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Bob Moser

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Blue Dixie: Awakening the South's Democratic Majority First Edition, Kindle Edition

by Bob Moser (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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A powerful case for a new Southern strategy for the Democrats, from an award-winning reporter and native Southerner

In 2000 and 2004, the Democratic Party decided not to challenge George W. Bush in the South, a disastrous strategy that effectively handed Bush more than half of the electoral votes he needed to win the White House. As the 2008 election draws near, the Democrats have a historic opportunity to build a new progressive majority, but they cannot do so without the South.

In Blue Dixie, Bob Moser argues that the Democratic Party has been blinded by outmoded prejudices about the region. Moser, the chief political reporter for The Nation, shows that a volatile mix of unprecedented economic prosperity and abject poverty are reshaping the Southern vote. With evangelical churches preaching a more expansive social gospel and a massive left-leaning demographic shift to African Americans, Latinos, and the young, the South is poised for a Democratic revival. By returning to a bold, unflinching message of economic fairness, the Democrats can win in the nation's largest, most diverse region and redeem themselves as a true party of the people.

Keenly observed and deeply grounded in contemporary Southern politics, Blue Dixie reveals the changing face of American politics to the South itself and to the rest of the nation.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. This arresting analysis from Moser, political correspondent for the Nation, debunks the belief in an enduring Republican South, which he terms the single most destructive myth of contemporary politics. The author wades into the swirl of stereotypes to challenge the conventional wisdom of many Democratic strategists, that the South is a Republican stronghold. Moser examines polls and voting trends that belie the idea of a conservative, fundamentalist, inherently racist voting bloc, looking instead at the history of the South as a breeding ground for progressivism and populist economic policies before proposing that the Democrats should stop trying to be the party of 'Republicans Lite' in order to win over Dixie. Moser details Jim Webb's and Barack Obama's successes in the South, praises Howard Dean's fifty-state strategy for re-energizing the Democratic Party in the region and gives insightful suggestions for how the party can continue the trend. Well-written, well-researched and perfectly timed with this year's election cycle, this fascinating read is highly recommended to anyone interested in unraveling political fact from fiction and detecting the myriad complicated relationships that knit a nation together. (Aug.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

"An incisive book about campaign strategy… Moser decries the failure of Democratic strategists to understand Southern voters [and] the sting is particularly keen."—The Boston Globe

"A wake-up call… Moser’s argument is cogent."—Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"Moser convince[es] Democrats that the South is a lot more complicated and interesting that they have made it out to be."—The New York Times Book Revew

"Conventional wisdom holds that the South is a solid GOP bloc… Moser explodes this myth."—Charleston City Paper

"Moser [represents] many progressives, liberals and populists in the South… in his important and entertaining new book Blue Dixie."—Independent Weekly (North Carolina)

"Moser argues that Democrats have lost elections when they don’t compete for the South… The solution is a message of economic fairness."—New York Post

"Well-written, well-researched and perfectly timed with this year’s election cycle, this fascinating read is highly recommended to anyone interested in unraveling political fact from fiction and detecting the myriad complicated relationships that knit a nation together."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Moser… argues that Democrats in the rest of the country should put aside their stereotype of the South."—In These Times

"Moser argues that Democrats can take back the South as the distance between haves and have-nots widens and a left-leaning demographic emerges."—Library Journal

"Blue Dixie makes the most compelling case I’ve read for why Democrats must not relinquish the South and, instead, compete hard for its votes, hearts, and minds with a bracing message of economic fairness!"—Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor, The Nation

About the Author

Bob Moser is an award-winning political correspondent for The Nation. He has chronicled Southern politics for nearly two decades for publications ranging from Rolling Stone to The Independent. A native of North Carolina, he lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One

THE SOLID SOUTHERN STRATEGY

THE TALE OF how Republicans "won" the South, and why Democrats gave it up, has been ironed out into a quintessentially American fable of good and evil and reduced to its satisfying essence for retelling every four years, when Democratic strategists and media pundits begin their ritual debate about whether, and how, Democrats should try to reclaim a slice of Dixie with a Southern strategy of their own.

