I “met” Tom Schaller a little more than three years ago after he wrote a provocative piece for the Washington Post arguing that Democrats should stop trying to compete in the South, especially in regard to presidential politics. I’d written something rather critical of Tom’s Post piece, prompting him to email me with a detailed response, explaining how wrong I was. I not only liked him immediately, I found his arguments surprisingly persuasive. The more I looked for flaws in Tom’s reasoning, the more I came to agree with him.
With this background in mind, I was delighted to read Tom’s new book, “Whistling Past Dixie: How Democrats Can Win Without the South.” It is the best and most important political book of the year. Its analyses and conclusions are a must-read for anyone in Democratic politics, especially those interested in the 2008 presidential race.
The following is an interview Tom and I did about the book, the implications of his thesis, and some of the book’s more controversial arguments.
At first blush, your advice to the party about winning without the South seems to be in conflict with Howard Dean’s 50-state strategy. You want to steer clear of the South, at least in the short term, because the region is not worth the investment. Dean wants to invest everywhere, including the South, now, with long-term gains in mind. And yet, you’ve praised Dean’s approach. Could you explain how the two strategies are congruent?
TS: What Dean is doing by calling for a minimum investment in each state is playing defense. And he’s right to have some base level of investment in each state: It is simply ridiculous for any state Democratic party to have, say, a volunteer executive director. Turnover is bad enough among state party officials and staff, and that degree of turnover creates inefficiencies and a loss of institutional memory. That’s why I have supported Dean’s approach, both before and after the 2006 elections, and why James Carville ought to can it. (Sidebar: I’m tired of his blather, and will say so publicly with greater frequency. To him, every year is 1992 all over again, which makes him increasingly irrelevant with each passing election cycle — except, of course, in the Washington cocktail party circuit he once disdained but within which he and his Republican wife have become central fixtures.)
Meanwhile, Rahm Emanuel is also right, and that’s why I said long ago on your site, Steve, that this whole Dean-or-Emanuel controversy is a false dichotomy. Emanuel’s job is to play offense and what he’s saying is this: Though you can’t always know which seats are in play (think AZ’s J.D. Hayworth or NH’s Jeb Bradley this year), for the most part both parties can target fairly well. And that’s where a party must spend its resources as the election approaches. Frankly, after the two most stable presidential elections in American history — one must go back to George Washington running the table twice, and before there was popular voting, to find consecutive elections when fewer than three states changed hands, as happened in 2004 relative to 2000 — not to mention the perverse gerrymandering we presently face, targeting is easier than ever. And thus, wasting resources on “moral victories” is unforgivable.
Nothing’s worse than a writer publishing a book shortly before an election, and then having the results undermine his or her thesis. And yet, 2006 seems to have fit quite nicely into your Whistling-Past-Dixie model. It seems to me the Republican Party looked less like a national power and more like a regional one. Is the GOP, to borrow a phrase from the book, “boxed in”?
TS: Well, nobody “calls” an election, but I think it’s fair to say that, 18 months before the 2006 midterms, and using mostly demographic, historical and some poll data, I nailed as well as anyone can expect, especially without a polling firm, national voter database, high-paid consultants, or a staff. (Maybe somebody ought to start asking why those who do couldn’t see this coming?)
As for the GOP becoming boxed in as a southern party with a sprinkling of Plains and Mountain West support, obviously this is precisely what I hope will happen. Would I say the Republicans are already in that box? Not quite, and even if they are in that box the lid remains open. Though I disagree with the conclusions set out in Tom Edsall’s ill-timed new book, Building Red America, I mostly agree with his diagnoses of the Democrats’ deficits in resources and infrastructure relative to the Republicans (except his belief that the national media are “liberal”). One of the things I will be watching most closely once the Democrats assume control of Congress in January is what they will do to begin to rectify this imbalance. The more they do to Build Blue America, the easier and quicker it will be to shut the lid on the southernized GOP.
I was particularly interested in your description of the “Keep Them Honest” fallacy. (As I recall, we met by arguing about this a couple of years ago.) On the surface, it seems that if Democrats cede the South to the GOP, Republicans won’t have to worry about their (fairly large) base and can devote more resources to competitive states. Except that’s wrong, isn’t it.
TS: Yes, it is wrong, as I’ve explained before on your site: Spending resources, especially in winner-take-all elections such as a statewide contests or congressional seats in single-member districts with plurality rule, is a self-defeating and self-depleting fool’s errand for any national party.
But among the things I wish I could change about the book is the fact that I did not think through the issue of what might be called non-transferable resources, and this epiphany came to me recently after being pressed by a bright columnist and progressive North Carolina Democrat named Ed Cone. Cone is understandably excited about the NC Democrats’ efforts to forge a 100-county strategy akin, on the state level, to Dean’s national approach. At a presentation I gave in Durham last week, Cone asked me what was wrong with this effort. Nothing, I realized. And that leads me to what might be called the “locally-derived resources exemption” corollary to my “keep them honest” fallacy.
Consider Heath Shuler, a great candidate. The thing about recruiting him is that it in no way jeopardized, say, Carol Shea-Porter’s chances of beating Jeb Bradley in New Hampshire this year. Why? Because carpetbagging (never thought I’d get to use that term on this blog!) candidates, with rare exceptions, tend to backfire. In short, as an electoral commodity, Shuler cannot be exported or transferred. And what’s true of candidates as resources is true of some dollars and most volunteers: If somebody is prepared to write a check to Shuler with money they would otherwise not give to political causes, or that person would be willing to volunteer locally for Shuler but won’t cross district or state lines, harvesting those resources in no way jeopardizes national efforts. (If, however, that donor were deciding between giving to a local, lamb-to-the-slaughter nominee or sending it to the DCCC, that’s another matter.)
