Politics: A Northern-Southern Strategy

OLE STROM was astrummin' a new and angry tune. At a Washington reception given by Southern Republican leaders, Senator Thurmond kept jabbing a bony finger into the chest of Bill Timmons, a conservative Tennessean and President Nixon's top congressional liaison man, berating him about the Administration's school policies ("I've got marks all over me," reports Timmons). The South Carolina Senator also complained that he could not get to see Nixon as often as he liked. Spotting Attorney General John Mitchell, he lit into him too. Then, on the Senate floor, Thurmond charged that the Administration was pursuing "a Northeast philosophy" and warned that "the people of the South will not support such unreasonable policies."

Thurmond had ample reason to be angry. He had stuck his neck out for Nixon in Dixie in 1968, fashioning a Southern campaign strategy that helped Nixon pick up 75 electoral votes in the peripheral South despite George Wallace. Many voters heeded bumper stickers that proclaimed: STROM SAYS YOU CAN TRUST DICK. For a time, Nixon's go-slow policies on school desegregation made Thurmond look good back home. But now he felt betrayed. The Administration was filing desegregation suits, threatening to send federal lawyers into the South in September to pressure local officials as schools reopen, and insisting that private academies cannot exclude blacks and still qualify for tax exemption. How could Dick do that to him?

No Vigilantes. There were at least three reasons for what looked like a turnabout in Administration policy toward the South: 1) the Supreme Court had ruled last October that there could be no more stalling on school desegregation, so the Justice Department had to get tough; 2) the sooner desegregation could be completed, the less likely it would be to loom large as a 1972 presidential election issue, and 3) the Administration needed to increase its appeal in large metropolitan areas outside the South --and to moderates within the region.

But Nixon obviously does not want any kind of real break with Thurmond or with large areas of the South. Calling an impromptu press conference, he said that he preferred "cooperation rather than coercion" and thus had no plans to send "vigilante squads" into the South. Vice President Agnew said that there is "no shift to the left" under way in the Administration. The Internal Revenue Service quickly approved the tax-exemption applications of six Southern academies on their mere statements that their classes were open to all races. Strom started smiling again. He said soothingly that Nixon "understands the South far better than some of his aides and underlings."

But the Administration's policies on racial issues are still under fire. The National Urban League's Executive Director Whitney M. Young Jr. said at his group's annual convention that he did not think the Administration was antiblack; that there are "contending forces" within it; and that he sees "some signs that elements are moving forward to bring about change" on racial matters.

Nevertheless, he added, the Administration "faces a credibility gap of enormous proportions" with blacks. He noted that Nixon had "asked black Americans to judge him by his deeds and not his words; we have done that--and we have been greatly disappointed." He revived his 1963 plea for a domestic Marshall Plan to help all poor people, black and white.

The controversy was perhaps even more intense within the Republican Party's own ranks. Kevin Phillips, a former Justice Department official whose 1969 book The Emerging Republican Majority outlined a basically conservative strategy that depends heavily on capturing the South, now writes a newspaper column. In it he took the position last week that current Administration policy runs the risk of losing both North and South. Charging that White House aides had "clumsily orchestrated an excessive policy shift" toward the left. Phillips argued that the Administration is "progressively alienating not only Southern conservatives but the Reaganite West and elements of the conservative intellectual movement"--and doing so without gaining any offsetting liberal support.

Administration officials insist that they have no intention of abandoning any part of the South to George Wallace, although they concede that they had hoped their policy had been conciliatory enough to undercut Wallace and prevent his victory in Alabama. Despite Wallace's survival, "nobody's writing off the Wallace states in any shape or form," says one Nixon official.

No Room to the Right. The Republican Ripon Society, a group dominated by young liberals, issued an 84-page examination of the relationship between the G.O.P. and the South. It charged that the Nixon Administration was "embarked upon a cynical and racially divisive path that can only end in tragedy." Moreover, the report said, any policy that tries to adjust "to the fears and prejudices of a narrow class of voters in the end is bound to fail." Based on a detailed state-by-state analysis, the Ripon report argues that there is "no room to the right" of rural Southern Democratic politicians for the Republican Party to move in; that Southerners will almost always prefer a conservative Democrat to a conservative Republican; and that the real opportunity for the party lies in an appeal to "the new South," which is largely urban and increasingly liberal in its attitude toward economic and social problems.

Even Wallace, the report says, gains votes partly because he is an economic liberal in the populist tradition despite his racial views. Noting the success of such moderate Republicans as Arkansas Governor Winthrop Rockefeller, Virginia Governor Linwood Holton, Tennessee Senator Howard Baker and Texas Congressman George Bush, the report contends that such candidates "won by appealing to just those groups that the Southern strategy rejects."

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