The legend goes like this: The Democratic Party became the unity party of white Southerners—a political extension of the Confederate States of America—after the Civil War. (True enough.) From Appomattox through the civil rights movement, the national Democratic Party was really two parties, with an enlightened Northern wing and a Southern wing wallowing in the muck of benighted traditionalism. (The exaggerations begin.) The "good Democrats" of the North swallowed hard and accommodated their Dixie cousins for the very practical reason that without their "solid South" vote in nearly every presidential contest, they would not have been contests.(Right.) Even Franklin D. Roosevelt put up with the racist demagogues of the Southern leadership, the Bilbos and Vardamans and Talmadges, because of political expediency. (Right again.) And even though white Southerners didn’t have a liberal bone in their bodies, they kept making an X in the boxes next to Democratic presidential candidates’ names. (Well . . .)

But "with a stroke of the pen," as the saying always goes, the first Southern president since Andrew Johnson, Texan Lyndon B. Johnson, intrepidly signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and brought a sudden and irrevocable end to the Democrats’ solid South. Why, even LBJ himself said so; in a quote that has become an inextricable part of the fable, the president worried out loud to one of his aides, the future journalist Bill Moyers, that he had "delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come."

By doing the right thing, we are told, the Democratic Party sacrificed Dixie and purified its sullied soul at last. And as soon as Johnson’s pen did its work, the legend continues, Republicans were ready to pounce. With the brilliant Southern strategy brewed to wicked perfection by Richard Nixon and his henchmen, the die was cast. After a quick post-Watergate blip, with Jimmy Carter’s election in 1976, the popular presidency of Ronald Reagan and the ascendance of religious right politics cemented the Republicans’ new solid South. While the region continued to grow in prosperity—thanks, of course, to its supposedly militant antiunionism and the resulting abundance of cheap labor that big business loves—the South remained what it had always been: backward, xenophobic, racist, and ignorantly susceptible to the rankest emotional appeals to Jesus, miscegenation, and militarism. The only difference was that the parties had switched places, with the Democrats laid as low as the sad old Southern Republicans once were. If anybody needed fresh proof of that, it came along in the 2000 election, when even a Tennessee Democrat, Al Gore, could not break through the brick wall of Caucasian conservatism to win a single state in Dixie. "The South is no longer the swing region," proclaimed political science professor and pundit Thomas Schaller, author of a "non-Southern" manifesto published in 2006 called Whistling Past Dixie: How Democrats Can Win Without the South. "It has swung."

That’s the story, and a sweet one it is for both Republicans and—in a perverse way—blue state Democrats. For Republicans, this neat little fiction confirms their superior command of political strategy—the canny ruthlessness with which they appropriated white backlash against ’60s liberalism, then rode the angry tide of evangelical politics in the ’80s. It also offers them the charming promise of starting every presidential election with one-third (and climbing) of the country’s electoral votes already sewn up. Meanwhile, Democrats outside the South—those who actually believe this Disneyesque version of political history—can recount the legend and view themselves, and their party, as martyrs for racial justice. The party’s sad record in national politics, post-LBJ, has indeed been a cross to bear. But such is the price of righteousness.

But nobody told Southerners they weren’t supposed to be Democrats anymore. During the 2006 midterm elections, Gallup pollsters discovered that more folks still said they were Democrats than Republicans in all but three Southern states—Texas, South Carolina, and Mississippi. In half of the South, it wasn’t even close: Democrats led by more than 10 percentage points in six Southern states. It’s not just the partisan leanings of Southerners that confound the solid South myths. Southerners are more conservative only if you winnow down American politics to cultural or "moral" issues alone. Southerners still tack the furthest right on gay marriage and abortion and still lead the nation in church going. They also back withdrawal from Iraq and strongly favor progressive populist economic policies—more spending on social welfare, stronger environmental and business regulations, universal health care—that are anathema to the GOP and, in many cases, markedly to the left of the national Democratic leadership.

But you’d never know that by listening to the conventional wisdom. The South has, in the popular mind, always been "solid"—solidly white, solidly conservative, solidly fundamentalist, and of course, solidly racist. But never solidly populist—and that is where the Democrats made their mistake.

