 |
|
|
| Quote |
"Why do some arrogant
indie rock fans find solace in working
musicians barely being able to pay
their rent?" -- Justin Verona,
Lexington
| | | |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
| Issue #20.48 :: 11/28/2007 -
12/04/2007 |
|
Uphill
Battle
Can S.C.
Democrats Capitalize on Nationwide Republican
Slide?
|
BY JULIE
JAREMA
|
With South Carolina’s presidential
primaries just around the corner on Jan. 26,
local Democrats are struggling to gain solid
footing in the run-up to elections next
November. Grassroots politics combined with an
Internet-savvy media strategy, Democrats say,
will be the key to gaining back seats in the
Legislature, and possibly some statewide offices
and the Governor’s Mansion in 2010.
However, there has been a long drought
in this state for Democrats. It all started in
1964, when U.S. Sen. Strom Thurmond defected
from the Democratic Party to the GOP, starting a
decades-long slide in which Democrats moved from
the majority to the minority party in South
Carolina. Thurmond defected to the Republican
Party on a states’ rights platform, which was
code at the time for opposition to the Civil
Rights Act of 1964 that President Lyndon
Johnson, a Democrat, was
pushing.
Combined with Nixon’s Southern
Strategy, the result was a race-based politics
that has given a strong long-term advantage to
the GOP in South Carolina. However, Democrats
say the current unpopularity of President Bush
gives them an opening to move the Democratic
Party forward in the state, and they intend to
do so by focusing on key issues like health
care, jobs and education, bolstered by
grassroots organizing and the Internet.
The challenge they face,
however, is of historic
proportions.
According to an interview
with John Egerton in the political newsletter Counterpunch,
Johnson’s support of the Civil Rights Act
“rallied the Southern politicians to enforce
their conservative and segregationist
stronghold.” Egerton quotes Johnson as having
said to an aid that “‘I may have turned the
South over to the Republican Party for the next
generation.’” In fact, says Egerton, a
contributor to the book Where We Stand: Voices
of Southern Dissent, it was Thurmond’s move to
the Republicans that “began this avalanche of
‘coming out’ parties where all these Democrats,
who were really closet Republicans, came out of
the closet to present themselves as what they
truly were, which was super conservative and
still segregationists.”
Decades later,
formal segregation is long gone but the
Republican Party still dominates South Carolina
politics, holding the governor’s office, a large
majority of seats in both chambers of the
General Assembly and all but one statewide
constitutional office. And though there is a
good possibility that the next president of the
United States will be a Democrat, there is
little doubt that South Carolina will remain a
Republican stronghold, out of step with the rest
of the nation in its disappointment with
President Bush and the war in Iraq.
The National
Picture
Nationally, Democrats have
reason to be optimistic. According to a 20-year
study
by the Pew Research Center, “Trends in Political
Values and Core Attitudes: 1987-2007,” 50
percent of Americans identify themselves as
Democrats or say they lean to the Democratic
Party, compared with just 35 percent who align
with the GOP. In 2002, the country was equally
divided along partisan lines with 43 percent
identifying with the GOP, while the same amount
said they were Democrats.
An enormous
shift has occurred since President Bush’s
contested win over Al Gore in 2000. With Bush’s
popularity ratings in a downhill spiral,
reaching among the lowest of any president,
Rolling
Stone dubbed him “The Worst President in
History.”
“Now, though, George W. Bush is
in serious contention for the title of worst
[president] ever,” writes historian Sean Wilentz
in the April 21, 2006 edition. “In early 2004,
an informal survey of 415 historians conducted
by the non-partisan History News Network found
that 81 percent considered the Bush
administration a ‘failure.’”
“No two-term
president since polling began has fallen from
such a height of popularity as Bush’s (in the
neighborhood of 90 percent, during the patriotic
up-swell following the 2001 attacks) to such a
low (now in the mid-30s),” Wilentz writes. The
reasons, he says, range from domestic policies
such as No Child Left Behind and a failed
immigration policy to foreign-policy blunders
such as the “Mission Accomplished” declaration
in 2003, increasing casualties in Iraq,
executive misconduct with the commuting of I.
Lewis “Scooter” Libby’s sentence and other
crises of credibility.
According to the
Washington
Post, the deep antipathy to Bush has
fueled grassroots support for
impeachment.
The Pew report says
“increased public support for the social safety
net, signs of growing public concern about
income inequality, and a diminished appetite for
assertive national security policies have
improved the political landscape for the
Democrats as the 2008 presidential campaign gets
under way.”
The War at
Home
Though the climate seems ripe for
Democratic gains — and nationally,
Democrats did retake the U.S. House and Senate
in November 2006 — South Carolina has not
followed the national trend.
