H. Brandt Ayers: Positive Southern appeal
Jan 31, 2010 | 820 views | 6 
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Time will tell if his State of the Union address did the job.A more dramatic and durable way of changing the subject is for the White House and the Democratic Party to do a fundamental structural pivot and make a non-racial, positive appeal to the South — a first for the modern party.
A network that includes a dozen former Southern governors and senators, as well as established academic and media leaders, is hoping that will happen and is exploring the possibility.
A Southerner, former Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine, is the new chairman of the Democratic National Committee and would have a natural interest in the idea, but nothing moves until the White House opens the garage doors.
Whether or not the network’s effort succeeds, the South will impose itself on the national consciousness on April 12 a year from now, the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War. Confederate battle flags will be flying.
For a White House, which was unaware of its looming rendezvous with the Confederacy until last week, the anniversary presents challenges: among them, fitting Obama’s one-nation theme into a divisive moment that does not offend cultural sensitivities of either blacks or Southern whites.
Obama won a significant victory in 2008, but he has not yet achieved a post-racial realignment of American culture and politics. It will be an unfinished work until the missing piece is in place: especially the crescent of states from South Carolina to Texas.
The South has a lot to offer and to be proud of, especially its comfort with racial change and its color-blind children. But, except for newly competitive Virginia and North Carolina, the South has never been truly a part of the serious national political dialogue about jobs, health, education and the environment.
Until 1964, segregation was the issue binding the South to the Democrats, but passage of the civil rights act that year caused the bitterest segregation wing of the party to bolt and become the base of the solid Republican South.
From Richard Nixon’s 1968 campaign forward, the GOP has had Southern strategies aimed at the white Southern majority with a message of welcome; we like you, and subtly now, we don’t like the (Black) Party.
That was two generations ago. Attitudes have changed. Obama now carries with him the aura of the Great Seal of Office. Times have never been more favorable for a “Nixon in China” effort to make it at least thinkable for national Democrats to compete for the Deep South.
The premise of these thoughts — the hope of a lifetime — is that the Deep South can be persuaded to come out of voluntary apartheid by a president and a party that appeal to the region with respect, the process through which strangers gain, at a minimum, mutual respect.
Let’s face it; the president and the South are strangers to one another. Strangers have to meet before they get to know each other.
A second premise is that, if Obama wishes to unify the Deep South with the nation, it should start well before the commemoration of April 12, 1861, and in doing so, he will want to be sensitive to the region’s cultural idioms.
Aside from Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, an Auburn native, the dominant advisers to the president, David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel, are not known to have fingertip knowledge of Southern politics and culture.
The South is different. It has come a long way up a hard road.
It is the only region to have been defined by a series of un-American experiences: defeat in a war fought on its own land, long periods of economic discrimination and poverty, dislocation and turmoil that resulted in the collapse of an historic civilization and the sudden emergence of another and better one. Finally, the last and unbearable difference is to have known the scorn of the “other” America, its media and its politicians.
A people who have lived through a hard history tend to be clannish, defensive and, for some, deeply resentful. These feelings for a large minority of white Southerners are soul deep; their touchstones are symbols of suppressed anger and open pride: a flag and a song, the Confederate battle flag and “Dixie.”
Both the flag and the song will blossom across the Deep South with commemorations next spring. Natural expressions of regional pride are best met with understanding, for to demean or suppress them is to inherit bitterness.
The president could merge cultural symbols of the South with the true meaning of the Civil War: “I am reminded again that we are one undivided America, that the honored dead at Gettysburg wore blue AND gray; they fought under different flags that deserve honor and respect but are equal inheritors of one America, indivisible, because in their fighting and in their dying they made a nation out of a scattering of states.”
A South, which for the first time had two competitive parties, could discard fringe politics such as the vaporous family values, anti-government rhetoric of the Southern GOP and, for instance, focus on the connection between high school dropouts and urban crime rates.
A genuine two-party South debating seriously about serious issues would mean that finally we are truly one nation, and in the quality of our political conversation, we are a better nation.
H. Brandt Ayers is the publisher of The Star and chairman of Consolidated Publishing Co.
Your idea of the south may have been true twenty years ago but it is not true today except in a few pockets. The south I know is made up of transplanted yankees, good ole boys and what used to be called yuppie types. I don't know what they are called now. But they live in 200,000. dollar houses and drive the latest fad in foreign cars. Just check out the suburbs south of the mountain in near Birmingham. Check out Tuscaloosa, Huntsville or other cities. And then you have the minorities, primarily blacks.
None of these groups are what they were twenty or so years ago. Sure you still have a few radicals but you have them in all parts of the country. But this business that the south is more prejudice than other parts of the country and that we still think about the civil war and segregation is a myth. It is propagated by people who are either out of touch or who do so intentionally due to their own prejudices against the south. You see it in the movies. When they depict the south they have dunderheads driving a twenty year old pick up and struggle to read the traffic signs. But you are right in that we still like Dixie.
You have painted an oversimplified picture. The real picture is, though their are still a few who fit your mold, that we do not look so much at color but at the person. We like Haley Berry. We like Mark Ingram and Javy. We like Condy and Thomas Sowell. We do not like Obama. Strange isn't it that he is half white?
Yep, the South and Obama are strangers but we know who he is. We have a few of his type in the South too. These are the elitist intellectual types who are driven by leftist theories and who have not clue as to who and what drives this country. No, it is not color but who you are.
But yes, Obama needs to get to know his people. He should maybe start in Mass? We might have more in common with the north than you realize.