Lyndon
B. Johnson made history twice in his trounce of GOP presidential rival Barry
Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election. The first time he made history was
when he won a greater percent of the popular vote than any other presidential
winner in more than a century. He scored nearly 500 electoral votes and carried
every state except six. This was the second time he made history with that
election. It was the five of the six states that he didn't carry that tells much
about how the South became the white South again. Five of the six states Johnson
lost were Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina. Johnson
himself explained why in his now famous quip that in ramming through the 1964
civil rights act the Democrats had "lost the South for a generation." Johnson's
prescient remark wasn't totally accurate. It has been more like two going on
three generations since white Democrats lost their stranglehold on the South.
Republican
congressman Bill Cassidy's oust of four term Democratic senator Mary Landrieu in
Louisiana put the capper on the white
Southern flip flop from Democrat to GOP. Cassidy even found the words to
punctuate it when he declared that his victory put "the exclamation point" on
the GOP's total dominance in the South. There are no white Democratic senators,
governors in the South and white GOP representatives control every Southern and
nearly every Border state legislature.
The
stock explanation for the white South's political cart wheel is race. Whites,
nearly all of whom were staunch Democrats before 1964, were so mad at Johnson
and the Democrats for championing civil rights and voting rights that they were
ripe for the GOP pickings. An astute Richard Nixon quickly picked up on this in
1968 with his Southern Strategy which meant say little and do less about civil
rights in the South.
An
even more astute Ronald Reagan launched his 1980 campaign presidential campaign
at the
Neshoba County Fair, near Meridian Mississippi, which was a stone's throw from
where the three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964. Reagan nakedly pandered to the not so latent
white racial hostility when he told a virtually lily-white, wildly enthusiastic
throng at the Fair, "I believe in states' rights." In the 1980s, GOP political
guru Lee Atwater kicked race baiting into even higher gear dangling a generous
blend of vicious anti-black stereotypes, code words, phrases, and outright naked
racial pitches that played on white racial fears.
The
GOP
strategy
firmly locked down the majority popular and electoral vote in the 11 old
Confederate and Border states. These states hold more than one-third of the
electoral votes needed to bag the White House.
But
apart from race there's another explanation for the GOP's white Southern lock
that's every bit as compelling. Goldwater, Nixon and Reagan never once uttered
the word race in their campaign pitches to Southern whites. They took another
tack. In his Mississippi speech Reagan punched all the familiar code attack
themes, big government, liberals, welfare, and law and order. The template was set for reshaping the white
Southern political dynamic. Fast forward three decades, in 2012 GOP presidential
contender Mitt Romney and VP running mate Paul Ryan picked their joint campaign
starting point and their audience just as deliberately as Reagan. This time it
was a battleship draped in red, white and blue docked in Norfolk, Virginia. The
virtually lily-white audience cheered as Romney and Ryan punched the same
familiar code themes: out of control spend thrift, bloated government. They
punctuated it with the hard vow to take back America.
Romney and Ryan
didn't openly espouse state's rights as Reagan did. Instead they updated the
code themes by lambasting Democrats, wasteful big government, run-away deficit
spending on entitlement programs, and their full-blown assaults on the so-called
Obamacare, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security programs, and labor unions. The
majority of the recipients of these programs have always been white seniors,
retirees, women, and children, and white workers. But these programs have been
artfully sold to many Americans as handouts to lazy, undeserving blacks,
Hispanics and minorities.
The final presidential tally in 2008 and
2012 gave ample warning of the potency of the GOP's conservative white
constituency. Obama made a major breakthrough by winning a significant percent
of votes from white independents and young white voters. Among Southern and
Heartland America white male voters, Obama made almost no impact.
In
South Carolina and other Deep South states the vote was even more lopsided among
white voters against Obama. The only thing that even made Obama's showing
respectable in those states was the record turnout and percentage of black votes
that he got.
Landrieu,
as every other white Democratic in the South, lost her senate reelection bid in
part because of race but in part also because Obama, as other Democratic
presidential candidate since Nixon's win in 1968, has been sold to white
Southerners as the epitome of evil, big government. This is what made the white
South the white South again and the brutal reality is that it's going to stay
that way for a long time.
Earl
Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a weekly co-host of
the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is the author of How
Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge. He is an associate editor of
New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour
heard weekly on the nationally network broadcast Hutchinson Newsmaker
Network.
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter:
twitter.com/earlhutchinson
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is a nationally acclaimed author and political analyst. He has authored ten books; his articles are published in newspapers and magazines nationally in the United States. Three of his books have been published in other (
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