Mugged (29 page)

A staple of Democratic campaigning is to accuse Republicans of being racists. Republican candidates can expect to have their entire life histories probed to find out if, as twelve-year-olds, they caddied at an all-white golf club or ever lived in a predominantly white neighborhood. When liberals can find no archaic restrictive covenant on some piece of property owned by the Republican, they invent stories about Republicans opposing civil rights, having a “despicable” history on race relations and pursuing an imaginary “southern strategy” to win racists over to their party.

Liberals’ neurotic obsession with this apocryphal “southern strategy”—it’s been cited hundreds of times in the
New York Times
—is supposed to explain why Democrats can’t get nice churchgoing, patriotic southerners to vote for the party of antiwar protesters, abortion, the ACLU and gay marriage. They tell themselves they can’t win the South because they won’t stoop to pander to a bunch of racists—which should probably be their first clue why southerners don’t like them.

The premise of liberals’ southern strategy folklore is the sophisticated belief that anyone who votes Republican is a racist. They are counting on no one noticing, much less mentioning, the real history of racism in this country.

The single most important piece of evidence for the Republicans’ alleged southern strategy is President Lyndon B. Johnson’s statement, after signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, that “we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come.” That self-serving quote is cited by liberals with more solemnity than Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death.”

Johnson’s statement is of questionable provenance. The sole source for the quote is LBJ assistant Bill Moyers, whose other work for the president included hunting for gays on Barry Goldwater’s staff and monitoring the
FBI’s bugs on Martin Luther King’s hotel room, then distributing the salacious tapes to select members of the Johnson administration and the press.
¹
If this were my case-in-chief for an important point, I’d want better sourcing than a sanctimonious liberal fraud.

A source for information about LBJ who is
not
a partisan hack, dirty trickster and MLK-adultery publicist is Robert M. MacMillan, Air Force One steward during the Johnson administration. MacMillan reports that when LBJ was flying on Air Force One with two governors once, he boasted that by pushing the 1964 civil rights bill, “I’ll have them niggers voting Democratic for two hundred years.”
²

Regardless of whether Johnson actually said the Democrats’ passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had delivered the south to Republicans, who cares?

That’s not proof! Liberals always produce this quote as they’re brandishing a signed confession to the murder of JonBenét Ramsey.
We have the smoking gun!
But LBJ’s statement was the opposite of a confession; it was a self-glorifying tribute to his own high principles. (These were principles of recent vintage: Johnson had ferociously opposed civil rights laws up until five minutes before he became president.)

Do you doubt that LBJ said it?

We’ll assume he said it.

Do you have some other explanation?

Yes. He was bragging about his bravery while simultaneously smearing Republicans.

How about this:
When Bush attacked the Taliban, he said, “We just delivered the Northeast to the Democrats for a long time to come.”
Would that be accepted as proof of the liberal Northeast’s complicity with al-Qaeda?

But that’s not the only problem with Johnson’s self-serving quote. Both parts of his analysis are false. First, the Democrats didn’t pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964. That bill, along with every civil rights bill for the preceding century, was supported by substantially more Republicans than Democrats. What distinguished the 1964 act is that it was the first civil rights bill that Democrats finally supported in large numbers. Congratulations, Democrats!

Second, that’s not what happened: The south kept voting for Democrats for decades after the 1964 act. The very year Johnson said it, even Goldwater couldn’t win the South. You don’t get a better test case than that.

Goldwater was one of only six Republican senators to vote against the 1964 act, on libertarian grounds, and the other five did so only because
they supported Goldwater’s presidential nomination.
³
Although a much larger percentage of Republicans had supported the 1964 Civil Rights Act than Democrats—Republican leader Everett Dirksen publicly rebuked Goldwater for his vote
⁴
—Goldwater was the GOP’s presidential candidate that year.

Goldwater went on to win five southern states in 1964—Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina. But he lost eight—North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Texas and Florida. That’s not a sweep anyplace except Chicago.

Democrats argue that it isn’t the number of states Goldwater won, but which states he won. Goldwater’s southern support came from the exact same states that Strom Thurmond captured when he ran for president as a segregationist “Dixiecrat” in 1948—Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina—with Goldwater adding only Georgia.

