its traditional Southern Comfort charm by the electoral bulk of California, New York, New Jersey, Minnesota and others. On the Democratic side, John Edwards, the one Southerner still standing, came in a gutshot third in a primary he’d won in 2004. The onetime North Carolina senator’s campaign is dying in a slow-motion hail of irrelevance and his post-Tuesday death agonies will be upstaged by more bloodletting between frontrunners Hillary and Obama. S.C. Republicans likewise deserted Bible and hearth in preferring crazy-mean Arizonan John McCain to friendly Arkansas preacher Mike Huckabee, whose own post-Iowa disintegration is leaving any stop-McCain movement to Yankee moneybags Mitt Romney and “America’s mayor” Rudy Giuliani, two candidates with nastiness to spare.
Fatalism is big among we of the Blue Ridge hills, and Larry Sabato seems to regard this campaign season with all the enthusiasm of Pickett’s threadbare infantry looking at Cemetery Ridge at Gettysburg. I share an Appalachian background with Dr. Sabato, oft-quoted political guru, University of Virginia professor and director of the Center for Politics at Mr. Jefferson’s campus, and was unsurprised at his characteristic bluntness, particularly regarding the Clintons: “There’s some Clinton fatigue even among Democrats when it comes to Bill Clinton,” he allowed via e-mail. “He’s lost his temper more times than we can count this election season. It has caused even friends of the Clintons to ask: What is Bill going to do in and out of the White House with Hillary as president? Still, I’d have to call Bill Clinton a tremendous asset for his wife. It’s doubtful that Hillary could win the White House this year without Bill. Most of her support is derivative of backing for his presidency.”
Nepotism is nothing new in Dixie politics, and the sight of relatives of great men helping themselves was old news when First Brother Billy Carter cashed his first paycheck from Libya. Of course, Hillary less resembles the father of Billy Beer than she does Lurleen Wallace, wife of Alabama Governor George Wallace whom the celebrated bigot engineered to succeed him in office. Bill’s attempt to pull a Lurleen is characteristically bold and infinitely better thought out than Mayor Rudy’s parade of expensive miscalculations, the latest being the 9/11 icon’s banking of the rest of his slender chances on the Florida primary.
“Giuliani’s adopted a one-state strategy,” noted the professor. “So, he either wins Florida outright or he is toast. I doubt even a close second will suffice. Rudy made a major strategic error in not contesting New Hampshire, which might easily have worked. Rudy, not McCain, could have won NH. Rudy is trailing in the latest Florida polls, but we’ll see.”
New Hampshire was not without portents for Senator Obama, whose campaign discovered an alarming difference between exit poll results favoring their man and the tallied ballots. Lefty blogs cried fraud, but this old Dixie trick was first noticed in Douglas Wilder’s narrowly 1989 successful run for Virginia governor. Majority-race voters wishing to be thought “liberal” often express preference for a black candidate to pollsters after pulling the lever for white supremacy minutes before in the voting booth, a simple trick of grits-eating hypocrisy Sabato calls “racial leakage. This phenomenon could easily reemerge in a major way in 2008. I’m convinced that it is one of several reasons why ALL the polls were wrong – and way wrong – in New Hampshire. Polls have error margins, but rarely if ever have nine first-rate surveys all been incorrect in the same direction, and massively so. Obama will have to sweat out every contest, at least in states that are overwhelmingly white.” If this bit of home-fried nastiness travels well out West, Obama’s Golden State wizards would do well to disregard poll numbers out of L.A.’s paler precincts.
Worst of all, the entire purpose of Super Tuesday, the foreshortening of the process in favor of the South and conservatism, looks to have done a massive botch. The results likely won’t pick a winner for either party or even do much more than bump an additional one or two candidates from the race. Sabato, whose recent book, A More Perfect Constitution, offers a fistful of unorthodox mechanic’s solutions to the current partisan political deadlock, points out an obvious choke-point. “The system we have set up for presidential selection is arbitrary, in that a couple of small, unrepresentative states have far too much influence (IA and NH).” Out of this artificially maintained, rotten-borough rural bias has come the contest facing the electorate next Tuesday. Says Sabato, “Now we’ve created a monstrosity on Feb. 5th – a national primary that has too much on one day. No candidate can visit and get to know 22 states in a week, much less communicate with 150 million people in a useful way.”
Meanwhile, the South’s long-term project of remaking the Republic in its image will suffer another loss, as Super Tuesday will leave them with no special bargaining power and a plague-wagon load of lifeless favorite-sons. The Reagan Age conservatism upon which it banked so heavily is turning into a historical curio everywhere else, and Dixie theocrats command less and less attention even within the movement’s besieged ranks. The long multi-generational task of avenging Sherman’s March will await the coming of another and worse day for America.
2008-01-31
Published: 01/30/2008
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re: print edition of story:
paragraph 2:
"Poet of onetime reknown John Crowe Ransom urged the region to go to cultural war against Yankeedom to subvert it."
Renown means "fame." Renowned is the adjective form meaning "famous."
Reknown does not exist in English. Apparently it is drawn from confusion with known.