Look Away
I’m not sure we can make too much from the argument that the country has chosen the Southerner five times out of seven in the modern era. Seven is a very small sample! And several of the examples — like when Jimmy Carter defeated Gerald Ford in 1976 — are much more easily attributed to historical context. ~Marc Ambinder
This seems right to me. Leave aside for now the silliness of counting an Eastern transplant such as Bush as a representative of the South. This was part of the reason why I insisted on pointing out the sheer lack of elected Southern Presidents between 1849 1850 and 1965. For those keeping track at home, there were exactly two Presidents who took over because of the deaths of their predecessors who hailed from Confederate states at the time they took office (Wilson was a Virginian by birth, but didn’t live there for very long), and there was only one other who was elected while hailing from below the technical Mason-Dixon line. That would be Harry Truman, who was about as Southern as I am Kenyan–and who only enjoyed his position as incumbent President because of FDR’s demise. Untimely Yankee President deaths put more Southerners (very broadly defined) into the White House than voters did for over a century. Until 1964, no one from the states that made up the Old Confederacy was actually elected to that position since Young Hickory Zachary Taylor That is rather staggering when you think about it (of course, it can be readily explained by the greater population of the Northern states, the War, Reconstruction, etc.).
Is it possible to imagine a similar span of time in which no one from the states making up the United States, c. 1865, had won the Presidency for 100 years? Of course it isn’t. Consider where most declared presidential candidates come from in each cycle: only a handful come from Southern states. Lately, they have enjoyed success for specific, explicable reasons (it seems to me that Bush v. Gore had more to do with the 2000 election outcome than anti-Yankee sentiment, especially since both candidates were technically Southerners). Complaining about this would be a bit like someone complaining in 1911 that the sinister New York-Ohio axis had dominated American politics for decades (from 1877 until 1913, every President but one–Benjamin Harrison–came from one of these two states), which would be to ignore all of the reasons why these were centers of political power for the two parties. Only with Woodrow Wilson were we finally ”freed” from the grinding oppression of New York and Ohio, and that didn’t exactly work out all that well for the country.
The 2008 field alone practically guarantees Yankee domination for years to come. The Dems have one Southerner running and the GOP has a potential of three, if Fred will deign to grace us with his lofty presence. This is actually backwards from the way it should be if the parties wanted to maximise their chances: the Dems need to be running relatively more Southerners and the GOP needs relatively fewer such candidates. The South is more or less a lock for the GOP in any case, not because they only respond to Southern candidates or refuse to vote for Yankees (which is an unsupportable thesis), but because they prefer GOP candidates who will talk to them in their idiom (even if it is done in a condescending, “I have to please the rubes” way) and pay lip service to their concerns. Granted, the GOP mostly just pays lip service to their concerns, but lip service is sometimes enough to keep voters loyal. It works with Democrats and black voters, so why not Republicans and Southern whites?
Just a few small points: I understand that as a Southern-phile (sorry for the made-up word) you have a desire to repudiate as non-Southern any president you don’t like (except LBJ, Carter, and Clinton, where it can’t be denied), but
a) Wilson did leave Virginia as an infant, but not to go North, but to move to Augusta, Georgia, where his father was a staunch Confederate, and then as a teenager he moved to Columbia, South Carolina. He began his undergraduate career at Davidson College in North Carolina, although, of course, he transfered to Princeton after a year. He even practiced law in Atlanta for a short time as an adult, only making a definitive move north of the Confederacy when he entered the Ph.D. program at Johns Hopkins.
b) Both sides of Harry Truman’s family were pro-Confederate in the Civil War. His mother supposedly (according to a possibly apocryphal tale) refused to sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom when she visited her son in the White House. In his famous book of interviews with Merle Miller, Truman rants with gusto about Reconstruction, the impeachment of Andrew Johnson, Thad Stevens, and Ben Wade, similarly oblivious toward any similarities to his own civil rights program. He may not have been fully culturally Southern, but he certainly was much more one than you are a Kenyan.
c) Zachary Taylor (born in Virginia, raised in Kentucky, technically a resident of Louisiana when elected) was Southern.
I don’t disagree with your main points; I guess I’m just in a nitpicky mood.
Nitpicking is fine. Nitpicking is the heart of blogging, and it keeps me honest. Besides, the Taylor point is obvious and I can’t believe I somehow forgot about him. He was Jefferson Davis’ father-in-law and quite Southern. This is what happens when you try to take an intensive language course and blog at the same time–you get sloppy.
Even including Truman (and I suppose I must concede the point here), that brings the total for the period between *Taylor* and Johnson to a grand total of one. Wilson’s story is a perfect counterexample to Drum: raised in the South, he nonetheless won the Presidency running from a Northern state (in an admittedly very strange election year). That is the key point: it isn’t a question of where the person is originally from that matters, but where he comes from when he is running for President. On that score, the South has had few contenders and even fewer winners before the recent run.
Speaking of nitpicks, I meant to write that Truman was “seemingly oblivious,” not “similarly oblivious.” (Similarly to what, you must have wondered?)
It is true, though, that while Truman may have been culturally Southern in many ways,* probably most Americans did not regard him as a Southerner during his administration. The border states (except Kentucky) did escape the full taint** of Southernness in many Northern minds; we probably could have had a Marylander or Delawarean as President if there had ever been a suitable candidate.
* Another way: he was the first Baptist President. I have heard him called a Southern Baptist, but I don’t know whether his congregation actually belonged to the SBC; the Northern Baptist/Southern Baptist boundary was very irregular in the border states.
**NOT my view, but the way many thought of it at the time.