Southern Strategy

Tomorrow night, March 20 at 7p.m., at Wake Forest University Tom Schaller will debate Bob Moser on the question of the Democratic Party's strategy towards the South. The debate will be held in Room 1312 of the Worrell Professional Center and respondents include yours truly and Delmas Parker, second vice chair of the NC Democratic Party, along with David Coates, politics professor at Wake Forest.

This debate's genesis was a work of BlueNC and the blogosphere in more ways than one. Read the rest for more on the debate and on the blogosphere's role.

Recently I offered a piece about the Southern GOP as the leading element of the Republican Party and how that limits the party's popularity outside the South. In today's Washington Post Harold Meyerson's column describes his take on that same issue. It's well argued and I won't condense it here. However, this quote gives you some sense of his point of view...

For four decades, it's been the Democrats who've had a Southern problem... couldn't elect any senators, then any House members, then any dogcatchers. They still can't, but the Southern problem, it turns out, is really the Republicans'. They've become too Southern...

Remember the new conservative coalition that was to provide a "permanent Republican majority?" Today that pipe dream is mostly associated with Karl Rove, but originally it was envisioned by Richard Nixon as the fruit of his Southern Strategy. This strategy was supposed to retain the party's traditional Northeastern and Midwestern conservative base while reaching out to Southerners disaffected by civil rights and the role of Democrats in the demise of Jim Crow. It was designed to meld the Puritan tradition of small government and individual responsibility with the historical sense of loss and grievance that infected the South.