It’s true that Democrats were bound to take a hit in the South after LBJ signed the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts of 1964 and 1965, which ended all forms of legal segregation and doomed the various schemes—literacy tests, violent intimidation—that had long suppressed black registration and turnout. But as Johnson knew, the cracks in the "solid" Southern Democracy had been widening since 1948, when Harry S. Truman’s modest civil rights plank sent Deep South Democrats stalking out of the national convention in protest. After the Dixiecrats’ attempt to block Truman’s reelection failed miserably, most returned—mad and determined, rather than chastened—to their ancestral party. The strains showed throughout the 1950s, especially after the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawing "separate but equal" schools. But it wasn’t until 1964 that the awkward Democratic coalition of such long standing—working-class whites, ruling-class whites, working-class blacks, middle-class Jews, liberals, moderates, evangelical Baptists, and neo-Confederate reactionaries, to name a few—started to unravel in the South.

The day before the 1964 election, Republican insurgent Barry Goldwater chose to make his final campaign stop in Columbia, South Carolina. Matched against a popular president leading the ticket of America’s dominant party, Goldwater had made the fatal mistake of being honest in his acceptance speech at the GOP convention, proclaiming his view that "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice" and instantly snuffing out the remote hopes he had entertained of occupying the White House. But Goldwater did not give up on what became the mission—the sole possible rationale, really—for his foundering campaign: building a new Republican base by breathing reactionary life into its moribund Southern wing. He stumped hard in Dixie, often accompanied by Strom Thurmond, the South Carolina senator who had topped the "Dixiecrat" (States Rights Party) ticket in 1948 and was now leading the segregationist exodus into the GOP. While Goldwater avoided overt race-baiting, his anti–civil rights voting record and Thurmond’s enthusiastic backing were more than enough to signal to Southerners—both whites, who voted in unprecedented numbers for a Republican, and blacks, who voted in unprecedented numbers for a Democrat—just where the new GOP stood on the "race issue." More directly, with his "states’ rights" rhetoric, Goldwater fully embraced the fierce distrust of the federal government that Southern traditionalists had felt in their collective gut since long before the Civil War. "Forced integration," Goldwater liked to tell his fans in Dixie, "is just as wrong as forced segregation." Richard Nixon would later pick up that refrain, sometimes verbatim.

The day after Goldwater’s Columbia rally, the national results were disastrous; Johnson racked up what was, at the time, the largest percentage of the popular vote in U.S. history. But Goldwater had broken through in what Southern journalist John Egerton calls "the five-chambered, race-obsessed heart of Dixie." These were the same old cotton states—Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, and South Carolina—that had revolted in 1948. But even in President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s cakewalk reelection of 1956, four of the five had still stuck with Democrat Adlai Stevenson (along with only three other states in the country). Goldwater had staked a claim in the South’s—and the nation’s—most "solid" Democratic territory. At the same time, Republicans had lost the majority of Southern states, including the economically booming, fast-growing cities and suburbs that had been friendly to Ike in the ’50s.

Republican progress was hardly as smooth or deadly as Sherman’s March. Richard Nixon’s 1968 election was nearly derailed by the Deep South, which voted in big numbers for George Wallace’s third-party effort and nearly swung the election to Democrat Hubert Humphrey. But that year, and more emphatically in 1972, Nixon made important inroads with the region’s fastest-growing demographic: suburbanites, who would later form the base of Ro...

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B001ELVPMQ
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Times Books; First edition (August 19, 2008)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ August 19, 2008
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 1.0 MB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Print length ‏ : ‎ 361 pages

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Bangor artist
It's fascinating reading and the author's knowledge of the wonderful, sometimes bizarre
Reviewed in the United States on April 20, 2016
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Instead of a dry and reserved history of Southern politics, this writing has tremendous energy .
I was carried along in my reading by the intensity and enthusiasm of the author. It's fascinating reading and the author's knowledge of the wonderful,sometimes bizarre, aspects of southern politcs made this book especially compelling and interesting.

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A. Ciardiello
Returning the South back to the Dems
Reviewed in the United States on September 20, 2008
Unlike Thomas Schaller, who argued in his book, Whistling Past Dixie: How Democrats Can Win Without the South, that the Democrats should form a new national consensus without the South, Bob Moser makes the exact opposite claim: the Democrats need to win back the South if they want to win future elections.

While most have correctly identified the South as being socially conservative, many (including the Democratic Party) have failed to realize how fiscally liberal the South is. Instead, many in the Democratic Party have become "me-too" Democrats; agreeing with the Republicans on fiscal issues while downplaying their own social agenda. This "New Democrat" type of moderation as not impressed the South. As a result, Democrats running in national elections in Dixie have gone nowhere.

