JACKSON — The Nov. 4 election did more than result in the election of the first African-American president. It well could have sounded the death knell of the Nixon-era born Republican Southern strategy that for three decades converted the once-solid Democratic South to a GOP bastion.
Mississippi began soldiering along with the Southern strategy in the 1960s, at first only in several federal elections, then graduating into state and local government offices, culminating with election of a Republican governor in 1991, then another in 2003.
Never, however, have Mississippi Republicans been able to grab numerical control of both houses of the Legislature, but GOP Gov. Haley Barbour has skillfully wrested political control of the Senate and constantly battled with Democratic House Speaker Billy McCoy to keep Democrats in that chamber off-balance.
When Barbour first ousted Democratic Gov. Ronnie Musgrove in 2003, it was at a time when the state was in the depths of the last recession, and Barbour scored telling blows on Musgrove over job-loss and the shortfall of state revenues. Poetically, Barbour is now confronted with the same problems in a recession that may be worse and longer.
Barbour’s tenure largely has coasted since 2003, becoming virtually immune from media criticism after Hurricane Katrina hit the state in August 2005, followed by a huge infusion of federal recovery money. Now has come lick-log time for Barbour to become more accountable to Mississippians, at a time when the back door of the White House that he enjoyed under George W. Bush is slammed shut.
Something’s terribly wrong, however, when on the same day Barbour was receiving kudos from fellow Republican governors in Miami for his Katrina handling, a 4-year-old Mississippi boy who had been in Barbour’s Department of Human Services system is found dead from starvation.
The Nov. 4 election left the Republican Party marginalized in the western swath of the Deep South as Virginia and North Carolina abandoned the Old Confederacy, won over by the appeal of Democrat Barack Obama, an amazingly eloquent, intellectually disciplined black man. Even while falling short in mostly rural, less-educated counties across Dixie, Obama nevertheless brought a new energy to long-suffering Southern Democrats, foretelling a Democratic resurgence in the region.
Black Democrats in Mississippi are obviously upset that despite evidence of many Obama campaign signs in white neighborhoods, the president-elect apparently received only 11 or 12 percent of the state’s white vote, according to preliminary analysis. That disappointment was evident in a discussion as part of Jackson State University’s Fannie Lou Hamer Seminar series, attended by a number of old civil rights activists in which I also participated. The conclusion of participants was that race obviously played a major role in John McCain getting 56 percent of Mississippi’s votes.
When Obama, a black man, gets 40 to 50 percent of the white votes in other states and only 11 percent in Mississippi, doesn’t that tell us something about our state? When the Rebel flag issue was put to a vote in 2002 and was resoundingly defeated, many white Mississippians were said to still be refighting the Civil War. Will the past ever die?
We can’t attribute the GOP appeal here entirely to race, because, after all, Mississippi as a religiously conservative Protestant state is fertile ground to sell moral values as a political weapon. Certainly the Republicans have stolen away the moral high ground from Democrats and successfully made it a political issue.
But when Sarah Palin’s pregnant unmarried teenage daughter is paraded on stage at the Republican National Convention, it makes a mockery the party’s heralded “just say no” mantra for sexual abstinence before marriage.
Hastings Wyman, a former South Carolina Republican activist who for years has published the valuable “Southern Political Report,” made a significant admission about the GOP’s racial appeal in his 1990 review of friend Alex Lamis’ “Two-Party South.” Wyman admitted racism has been used as an inflammatory weapon, and a major tool in the building of the new Republican Party in the South.
So it’s no surprise when a black man is elected president, to paraphrase Faulkner, the past isn’t past.
