Dems: Southern Strategy? genre: Polispeak
Former Virginia Governer, Mark Warner, is proposing a new strategy for Democrats to garner votes in southern states. The latest edition of Newsweek explains Warner's strategy. I thought the article was interesting, especially when you realize how little agreement exists within the Democratic Party on a voter strategy.
Howard Dean, DNC Chairman believes that Democrats need a presence in all fifty states and is in the process of putting people on the ground accordingly. A number of other Democratic strategists feel the money Dean is spending would be better spent on targeting specific races that the Democrats can potentially win.
Warner, an unannounced but unrelenting candidate for the presidency, is happy to help, urging Dixie's Democrats to break with the national party's Bush-bashing strategy and instead emphasizing bipartisanship and values. Warner is hoping big Southern victories in 2006 will prove that his Virginia success was a preview of things to come, not just a random stroke of luck in a region grown hostile to Democrats.
He won the Virginia governorship in November 2001, a high point for post-9/11 Republican power. While in office, he won rural support by channeling economic development toward the state's depressed Southside. He even managed to raise taxes and see his poll numbers go up.
In speeches in the South, he preaches the blessings of bipartisanship. He rarely mentions the words "Bush" or "Republican" and only invokes his own party to say, "I'm proud to be a Democrat, but I'm prouder to be an American." There is "a wide swath of Reagan Democrats or independents who are up for grabs," Warner tells NEWSWEEK, "but it can't be for a Democrat who's going to preach the kind of 'us against them' '70s populism."
Warner is also telling Southern Democrats to go on the offensive on values issues and run against "cultural elitism."
Some Democrats who've heard prophecies of a Southern renaissance before are skeptical. They think the party would be better off cutting its losses in Dixie and focusing on the Southwest and Rocky Mountain states.
In my own opinion, the lack of consensus merely indicates a shortage of leadership within the Party. Without a national voice that can garner respect across the diversity within the Party, Democrats remain vulnerable to the Republican strategy that has routinely focused on the absence of a Democratic message. As long as the Party is seen as nothing more than a number of competing factions jockeying for the 2008 presidential election, the public will continue to believe that principles take a back seat to partisan posturing. The 2006 midterm election is an opportunity the Democrats can ill afford to squander.
Daniel DiRito | April 30, 2006 | 12:19 PM
Comments
1 On May 1, 2006 at 2:16 PM, tctatc wrote —
I wonder if this will help or hurt. There is an individual from the south who claims to have discovered the material used to construct the Bible proving it is a hoax. A lot of southerners are aware of that. The south is being manhandled by the Baptists who do vote robbery, the fires of hell gun to the head. Occasionally they trip up, the Jimmys, Bakker and Swagert for example. Conventional wisdom says that there will be a significant backlash, blind voting the other way whatever it is when that knowledge, the Bible from which the preacher gets his license is bogus. Of course this could be a trap for the Democrats too. The information of the discovery is on the Internet at hoax-buster.org for those that would like to see.
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