Moser states that the Democrats need to employ a 21st century type of populism; one that argues for the power of good government to protect the common man. This populist style will resonate strongly with Southern voters, who have witnesses many jobs shipped overseas and a widening gap between the top-income earners and the middle class. With an increasing number of Evangelicals preaching a social gospel calling for more aid to the poor, a new populism, Moser claims, can indeed work. These issues are strong ones for the Democratic Party, and they should use thus to their advantage.

Unlike the Solid South of the early 20th century, the South of today is far from solid. Local Democrats in state legislatures have been able to win elections, and there are still more voters registered as Democrats rather than Republicans. Permanent minority status, Moser argues, is far from inevitable. If the Democrats can formulate an agenda arguing the positive aspects of good government, they can ultimately reclaim the South.

Especially relevant in an election year, Moser's book is a must read for Democrats and Southerners alike. Although he does make some subtle, snide, and at times unnecessary attacks on the GOP, his analysis is still solid. With a projected 40% of the nation's electoral votes by 2032, the South is by far too valuable a region to simply pass up. If the Democrats fail to heed Moser's advice, they may lose the South, and thus the presidency, for many generations to come.

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David Ortez
Yes we can!
Reviewed in the United States on October 18, 2008
Blue Dixie: Awakening the South's Democratic Majority by Bob Moser is an articulate, well-documented and concise book detailing the strategy that Democrats need to implement in the South if they wish to succeed. The book could not have been written at a more perfect time as Barack Obama heads into the General Election against the Republican candidate John McCain.

This is a book that every Southern Progressive must read before they cast another ballot in a Presidential election. In eight quick chapters, Bob Moser is able to convey his arguments with facts and research that support his overall claims. This read is recommended to anyone willing to entertain the Republican myth in the south and unravel the voting inconsistencies of the South since Nixon.

The demise of the Democratic Party in the South is a culmination of multiple events as Moser recounts. He sheds light into the Republican's myth of how the South was won, but any Romanization of such accounts is not included without scrutiny. There is hope for Southern Progressives though. Moser calls for a Southern populist movement that unites the regions diverse ethnic and socio-economic population through the issue of Economics. Moser looks down upon the pandering to Dixiecrats by Democrats and asks them to wake up and see their new constituency- made up of Hispanics, Northern Yankees that have relocated in the South to retire and African-Americans.

Moser's argument is as follows: the Democrats betrayed the South by neglecting their new constituency of African-Americans that were eligible to vote. They also
failed to rally behind the white Southern Progressives that helped African-Americans win their rights. At the same time, Republicans developed a race-baiting tactic and swept up the region by gerrymandering. Democrats then became the "Republican-Lite" party; always copying the GOP and trying to out do them.

Moser claims, "Only one party calibrated its pitch and its organizing methods- focusing on the megachurches that were becoming the community centers of Southern suburbs- to the regions evolving culture and new economic realities." This is how the GOP was able to establish a successful base in the South and the Democrats have only imitated them and failed. This has created a self-fulfilling prophecy that makes it seem that the South belongs to Republicans thus Democrats do not challenge them. The end result is that Southern Progressives feel neglected and it shows. They do not show up to vote.

The South is not a lost cause for Democrats. By exposing the false claims of the Republican party and using Moser's strategy and grassroots organization, Democrats have a great chance of turning the tide in this region. Moser uses personal narratives of people living in the South that seek the change that Progressives envision. Democrats cannot continue to neglect the region and must fight for the votes. Moser explains that a populist message of economics will unite the region behind a Democratic any day. Democrats cannot afford to ignore the region any more. Bob Moser never said it would be easy but Democrats have to fight to win back the region. Blue Dixie explains even to a political novice what Progressives need to do to win back the South. Can Democrats build a new progressive majority in the South? Yes we can!

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5.0 out of 5 stars It's fascinating reading and the author's knowledge of the wonderful, sometimes bizarre

4.0 out of 5 stars Returning the South back to the Dems

5.0 out of 5 stars Yes we can!

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It's fascinating reading and the author's knowledge of the wonderful, sometimes bizarre

Returning the South back to the Dems

Yes we can!