On Nov. 7,
2006, Democrats lost every statewide office
except the superintendent of education, which
Jim Rex won by a margin of about 450 votes out
of more than 1 million cast. Republican Mark
Sanford defeated Democrat Tommy Moore in the
gubernatorial race; Republican Andre Bauer
defeated Democrat Robert Barber for lieutenant
governor; Republican Mark Hammond defeated
Democrat Cheryl Footman in the race for
secretary of state; Republican Thomas Ravenel,
who was later arrested on a federal cocaine
charge, defeated Democrat Grady Patterson for
state treasurer; Republican Henry McMaster ran
uncontested for state attorney general; and
Republican Hugh Weathers beat local Democratic
farmer Emile DeFelice in the race for
commissioner of agriculture.
In the U.S.
House races, five out of six seats went to
Republicans with Jim Clyburn in District 6 the
only Democrat to be elected. And in the
Legislature, Republicans held onto the majority
in both the House and Senate, a position they
have maintained since 1994 when then-Democrat
Hugh Leatherman of Florence dramatically flipped
parties and sealed the Democrats’ fate both then
and since.
Essentially, white Democrats
in South Carolina have become increasingly rare.
Writing in 2003 in the article “The
Two-Sided South” on governing.com,
Alan Greenblatt noted that “the ranks of white
Democrats have dwindled to 27 out of 124 members
in the House, and 13 out of 46 in the Senate.”
Today there are just 11 white Democrats in the
state Senate.
The political makeup of the
2007-08 Senate is 26 Republicans and 19
Democrats, with Republican Shane Massey recently
winning the seat formerly held by Tommy Moore,
D-Aiken. Moore departed to work as a lobbyist
for the payday lending industry. In the House,
71 representatives are Republican and 51 are
Democrats.
“South Carolina has become a
one-party state — the Republican Party,” says
Phil Noble, president of South
Carolina Democratic Leadership Council
(DLC), called the New Democrats. “A black party
and a white party — we want to go beyond the
divisions of race and history that have held our
state back.”
Race-Based
Parties
South Carolina
Democratic Party Chairwoman Carol Fowler
says the reason Democrats in the state lag
behind the Republicans is, in part, because of
race.
“I think South Carolina has always
been a less progressive state than the rest of
the country,” Fowler says. She goes on to say
that it’s an historic trend going back decades
and even longer. “Our schools are at the bottom,
health care — the economy is not what it should
be. I think that’s attributable to the way
people vote.”
And the way people vote in
South Carolina is Republican. With Nixon’s
Southern Strategy, white Democrats who were not
willing to fully embrace the civil rights
movement switched to the GOP. What began as a
trend in the South toward Republicanism became
entrenched as a long-term shift under two terms
of Republican President Ronald Reagan in the
1980s. Though racial politics are not as heated
as they once were, racial equations still define
the politics of the South.
As Free Times
reported in a previous cover story on Democratic
politics in South Carolina, Republicans
typically draw about 70 percent of white voters.
Democrats draw about 90 percent of black voters.
South Carolina has a white majority, with about
65 percent white and 30 percent black, so the
Republicans have a race-based advantage in this
state. With black voter turnout typically lower
than whites and more and more whites deserting
the Democratic Party over the years, the
Republican advantage has only grown.
“I
think the party’s challenge is to address the
issues that are most important to all South
Carolinians — not to be a black South Carolina
or white South Carolina or even just the
Democrats,” says Steve Benjamin, who lost the
race in 2002 to be the state’s attorney general
and currently serves as chairman of Richland
County’s Democratic Party. Benjamin says the
Democrats must identify and run on “issues that
are important to all of us.”
“I hope and
pray the racial politics — the old Southern
Strategy, the wedge politics — is dead,”
Benjamin says.
 |
|
Steve
Benjamin, chairman of the
Richland County
Democratic
Party |
According
to state Sen. John Land, D-Calhoun,
re-apportionment of the voting districts in the
1980s also explains a lot about why Democrats
have such low representation in South
Carolina.
“The Democratic Party is in the
worst shape I’ve ever seen it [in South
Carolina],” says Land, a state senator since
1976. “Every time you created a black district,
you bleached three other districts. We weren’t
voted out — we were switched
out.”
Gerrymandering in the 1980s created
single-member, separate white and black
districts — therefore ensuring blacks a handful
of seats but cementing a Republican stronghold
statewide.
A Fighting
Chance
Despite these historic
challenges, the low approval ratings of
President Bush and the low numbers of voters
identifying themselves as Republicans offer an
historic opportunity for Democrats in South
Carolina to get back in the game.
