And let me not forget the Southern Strategy.

Please, let me not forget!

Thank you for letting me beat a point to death. I quote, from en.wikipedia.org:

Southern strategy
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In American politics, the Southern strategy refers to the focus of the Republican party on winning U.S. Presidential elections by securing the electoral votes of the U.S. Southern states. The phrase Southern strategy itself, was invented by Nixon strategist Kevin Phillips. For the years of 1948 to 1984, the southern states, traditionally a stronghold for the Democratic Party became key swing states, providing the popular vote margins in the Presidential elections 1960, 1968 and 1976. During this era, several Republican candidates expressed support for states' rights, which critics have argued was intended as a signal of opposition to civil rights. This strategy was largely a success, and the South is now considered a Republican stronghold.

Recently, the term has been used in a more general sense, in which cultural themes are used in an election — primarily but not exclusively in the American South. Yet, the use of the term, and its meaning and implication, are still hotly disputed.

Contents [hide]
1 Pre-History of the Southern Strategy
2 Roots of the Southern Strategy
3 Evolution of the Southern Strategy
4 Failure of the Southern Strategy
5 Modern appraisal in the Republican party
6 See also
7 References



[edit]
Pre-History of the Southern Strategy
After the American Civil War, Southern states gained seats in the U.S. House of Representatives and representation in the Electoral College since blacks were fully counted, instead of being counted as only three-fifths of a person, for election purposes. Resentment stemming from the Civil War and the Republican Party’s policy of Reconstruction kept Southern whites in the Democratic Party, but the Republicans could still compete in the Southern States with a coalition of blacks and highland whites. After the North agreed to withdraw federal troops under the Compromise of 1877, and the further failure of the "Force Bill" (to protect black voting) in 1890, Southern blacks, the base of Republicans power in that region, became increasingly disenfranchised. The white Democratic Party in the South enacted the Jim Crow Laws and undertook other measures to to ensure that most blacks could not vote. The Republican Party lost its ability to effectively compete.

The South became solidly Democratic until the middle of the 20th Century. During this period, Republicans held only a few House seats from the South. Between 1880 and 1904, the Republican Presidential candidates in the South got between 35 percent and 40 percent of that section's vote (except in 1892, when the 16% for the Populists knocked Republicans down to 25%). From 1904 to 1948, Republicans broke 30% of the section only in 1920 (35.2%, carrying Tennessee) and 1928 (47.7%, carrying five states). The only important political role of the South in presidential elections came in 1912, when it provided the delegates to select Taft over Theodore Roosevelt in that year's Republican convention.

During this period, Republicans occasionally supported anti-lynching bills, which were filibustered in the U.S. Senate, and appointed a few black placeholders, but largely ignored the South. It was not until 1928 that the situation changed. In that year, Republican candidate Herbert Hoover rode the issues of prohibition and anti-Catholicism to carry five former Confederate states, with 62 of the 126 electoral votes of the section. After his monumental victory, Hoover attempted to build up the Republican Party of the South, transferring patronage away from blacks and toward the same kind of white Protestant businessmen who made up the core of the Northern Republican Party. However, with the onset of the Great Depression, Hoover soon became extremely unpopular and the Southern Republican Party fell apart. In 1932, Hoover received only 18.1% of the Southern vote for re-election. The subsequent policies of Franklin Roosevelt were very popular in the South, and the Southern Republican movement was set back a generation.

In 1948, a group of Democratic congressmen, led by Governor Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, split from the Democrats in reaction to an anti-segregation speech given by Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, founding the States Rights Democratic or Dixiecrat Party, which ran Thurmond as its presidential candidate. The Dixiecrats, failing to deny the Democrats the presidency in 1948, soon dissolved, but the split lingered.

In addition to the splits in the Democratic Party, the population movements of World War II had a significant effect on the makeup of the South. The addition of many Northern transplants significantly bolstered the base of the Republican Party in the South. In the post-war Presidential campaigns, Republicans did best in the fastest-growing states of the South with the most Northern settlers. In the 1952, 1956 and 1960 elections, Virginia, Tennessee and Florida went Republican all three times, while Louisiana went Republican in 1956, and Texas twice voted for Eisenhower and once for Kennedy. In 1956, Eisenhower received 48.9% of the Southern vote, and he became the second Republican in history (after Grant) to get a plurality of Southern votes.

Many states' rights Democrats were attracted to the 1964 presidential campaign of Republican Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona. Goldwater was notably more conservative than previous Republican nominees such as Dwight D. Eisenhower. Goldwater's principle opponent in the primary election, Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York, was widely seen as representing the more moderate (and pro-Civil Rights), Northern wing of the party (See Rockefeller Republican, Goldwater Republican). Rockefeller's defeat in the primary is seen as one turning point towards a more conservative Republican party, and the beginning of a long decline for moderate and especially liberal Republicans. Goldwater’s primary victory is also seen as a shift of the center of Republican power to the West.

