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• Monday, August 4, 2008 12:54 PM

  Too much blaming of the right

  I like some of the overall themes of the interview, especially the "dumbing down" of political discourse. But I found it odd that she was attributing this solely to the Republicans. The dumbing down seems to me more about the "southernization" of politics. Most of the "blue dog" Democrats are from the south or states that were "slave states," like Missouri. A few are pro-Israeli and pro-security people from the coasts like Jane Harman from California, but most are what I think of as Southerners who could only be Democrats if they were very conservative, since the Democrats lost the south after LBJ signed civil rights legislations.

  There was a blog posted a while back on salon.com about the legacy of the southern politician who died recently--why am i blanking on his name?-and I think that blog got it exactly right. He traces it back to Jimmy Carter, who was the first Democrat able to be elected after Johnson. Then there was Clinton who in my mind really transformed the Democratic Party from the days of Roosevelt to what it has become today, which is not a party of "liberals" or "progressives."

  Obama is from Chicago, but he sounds like an evangelical preacher when he gives speaches--why is that? I think it's the southern style and substance of politics that has inflected general political discourse in the U.S. And that can't be laid entirely at the feet of the Republican party, even if people like Newt Gingrich and Trent Lott dramatically symbolize it.

  Here's an example of it--Debbie Wasserman Schultz (Dem) who is from Florida would not criticize Ileana Ros--Lehman (she is about as right-wing a Republican as they come), because they're "friends." Shultz said the same thing about another Republican from Florida. What on earth does it mean

  I think this "southernization" is more important than any right/left grid, which Glenn has written about before, as somehow not quite capturing the shifts occuring in the bodypolitic. I think he's right, and I think the distinction that explains the "dumbing down" is more about region than Democrat vs. Republican.

  The 2000 election and which voters were screwed in Florida--those Democrats mostly African American, who were not going to vote for George Bush and some retired Jewish voters, many of whom are probably originally from places like New York or major urban centers in the north, who would never vote for Buchanon. It is true that Al Gore's campaign took up the cause of their voters, but not like Jesse Jackson or Black leaders who continued to complain about Black disenfranchisement in precincts in Florida.

  I think we're still feeling the repurcussions of the southern political class's reaction to civil rights. That's why Bill Clinton used race during Clinton's campaigning in the south. Can you imagine her or him saying what they did in New York? No, Bill Clinton would not have done that.

  The issue of race still matters in America, but particularly to southerners.

  —calbears Read calbears's other letters
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