Cameron
Runyan, a member of the executive committee of
the South Carolina Democratic Party (SCDP) and
candidate for the nonpartisan Columbia City
Council, says the national Democratic campaigns
are helping build the state party by attracting
more volunteers and getting them excited about
the political process.
S.C. Rep. Bakari
Sellers, D-Bamberg, who is up for re-election in
2008, agrees.
“I think that the
groundwork and foundations laid by presidential
candidates Sen. Clinton and Sen. Obama will
bring success to the South Carolina Democratic
Party in the near future,” he says.
“I
think South Carolinians are motivated,” says
state Rep. Gilda Cobb-Hunter, D-Orangeburg. “The
presidential primary has brought a degree of
excitement and involvement to the process for a
lot people who dropped out. The key would be for
us to capitalize on all these new people who
have come into the party.”
 |
| S.C.
Rep. Bakari Sellers,
D-Bamberg |
Fowler
says Democrats are in the game in South
Carolina.
“There are lots of independents
in this state,” Fowler says. “We are clearly not
in the majority. We win or lose statewide and
local offices by not a huge majority. [But]
there’s plenty of opportunity for Democrats to
win offices.”
Independents will be the
swing vote in the 2008 presidential election, as
well as the young vote.
Although Sellers
says he thinks the young vote will be engaged
because of the charisma and vision of Obama and
the Clinton name, the South Carolina Democratic
Party lost its chance to truly engage young
voters when it denied Comedy Central faux
conservative Stephen
Colbert’s bid to get on the ballot. His bid
was voted down 13-3 by the party’s governing
committee.
“I was looking forward to
seeing if [Colbert’s participation] would
increase participation by young people,”
Cobb-Hunter says in an interview by MTV. “We’ll
never know now.”
According to the Pew
report, it is the Republican Party that has
rapidly lost public support, particularly among
independents. Faced with an unpopular president
who is waging an unpopular war, the proportion
of Americans who hold a favorable view of the
Republican Party stands at 41 percent, down 15
points since January 2001. But during that same
period, the proportion expressing a positive
view of Democrats has declined by six points, to
54 percent.
The report says that
Americans are expressing greater commitment to
solving domestic problems and voicing more
hesitancy about global engagement.
“They
are also less disposed than five years ago to
favor a strong military as the best way to
ensure peace,” the report says.
In
2002, the report says, less than a year after
the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, more than six in
10 agreed that the best way to ensure peace was
through military strength. Today, about half
express similar confidence in military
power.
Also, shifts in traditional social
values are occurring. Younger generations tend
to be less religious, the Pew report says, and
more supportive of affirmative action. The Pew
report also says that the public has become
increasingly accepting of homosexuality over the
years and more averse to the idea that women
should return to their traditional roles in
society.
Less dramatic shifts in social
values have occurred on key issues such as gay
marriage, abortion and the death
penalty.
“Gay marriage is opposed by most
groups in the population,” says the Pew report,
but “exceptions include young people ages 18-29
(56 percent support), liberal Democrats (72
percent), and secular individuals (60
percent).”
Of course, social values often
vary from state to state, with Northern voters
tending to be more liberal and Southerners more
conservative.
“For example, politically
conservative, white evangelical Christians make
up 10 percent of all Republicans and Republican
leaners in New Hampshire,” states the Pew
report, whereas that figure is 39 percent in
South Carolina. “On the Democratic side, the
proportion of Democrats who say they are
politically liberal ranges from 38 percent in
California to 25 percent in South
Carolina.”
Centrists and
Liberals
Liberal has become a
four-letter word in some Democratic circles, say
young members of the local political
organization Drinking Liberally.
“Liberal
has become so joined at the hip with Democrat
that there needed to be another word to describe
left-leaning, forward-thinking people who don’t
necessarily agree with every plank in the
Democratic platform,” says Rafi Dowdy, city host
for Drinking Liberally that meets at the Publick
House in Columbia, of his choice to use the word
progressive.
Andy Brack, veteran
political observer and former Democratic
congressional candidate in 2000 from Charleston
and Myrtle Beach, says he doesn’t think the two
terms are interchangeable.
“Progressives
have always been open-minded, forward-thinking
people going back to the days of Teddy
Roosevelt,” Brack says. “There are progressive
Republicans and progressive Democrats. The
difference between them and traditional politics
of any stripe is that they are open to new ideas
and compromise.”
Whether they call
themselves liberal, progressive or centrist,
Democrats in the state are hoping to change some
voters’ minds through grassroots organizing.
According to Noble, the New Democrats
(who are members of the centrist DLC) have a new
“bottom up” strategy that they are aggressively
pushing among Democrats in South
Carolina.