In the 1964 presidential race, Barry Goldwater ran a very conservative campaign (sometimes described a libertarian, part of which was an emphasis on "states' rights". As a conservative, Goldwater broadly opposed strong action by the federal government. In his state of Arizona, Barry Goldwater has been a co-founder of the state NAACP and had led the campaign to desegregate the state’s public schools. However, although he had supported all previous federal Civil Rights legislation, after much consideration, Goldwater made the decision to oppose the Civil Rights Act of 1964. His stance was based on his view that the act was an intrusion of the federal government into the affairs of states and second, and that it was an interference with the rights of private persons to do business, or not, with whomever they chose. This States' Rights stand has been interpreted as a subtle appeal to racist white Southern Democrats, and undoubtedly attracted many. However, this vote proved devastating to Goldwater’s campaign, contributing to his landslide defeat in 1964. One Johnson ad, “Confessions of a Republican” ran in the North, and associated Goldwater with the Ku Klux Klan. At the same time, Johnson’s campaign in the Deep South publicized Goldwater’s full history on civil rights. In the end, Johnson swept the election, including a significant majority in the South. However, besides his home state of Arizona, Goldwater managed to pick off five Deep South states: Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina, almost certainly because of his states’ rights position.

At this time, Senator Goldwater’s position was at odds with most of the prominent members of the Republican Party, dominated at that time by the East Coast Episcopalian Establishment. A higher percentage of the Republican Party supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than did the Democratic Party, as they had on all previous Civil Rights legislation. The Southern Democrats often opposed their Northern Party mates--and their Presidents (Kennedy and Johnson) on civil rights issues. The point man in the Senate for delivering the votes to break the filibuster against the measure by 17 Democrats and one Republican was conservative Republican Senator Everett Dirksen from Illinois.

[edit]
Roots of the Southern Strategy
In the election of 1968, Richard Nixon saw the cracks in the Solid South as an opportunity to tap into a group of voters that had heretofore been beyond the reach of the Republican Party. The United States was undergoing a very turbulent period in 1968. The founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and most influential member of the Civil Rights Movement, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968. His death was followed by black rioting throughout the country. Martin Luther King’s policy of non-violence was being challenged by more radical blacks and by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. There were protests, often violent, against the Vietnam War. The drug subculture was causing alarm in many sectors. Nixon, with the aid of Harry Dent and then South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, who had switched to the Republican party in 1964, ran on a campaign of states' rights and "law and order". Many liberals accused Nixon of pandering to racist Southern whites, especially with regards to his "states' rights" stand.

As a result, every state that had been in the Confederacy, except Texas, voted for either Nixon or George Wallace (a Southern Democrat running as an independent), despite a strong tradition of supporting Democrats. Meanwhile, Nixon parlayed a wide perception as a moderate into wins in other states, taking a solid majority in the electoral college. Because of this result, the election of 1968 is sometimes cited as a realigning election, but such a belief also ignores the fact that the Democratic Party swept every Southern state except for Virginia in the Presidential election of 1976, after the last admitted advocates of the Southern Strategy had left positions of influence within the Republican Party. Others argue that the strong Democratic showing in the South in 1976 was the exception that proves the rule, and was directly influenced by the fallout of the Watergate scandal, in which Southerner Jimmy Carter defeated incumbent Ford and a disgraced Republican Administration.

[edit]
Evolution of the Southern Strategy
As civil rights grew more accepted throughout the nation, basing a general election strategy on appeals to "states' rights" as a naked play against civil rights laws would have resulted in a national backlash. In addition, the idea of "states' rights" superficially took on the patina of a broader meaning than simply a reference to civil rights laws, eventually encompassing federalism as the means to forestall national intervention in the culture wars.

On August 4, 1980, Ronald Reagan, as a candidate, delivered a speech near Philadelphia, Mississippi at the annual Neshoba County Fair. Reagan excited the crowd wild when he announced, "I believe in states' rights. I believe we have distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended to be given in the Constitution to that federal establishment." He went on to promise to "restore to states and local governments the power that properly belongs to them." Philadelphia was the scene of the June 21, 1964 murder of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, and this speech has used by critics to demonstrate Reagan’s alleged hidden racist message. However, it is difficult to argue that the choice of site in itself was inherently racist. The Neshoba County Fair has been a popular campaign stop for presidential candidates, and has also been visited by John Glenn, Jack Kemp and Michael Dukakis during their respective Presidential campaigns.

