On letting the South go

Updated below. Wednesday morning. December 10, 2014.

Weren’t we sour-grapesing like this after 2004?

Letting the South go is how we let the South go.

And while Mary Landrieu is no loss in and of herself, she did not serve in the Senate in and of herself. She added to the majority and the majority decides committee chairs and committee chairs control Congress.

And, yes, it’s true, the Democrats don’t need the South to win the Presidency, but it’s also true that there are still more Red States than Blue States and every state still gets two Senators. Letting the South go means accepting the possibility of a permanent Congressional minority, unless turning Oklahoma, Nebraska, Kansas, Utah, Wyoming, and Idaho blue will be easier and quicker than flipping Georgia, Texas, Kentucky, and Tennessee. And, I don’t know about you, but I’m not confident that we can get two Democratic Senators from Ohio, Wisconsin, and Indiana, or even Pennsylvania, Illinois, or New Hampshire next time out, or that we can get even one back in Iowa or Colorado, although 2016’s being a Presidential election year will help. Marco Rubio might be vulnerable down in Florida. (I don’t count Florida as part of the South.) John McCain’s up for re-election and maybe Arizona voters are finally tired of him or maybe he’s tired of them and he’ll retire. There are other possible pickups outside the South too. So maybe, maybe, writing off the South won’t matter.

But there’s this: once upon a time, and not that long ago, writing off the South would have meant writing off Virginia and North Carolina. It is a Presidential election year and Arkansas and Louisiana and even Georgia and North Carolina might be worth the effort, if you know who is at the top of the ticket.

And governorships and state houses matter. The Democrats have to stop thinking only about Congress and the White House, if only to build a bench for future candidates for Congress and the White House, but mainly because governors and state legislators have the most direct influence on the lives of citizens, and here’s the thing.

There are millions of Democrats in the South. Writing off the South means writing them off and leaving them to the mercy of Republican governors and state legislators who, as we’ve seen, show no mercy.

Fifty states. All fifty states.

One more thought: while for the moment there are no more Democratic senators from the South, there are still plenty of Democratic Representatives to the House. Writing off the South, means writing them off too. I don’t want to be the one to explain that to John Lewis. Do you?

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For the record, I don’t think not writing off the South means recruiting more Mary Landrieus or Mark Pryors. Note to the Democrats in charge of these things: If you need minorities and rank and file Democrats to come out to vote, running white conservatives who kowtow to Big Business and Wall Street and making desperate appeals to Republican voters isn’t the way to go about it.

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Updated with a dose of Charles Pierce who was thinking along the same lines yesterday: Concede Nothing.

Bernie Sanders is drawing big crowds in South Carolina and in Mississippi.He wouldn't come close to winning anything in either of those states, but there is a working-class audience there that is interested in listening to him, and that is worth respecting in our politics. There always has been a kind of working-class populism in the South, and it always came to grief over race. But it's 2014, and forging an actual alliance of working people, black and white, in the places that need it the most, is a worthwhile effort whether it fails initially or not. To abandon the people trying to forge that alliance -- and, therefore, to abandon the people on whose behalf that alliance is being forged -- would be political malpractice of the highest order. It would be an odd kind of confirmation of Willard Romney's first bumbling attempts to run away from himself on health care, whereby G.I. Luvmoney averred that what worked in Massachusetts would not work in Mississippi, as though Those People were expendable because the Mississippi Republicans would have them die by the side of the road. Sometimes, the fight alone is enough.

Read the whole post at Esquire.

Comments

[Ja_bartlett]

Some unfocused noodling here, so bear with me.

This issue--letting the erring sisters go in peace, as Horace Greeley suggested during the secession winter of 1861--is one I struggle with. I am by no means convinced that Greeley was wrong. The North had enough economic/political/scientific clout to become what the United States became by the turn of the century all on its own. In the end, the South got a hell of a lot more out of reunion than the North did (and they still do, if you look at how many government dollars go to red states versus blue ones).

I believe the country would be better off without the toxic brew of religion, militarism, and arrogance that's quintessentially Southern, and not much changed from what it was 150 years ago. But it's too late to reverse Lincoln's decision to fight the Civil War, which is essentially what those who suggest Democrats abandon the South are arguing for. (You'd have to refight the war door to door in the North now, and one front would be on the Dane/Jefferson county line here in Wisconsin, between blue Madison and the deep red Milwaukee suburbs.) It's all well and good to hope that we can find better Democrats, or better issues to run on in Southern states. The question is, can we do it in time, before our modern Confederates have remade the whole country in their image, or wrecked it beyond saving? I'm afraid we won't be able to.

[daveminnj]

The single most self-destructive thing the Democratic party has done in the last 6 years was replacing Howard Dean and his 50 state strategy. It is simply not possible to build a wave without contesting every possible seat.