“The great hope of the Internet
and new technology is that it gives ordinary
people a chance to be heard and effective in the
political process,” Noble says. “Many people can
make small donations online to offset the
influence of big money; voters can communicate
with each other via email and lots of online
organizing tools; with a cheap video camera,
anyone can create their own ‘commercial,’ put it
on YouTube for free and email the link to
potentially thousands of people at no
cost.”
The Democratic
Party
The DLC claims South Carolina is
in a “quiet crisis,” falling behind the rest of
the nation in educational achievements, health
care and economic issues. It proposes new
strategies that include a “Reform Agenda for
Success in the 21st Century.” They believe that
education is the key to South Carolina’s
long-term success.
The DLC proposed what
it calls “Five Big Ideas”. Number one: a
commitment to world-class learning, including
passing a constitutional amendment to establish
a top-quality education system instead of a
minimally adequate system as the state’s
standard for public education. Number two:
statewide 4-year-old kindergarten with adequate
support services in health and nutrition to
ensure that all children are ready to learn.
Number three: a laptop computer for every
student and wireless broadband for every family.
Number four: universal access to unlimited
learning and job training for colleges, graduate
schools or tech schools regardless of an
individual’s wealth with a combination of
financial aid, tax credits, loans and community
service. Number five: universal minimum health
care.
Although most local Democrats, like
Steve Benjamin and Cameron Runyan, consider
themselves members of the DLC, they say for the
Democratic Party the main issues are public
education, health care, raising the minimum wage
and ensuring fair economic opportunities
regardless of class or race.
 |
| Cameron
Runyan |
“The
message for me is a quality public education for
every child,” Cobb-Hunter says.
“Allowing
South Carolinians the ability to get health
care, affordable health care when they need it —
a job paying a livable wage. I think that those
are basic survival things that most people can
relate to.”
Runyan agrees.
“Public
education, health care — a universal right, a
human right … fairness in government,
accountability in government, transparency in
government, the opportunity for all people to
achieve fulfillment in life — these are all
Democratic values,” he says.
Local
Democrats say the way to gain back seats in the
Legislature, statewide offices and perhaps even
the Governor’s Mansion in 2010 will be through
grassroots organizing building off the
excitement of the presidential
campaigns.
“We [Democrats] win by
bringing people together,” Runyan says. “They
[Republicans] win by dividing people. That’s the
difference.”
“I firmly believe the
Democratic Party can win elections here,”
Benjamin says. “It does not require a
generational shift in values.”
“We can
win here — what it takes is working every day to
build party infrastructure,” Benjamin says.
“That’s happening with the presidential campaign
— every major presidential candidate has an
organization on the ground here. It’s energizing
and activating voters — that’s going to have
some carry-over benefits for the party after the
primary is over.”
“We have a strong
Democratic Party here in Richland County and
that could be across the state,” Benjamin
says.
That’s the plan, Runyan says, with
the South Carolina Democratic Party’s new
46-county strategy.
“We are building the
county parties from the ground up to create
infrastructure,” Runyan says. “We’ve got
buildings, volunteers — it’s a grassroots
strategy.”
2008 and
Beyond
It remains to be seen whether
Democrats — Blue Dogs and progressives
alike — can capitalize on the
anti-Republicanism sweeping the nation. Most
Democrats are hopeful, but some say it will take
more than one election cycle to gain footing in
the state.
“No, I don’t think they can
capitalize on the unpopular war and unpopular
president,” Land says. “We have created too many
of those [gerrymandered] districts to make a
fast comeback. It might take us 100 years to
come back because of the
re-apportionment.”
Fowler says the party
definitely doesn’t want to lose any of the
ground it’s made.
“We have to hold onto
the superintendent of education — that’s
essential,” she says. “We need to elect a
governor and lieutenant governor. We’d like to
hold all constitutional offices, but clearly the
governor is most important,” she
says.
Runyan says grassroots campaigning
will be crucial to electing a Democratic
governor in South Carolina in 2010.
“My
hope is that the Democratic Party will have the
grassroots structure in place to make the next
gubernatorial candidate equally competitive with
the Republican,” Runyan says.
He also
says Democrats can expect to win some seats in
the Legislature in the next election
cycle.
“I think there’s a very real
chance that we can pick up some seats in the
Legislature in 2008 — I would look for us to do
that,” he says.
With a good chance that
the United States will elect a Democratic
president in 2008, South Carolina Democrats have
an opportunity to capitalize on all the
campaigning in the Palmetto State and the
dissatisfaction with President Bush and the Iraq
War to pick up some seats in the Legislature.
Whether that opportunity will be fulfilled
— or carry over to 2010 to elect a
Democratic governor — is an open
question. |
| |
| | |
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