Charges of racism have been lodged in subsequent Republican races for the House and Senate in the South. The Willie Horton commercials used by supporters of George H.W. Bush in the election of 1988 were considered by many to be racist. Other examples include the 1990 re-election campaign of Jesse Helms, which attacked his opponent's alleged support of "racial quotas," most notably through an ad in which a white person's hands are seen crumpling a letter indicating that he was denied a job because of the color of his skin. Most professional academics–-historians, political scientists, sociologists, culture critics, etc.––as well as Democratic party supporters argue that support for what conservative acolytes depict as a new "Federalism" in the Republican party platform is, and always has been, nothing but a code word for the politics of resentment, of which racism provides the fuel.

Bob Herbert , a well known liberal op-ed columnist, reported in the October 6, 2005 edition of the New York Times of a 1981 interview with Lee Atwater, President George H.W. Bush's campaign manger, in which he discusses politics in the South

You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say 'nigger'-- that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.
And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me -- because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger." [1]
[edit]
Failure of the Southern Strategy
There are many people who challenge the opinion that the Southern Strategy was responsible for large GOP political gains in the South. There are several facts that appear to support this challenge, such as:

Democrat Jimmy Carter's victory in every Southern state except for Virginia in the 1976 Presidential election, years after the emergence of the Southern Strategy.
The first Southern state to give the GOP control of both its governorship and its legislature was Florida, and it did not do this until 1998 [2], long after the original architects of the Southern Strategy had left the GOP. However, it should be noted that the Southern Strategy was mainly targeted at electing presidential candidates, and that Democrats on state level were much more conservative than the likes of George McGovern, Michael Dukakis or John Kerry. (One of the originators of the Southern Strategy, Kevin Phillips, had even become openly supportive of Democratic political candidates by then.)
Georgia did not see its first post-Reconstruction GOP governor until 2002.
Louisiana had two Democratic US Senators as late as 2004. Arkansas still has two Democratic US Senators. However, all of these Democratic senators are routinely accused of being democrat in name only, opposed to abortion rights, and generally conservative-to-moderate.
Kentucky came close to civil war when it seemed a Republican had become governor in 1902. Subsequently, the election was overturned by the state legislature. The controversy resulted in the assassination of Governor William Goebel, the only governor assasinated in the history of the United States.
It is highly disputed that the Southern Strategy existed as an agreed upon strategy within the GOP after the early 1970s, when Kevin Phillips and Richard Nixon left positions of influence within the GOP.

Of course, some would argue that Carter's one-time victory in the South reflected more of a temporary reaction to the Watergate scandal than an end to this long-term strategy for realigning the South with the GOP. Overall, as of the early 21st century the South has gone overwhelmingly Republican. Opponents of the GOP point to occasional faux pas, such as that made on Dec. 5, 2002 by Mississippi Republican Trent Lott (See section Controversy and resignation) as evidence that the attitudes which spawned the Strategy are alive and well. After heavy criticism, including some criticism by prominent Republicans, Lott apologized repeatedly and was forced out of his Senate Majority Leader position. Defenders of the Republican Party suggest that this indicates that his views are not widely held within the Republican Party. Lott remains the junior Senator from Mississippi as of 2006, and the national Republican Party has not endorsed a primary challenger for his seat, which will be up for election in 2006, and he has wide approval ratings high above 60%, despite these remarks. Critics of the GOP also point out that the politics of white southerners are fiercely Republican and conservative on a national level, and that the contrast in Alabama during the 2004 presidential election served as a reminder, when 82% of white Alabama voters voted for George W. Bush and 91% of black Alabama voters voted for John Kerry.[3]

[edit]
Modern appraisal in the Republican party
Following the 2004 re-election of President George W. Bush, the Chairman of the Republican National Committee and Bush's campaign manager Ken Mehlman began an extensive tour to deliver speeches at meetings with African American business leaders, community and religious leaders, church meetings and some college students meets in states like Maryland and New Jersey. Mehlman apologized[4] for the Southern strategy, declaring that the Republican Party would never be complete or a majority party without receiving the support and confidence of the African American community. Mehlman is said to be building a cohensive effort to open the minds of African American voters to voting Republican, and working to combat stereotypes about the Republican Party that developed in the Civil Rights era and owing to the Southern strategy. Many prominent Republican and conservative commentators have denounced Mehlman for his apology, Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity among them.[5]

References

The Southern Strategy Revisited: Republican Top-Down Advancement in the South, by Joseph A. Aistrup.
The Rise of Southern Republicans, by Earl Black and Merle Black.
From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich: Race in the Conservative Counterrevolution, 1963-1994, by Dan T. Carter.
A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow, by David L. Chappell.
The Emerging Republican Majority, by Kevin Phillips.
RNC Chief to Say It Was 'Wrong' to Exploit Racial Conflict for Votes by Mike Allen of the Washington Post
Why The GOP's Southern Strategy Ended