That would be a reasonable argument, but only if your entire historical knowledge begins and ends with 1948 and 1964. Far from preparing the GOP for a southern takeover, Goldwater’s 1964 campaign nearly destroyed the party and created no foundation at all—not even in the South. (That’s what purist libertarianism gets you.)

The southern states Goldwater won were the very states that Nixon and Reagan would go on to lose, or almost lose, in their triumphant elections of 1968 and 1980. On the other hand, Democrats Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton would do pretty well in the Goldwater states in their southern sweeps of 1976 and 1992.

Republicans did not flip the states Goldwater won. Those states went right back to voting for the Democrats for many decades to come. Republicans always did best in the southern states Goldwater lost, which happened to be the same ones Republicans had been winning with some regularity since 1928.

These are the facts:

In 1928, Republican Herbert Hoover won Virginia, Tennessee, Florida, Texas and North Carolina. (See Appendix A for electoral maps.)

In the thirties and forties, FDR and Truman dominated national elections throughout the country, so there is little to be learned about southern voting patterns from those dark days.

In 1952, Republican Eisenhower won Virginia, Tennessee, Florida and Texas, losing Kentucky by a razor-thin 0.07 percent margin.

In 1956, Ike again won Virginia, Tennessee and Florida and added Texas, Kentucky and Louisiana.

In 1960, Nixon won Virginia, Tennessee, Florida and Kentucky.

You will note that 1928, 1952, 1956 and 1960 are years before 1964.

In 1968, Nixon won thirty-two states overall, including six southern states—all the usual Republican favorites: Virginia, Tennessee, Florida, Kentucky, North Carolina and South Carolina. These were the exact same states Republican Hoover had won in 1928, plus South Carolina. Nixon lost Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi—four of the five states Goldwater had won.

Four years after Goldwater’s run, the segregationist vote went right back to the Democrats. Democrat Hubert Humphrey picked up about half of George Wallace’s supporters that year; Nixon got none of the segregationist vote, as the polls demonstrated.
⁵
Nixon’s early poll numbers were the same as his vote, whereas Humphrey miraculously gained 12 percentage points—just a little bit less than Wallace lost on Election Day.

Then, in 1976, despite Nixon’s malevolent plot to corral racist Democrats, Jimmy Carter swept the entire South. All eleven states of the Old Confederacy—except the great commonwealth of Virginia—flipped right back and voted Democratic. The electoral map of Jimmy Carter’s victory in 1976 virtually splits the country down the middle, with Carter taking the entire South, a few solidly Democratic northeastern states and his vice president’s home state of Minnesota and neighboring Wisconsin. On the entire continental United States, Carter did not win a single state west of Texas. Of 147 electoral votes in the South, Carter won 127 of them.

Was that because Carter was appealing to bigots? Or is it only appealing to bigots when Republicans win in the South?

In 1980, Reagan won a landslide forty-four states. Reagan crushed Carter in the southern states Republicans had been winning off and on since 1928—Virginia, Tennessee, Florida, Texas and Kentucky. (Republicans had won at least four of those states in five previous elections—three predating Goldwater’s 1964 campaign—in 1928, 1956, 1960, 1968 and 1972.)

But despite it being a landslide election, Reagan still lost, or barely won, the Goldwater states, narrowly winning Alabama, Mississippi, and South Carolina
⁶
and losing Georgia outright. Reagan prevailed in only one Goldwater state by a significant margin: Louisiana. But so did Eisenhower in 1956. Even in an election in which the Democrats carried only six states in the entire country, one of those six was a Goldwater state.

Noticeably, Reagan won among young southern voters—and lost among their seniors, i.e., the ones who had voted in 1948 and 1964. The
segregationists never abandoned Democrats. Eventually, they died or were outvoted by other, younger southerners.