To pull it all altogether: National resources should be targeted where the party has a reasonable chance of winning, and any and all local resources that would otherwise not be raised or cannot be transferred beyond the district/state should be harvested without limit.
You encourage Democratic candidates not to compromise on basic, fundamental principles, but you also urge the party to give up on gun control as part of an effective strategy in the West. Is a state-by-state policy the way to go on the Second Amendment?
TS: For state-level and local candidates, I suppose taking an anti-gun stand is fine — but not for presidential candidates. I don’t keep a gun in my home, and probably never will. If you handed me a petition to urge members of Congress to propose an amendment that would clarify the ambiguous language of the Second Amendment, I probably would sign it. Until and unless the Second Amendment is amended (and I wrote my doctoral dissertation on amendments, so I can assure you it won’t happen any time soon), ACLU card-carrying civil libertarians like me cannot pick and choose which amendments in the Bill of Rights they will support and which they’d rather not. That may sound like I’m pandering, but the fact is that it would be internally inconsistent to do so.
Politically, of course, supporting gun rights as a way to neutralize the Second Amendment helps Democrats solve their “cultural” issue problems. I’d rather do that than accede to those who say Democrats should cave on reproductive choice — an issue on which Democrats are winning nationally and, get this, even in the South! (According to state-by-state SurveyUSA polls, weighted for population size, the South has six percent more self-described “pro-choicers” than “pro-lifers,” thanks to pro-choice pluralities in the five largest states: FL, GA, NC, TX and VA.)
So, don’t compromise on the First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments, but don’t compromise on the Second, either. Support it, and take a weapon away from the GOP, so to speak.
For all of the detailed analysis of cultural issues in the book, it seems that, for much of the South, it comes down to race. From the book: “Despite the best efforts of Republican spinmeisters … the partisan impact of racial attitudes in the South is stronger today than in the past.” Ken Mehlman’s protestations notwithstanding, the “Southern Strategy,” with its strong racial component, still seems like an effective way to stop Democrats in the South. The Senate race in Tennessee, for example, comes to mind.
TS: The issue of race triggers the most vitriolic and, frankly, most personal and least thoughtful attacks on the book. (And, in some cases, attacks on me personally: You should see some of the hate mail I’ve received.) Look, race is strongly correlated with Republican presidential voting in the white South. That’s not my opinion, and I wish it were not true. But it’s an empirical fact, and Democrats who deny it or ignore it do so at the party’s peril.
It always fascinates me when the same conservative Democrats who feel free to lecture me about what I don’t get about the South, or lecture Democrats more generally about what they don’t get about cultural and moral issues, fall deafeningly silent when it comes to lecturing white southern Democrats about their racial animosities. “Moral values,” apparently, do not include racial justice. This is disgusting, and although the Ed Kilgores, Paul Begalas and James Carvilles like to moan that white southerners are the only Democrats it’s still OK to criticize, the fact is that white liberals from the Northeast endure far more scorn. When South Carolina, which has consistently been on the wrong side of American constitutional history for two centuries, receives the same amount of derogatory scorn as “Taxachusetts,” I’ll shut up.
As for Ford, he did everything Democratic centrists say Democrats must do to win in Red states: He talked about how powerful his Jesus is; he filmed a campaign ad standing in a church pew; he wore a camouflage hunting cap in live TV appearances on election day; he criticized John Kerry’s “stuck in Iraq” remark and the New Jersey same-sex ruling. Worst of all, when asked point blank by Chris Matthews if he thought the “call me, Harold” ad was racist, Ford said “no.” That means he, as a black man, refused to call an ad that everyone else agrees was racist what it was. Why? So he wouldn’t risk offending whites who might be miffed that Ford called his opponents’ tactics racist? Ford’s was a say-anything, comprise at every turn, pander-fest. He left sacrificed every last ounce of his integrity in order to win—and still lost. All of which means that one of three things is true: (1) The pander strategy doesn’t work; or (2) a certain percentage, however small but significant, of white Tennesseans simply will not pull the lever for a black candidate; or (3) Tennessee is just too conservative to elect a Democrat to statewide federal office. Take your pick.
Any chance at all of a Democratic resurgence in the South anytime soon? From the book: “From base camps in Austin, Alexandria, and Orlando, perhaps by 2028 the next generation of Democrats will be able to surround the region, steadily convert the Outer South, and eventually press inward toward the Deep South.” Need it take 22 years?
I’d probably add Little Rock to that list of cities, but yes, it will still take 22 years to get all the way to the belly of the Deep South. But that does not mean the entire South will be unmovable until then, and then will suddenly flip all at once. What I’m saying is that some parts of the South — especially what’s known as the “Outer” or “Rim” South — are more likely to flip first, with the Deep South last.
Of course, when the Democrats find themselves competing in Alabama or Mississippi in a presidential election, the non-southern strategy will be moot because the only question will be whether the Democratic nominee will be carrying 40 or 45 states. Before dreaming of 45 states, doesn’t it make more sense to figure out how to win 35 or even 25 states first? Sure it does, and that’s why we should proceed with the non-southern strategy, build a national governing majority, governing confidently and effectively, and then present that record of accomplish to skeptical southerners for their inspection. (But isn’t that what Clinton-Gore did for eight years? And look at what happened in 2000.)
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Thanks very much to Tom for doing this Q&A. Be sure to check out the book; it’s a must-read.