Courting Dixie

By STANLEY W. CLOUD

Like Katharina and Petruchio in Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, the Democrats and the South have long had trouble deciding whether they would rather fight or make love. Beginning in 1948, Southern voters, traditionally Democratic, became increasingly embittered by the national party's liberal tendencies. As a consequence, while the South remained more or less true to local and congressional Democrats, it began playing the field where presidential candidates were concerned. The Democrats toyed with the idea of a divorce, hoping to capture the White House with just the North and the West. But the landslide defeats of 1984 and 1988 put an end to that, and last week the chastened party turned southward again by nominating Southerners for both President and Vice President. Said Georgian Jimmy Carter, as he prepared to address the delegates: "I think I've heard more Southern accents here this week than at the convention that nominated me in '76."

The strategy is not complicated. The 11 states of the old Confederacy control 147 of the 270 electoral votes necessary to win. Just three border states -- Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri -- would add 34 votes to the equation. Better yet, for candidates who can appeal to it, the South has often voted as a bloc. A candidate who carries the region can pick and choose among the rest of the states to put together a winning combination. The South, plus New York, California, Ohio and Michigan, for example, yields an electoral-vote total of 307. Carter's election in 1976 was a textbook illustration of how the arithmetic works. The former Georgia Governor carried the entire South (except Virginia) and defeated Gerald Ford by 57 electoral votes, even though Carter won only one non-Southern state west of the Mississippi River and had only a 2-percentage-point edge in the popular vote. Says Carter: "I don't think that mathematically the Democratic Party has much of a chance to win this year without carrying most of the South."

The team of Bill Clinton and Al Gore aimed to repeat the Carter performance by using Clinton's strong base among Southern blacks, while benefiting from a three-way split of the white vote with George Bush and Ross Perot. Clinton, says senior strategist James Carville, "is the first candidate since Carter to have significant black support in his own right. He has the network. He has the record." Some key Southern Democrats, including Carter's former press secretary Jody Powell, estimate that with Perot in the race they needed only about 20% of the white vote, plus the black vote, in order to carry the South; with Perot out, the same experts estimate that Clinton-Gore will have to get at least 30% of the white vote.

Another problem -- for Republicans as well as Democrats -- is that the old "Solid South" has begun to lose some of its solidity. As more and more Northerners have moved to the Sunbelt in search of jobs, warmer winters, cleaner air and affordable suburbs, and as telecommunications have bound the nation closer together, the region has become more diverse, its citizens more cosmopolitan.

Thus, it is no simple matter to devise a political campaign that can appeal to Southern blacks as well as whites, to Florida motel operators as well as Texas bankers, to South Carolina cotton growers as well as Virginia lawyers, to blue-collar as well as white-collar workers. The South, once derided as a cultural and political backwater, has come to resemble the rest of America, both physically and in its social and political attitudes, more closely than at any other time in the country's history. "Today," says Carter, whose candidacy helped end the South's isolation, "Oregon doesn't have a much different philosophy from, say, Florida."

That is overstating things a bit. For all the changes during the past two or three decades, the modern South -- about a third of whose population lives in rural areas -- remains more conservative than the country as a whole and is more likely to be turned off by such things as the gay-rights and pro-choice movements. Understanding that, Republican presidential candidates from Richard Nixon to Bush have targeted white Southern voters by stressing economic and social conservatism -- including thinly veiled appeals to racism, like the notorious Willie Horton ads of 1988. The results have been divisive but spectacular. Since 1968, except when Carter won in '76, G.O.P. presidential candidates have owned the South and the Democrats have seen their once secure Southern base shrink until its mainstays were blacks and poor whites. This year the task facing Clinton and Gore is to reach out to the mostly white voters who defected during the past quarter-century while remaining true to their party's civil-rights and economic traditions.

The South has played a major role in electing Presidents since the founding of the Republic. In the 20th century, few candidates have made it to the White House without strong Southern support. The news from Madison Square Garden last week, as Clinton and Gore delivered their acceptance speeches in the soft, rolling accents of the South, was that the Democrats were back on their old flame's front porch, roses in hand, hoping to rekindle the spark of passion in her fickle heart.