Extensive college polling in 1980 put Reagan in third place in the northeast, well behind John Anderson and Jimmy Carter. But at southern colleges, Reagan massacred both Anderson and Carter. Thus, Reagan won 14 percent of the student vote at Yale but 71 percent at Louisiana Tech University.
⁷
Are we supposing the LTU students were Goldwater men at age three? Dixiecrats before birth? No matter how you run the numbers, neither Nixon nor Reagan ever captured the Goldwater voters. Republicans certainly weren’t winning the Dixiecrat vote. Even in 1968, twenty years after Thurmond’s 1948 campaign, Nixon carried only one of Thurmond’s states, despite taking six southern states in all. After Thurmond’s presidential run, the Dixiecrats went right back to voting for the Democrats for another half century.

Of course, Nixon and Reagan did sweep the entire South in their 1972 and 1984 reelections. Also the Midwest, the Colorado Mountains, the windswept prairies, the Pacific Northwest and the Hawaiian Islands. Nixon walloped his opponent, George McGovern, in every state of the union except Massachusetts. The same thing happened in 1984, when Reagan won forty-nine states, losing only his opponent Walter Mondale’s home state of Minnesota—and Dutch nearly took that. A political party that attributes such landslide victories to a secret Republican plan to appeal to racists has gone stark raving mad.

Revealing what intellectuals really thought at the time, as late as 1972, liberal luminary Arthur Schlesinger Jr. openly acknowledged in the pages of the
New York Times
that the segregationists would be voting for McGovern—not Nixon—writing that “voters hesitate between McGovern and George Wallace.” Note that he did not say voters hesitated between Nixon and Wallace.

So firmly were the segregationists in the Democratic fold, that Schlesinger went on to praise them for their integrity. The Wallace votes in the primaries, Schlesinger said, showed that voters cared deeply about—I quote—“integrity.”
⁸
That’s what liberals said before they decided to do a complete historical rewrite.

And of course, McGovern gave an obligatory tribute to the segregationist Wallace in his acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention that year.
⁹
This was in 1972, the exact midpoint between Goldwater and Reagan, when the imaginary “southern strategy” should have been complete, according to the fevered propaganda of the left.

It wasn’t until 1988, a quarter century after Goldwater’s run, that a Republican presidential candidate finally won all five of his southern states in anything other than forty-nine-state Republican landslides. Bush won only a forty-state landslide that year.

In addition to Goldwater’s states, Bush also won California, Maine, Vermont, Illinois, Michigan, Iowa and Delaware. And yet no one talks about Republicans’ secret strategy to appeal to Ben & Jerry’s lesbians to explain their Vermont triumph in 1988.

Four years later the South would flip right back and vote for Clinton, who carried six southern states, including two Goldwater states.

Not only that, but from the moment of LBJ’s woe-is-me prediction in 1964 that Democrats had lost the South forever, Democrats continued to win a plurality of votes in southern congressional elections every two years for the next thirty years, right up until 1994.
¹⁰
Republicans didn’t win the Dixiecrat vote—the Dixiecrats died. If the Republicans were scheming to capture southern racists—of which there is no evidence—it didn’t work.

In presidential elections for forty years, between 1948 and 1988, Republicans never won a majority of the Dixiecrat states, except in two forty-nine-state landslides. Whatever turned the South away from the Democrats—their enthusiasm for abortion, gays in the military, Christian-bashing, springing criminals, attacks on guns, dovish foreign policy, Save the Whales/Kill the Humans environmentalism—it wasn’t race.

By contrast, Democrats kept winning the alleged “segregationist” states right up to the 1990s. In 1976, Carter won all the Goldwater states. Even as late as 1992, Clinton carried two of the southern states won by Goldwater: Georgia and Louisiana.

Were these southerners voting for Goldwater out of racism, but supporting Clinton for other, noble reasons? If anything, it was the opposite. Clinton’s mentor was J. William Fulbright, a vehement foe of integration who had voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. At his gubernatorial inauguration, Clinton publicly embraced Orval Faubus, the man who stood in the schoolhouse door in Little Rock rather than comply with the Supreme Court’s school desegregation ruling.
¹¹
(That’s when Republican Eisenhower sent in the 101st Airborne to enforce civil rights in Arkansas.)