fbpx
Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

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 […]

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?

Advertisement

Comments

The American Conservative Memberships
Become a Member today for a growing stake in the conservative movement.
Join here!
Join here