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Showing
Cleavage
To
maintain their electoral majority in the South,
Republicans must maintain clear differences with
Democrats on taxes, guns and traditional
values.
The
late Lee Atwater, who was to President George W.
Bush’s father what Karl Rove is to the son, often
said that a Republican candidate in the South must
“show cleavage” in order to beat a Democratic
opponent. Atwater’s pun was his way of saying that
the long cultural attachment of Southern voters to
the Democratic Party forced a Southern Republican to
offer a sharp policy contrast to convince those
voters to change parties.
The
dramatic realignment of Southern voters contributed
more than any other factor to the emergence of the
Republican Party to its present national power.
Democrats are chipping away at the Republican
domination in the region, and they have had some
notable successes.
The
consequences of this Democratic counterattack has
national implications, but the battle isn’t a
national one. It is many state and local battles all
across the South.
Political
parties in the United States are not really national
in character, as the parties in Great Britain or
Germany are. American parties are, first and
foremost, state parties. These state parties
function in concert through national party
committees (i.e., the Democratic National
Committee and the Republican National Committee) to
set rules for the nomination of presidential
candidates.
What
is national in scope is a presidential campaign and
the presidency itself. A political party’s
presidential candidate expects to control that
party’s policy agenda. Once elected, a president
is generally viewed as the leader of the party and
dominates the policy debates and the workings of the
national committee.
Not
surprisingly, there is often tension between the
party’s presidential candidate (sometimes the
incumbent) and the state parties. In 1972, Richard
Nixon ignored the pleas of state party leaders and
actively supported Democratic candidates because
Nixon saw it as politically advantageous to his
presidential campaign.
Certain
presidential campaigns have helped to reposition a
party and caused it to grow. Barry Goldwater’s
losing campaign in 1964 prompted the party
realignment in the South that made Nixon’s 1968
victory possible. Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign
reoriented the Democrats to a center-left position.
The
staying power of parties, however, remains in the
state and local party organizations. They nominate
the candidates who, by the hundreds, determine the
overall direction of the party. They represent the
voice of the party over time.
The
first President Bush damaged his party when he
abandoned his pledge not to support new taxes, but
this mistake did not prevent the GOP from making
dramatic gains at the state and local level for the
next several years. This was because substantial
power and energy remained in the state and local
party organizations, most of which opposed their
president’s tax policy.
The
present threat to the dominance of the GOP in
Virginia and the rest of the South is not coming
from their president, but from incumbent state
politicians and party leaders who have grown too
comfortable with their majority status.
Mark
Warner capitalized on this GOP weakness in his 2001
gubernatorial election campaign. The GOP had begun
to lose its edge. It no longer “showed
cleavage,” to use the Atwater expression.
The party that rose to power as an alternative to
the paternalistic, tax-and-spend, anti-gun,
abortion-on-demand Democrats allowed its image to
become blurred.
Unlike
Republicans, Southern Democrats don’t need to show
cleavage. They can prevail when the differences are
blurred.
When
the Virginia GOP is no longer seen as the steadfast
champion of the taxpayer, traditional values and the
Second Amendment, it will be on its way to minority
status.
-- August
11, 2003
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