North Carolina Democrats should read Schaller's book and calculate the merits of its big-picture strategey. Then they need to make their case for a place at the table, lest the national party whistle right past them.

My newspaper column is about Tom Schaller's book, Whistling Past Dixie.

UPDATE: See this N&O article, too: "Rahm Emanuel is one of the cool kids. Larry Kissell is not."

N.C. Democrats deserve place in national strategy

by Edward Cone
News & Record
12-3-06

If ever a book deserved not to be judged by its cover, it would be Tom Schaller's Whistling Past Dixie: How Democrats Can Win Without the South. The glib title sounds like a kiss-off to Southern Democrats, and a lot of Southern Democrats have taken umbrage at it, but they are missing the point of the book.

Schaller, a political science professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, has written a research-driven primer on winning presidential elections. The book is about allocating resources and planning strategy. It traffics in voting data and demographics, and urges Democrats to play to their strengths instead of playing me-too on issues defined by Republicans.

His advice to the Democrats is to forget for the moment about rebuilding their old "Solid South" base and to focus instead on bringing Midwestern, Southwestern and Mountain West states into their column. "Democrats should begin to build a non-southern majority by unapologetically tailoring policies and targeting messages to more receptive audiences outside the South," writes Schaller in the book. "Bowing and scraping to salvage a few southern votes here and there only leads to the sort of ideological schizophrenia that does little to improve the Democrats' southern fortunes and, worse, muddies the party's image outside the South."

Critics -- some of whom admit to not having read the book -- say Schaller would turn his back on loyal Democrats who deserve support and cede territory that is still worth a fight. Not so, he says. "The Democrats should aspire to capture the South, of course, but only after first targeting the Midwest and Interior West," he told me in a recent interview at my Web site. "Mine is an argument about efficiency and priorities, not about 'screwing the South.' "

He reiterated that point when I spoke to him during his visit last week to Duke, emphasizing his support for the "50-state strategy" of the Democratic National Committee under Howard Dean. That strategy calls for maintaining a minimum level of party staff across the country, rather than giving up on large swaths of GOP-dominated turf and having to rebuild a campaign apparatus from scratch for each election. But targeting resources, as Dean's rivals wish to do, is also smart and not mutually exclusive, he says, and the Democrats need to win the White House by gathering the low-hanging fruit.

Schaller, who lived and worked in Chatham County while getting his doctorate at Chapel Hill, differentiates between various Southern states and regions in the book, but that too-clever title and a habit of lumping together the 11 states of the former Confederacy often serve him poorly. He does hold Florida aside in a category of its own and says Virginia may be worth targeting in national elections, but I found his analysis less convincing as he moved further down the ticket to congressional and local races, especially here in North Carolina.

Democratic prospects look bright in North Carolina in ways that go well beyond control of the governor's mansion and legislature. The state party has a sharp, creative chairman in Jerry Meek at a moment when GOP leadership is in disarray. Republicans couldn't even knock the tarnished crown off Jim Black's head in November (which is no excuse for the Democrats not to demote him from leadership).

Meanwhile, grass-roots activists centered at BlueNC.com are working on a 100-county strategy based on Dean's national plan, and Meek got results last month in several western counties by pursuing a similar path into traditional Republican strongholds. A tide of economic populism is reviving memories of the New Deal in parts of the state hit hard by globalization. Even if the GOP trend in presidential-election years keeps the disappointing Liddy Dole in the Senate, this state has rarely seemed less in step with its sisters in the Deep South.

Schaller's strategy may make sense on a national level, but too rigid an application would be counterproductive. The Democrats would be foolish to miss opportunities in the South when they arise and to fail to recognize how fluid the situation on the ground can be. Look at what happened in North Carolina's eighth congressional district, just south of here, where upstart Democrat Larry Kissell recently came within a few hundred votes of ousting incumbent Robin Hayes. Just a little support from the national party might have made the difference for Kissell, but no help was forthcoming.

North Carolina Democrats should read Schaller's book and calculate the merits of its big-picture strategey. Then they need to make their case for a place at the table, lest the national party whistle right past them.

© News & Record 2006

Edward Cone (efcone@mindspring.com or www.edcone.com), a magazine journalist, contributes a column to the News & Record on Sunday.

Comments

[Robert P.]

Hi Ed,
Great column, but I think credit goes to NCDP for preparing to go 100 Counties, even if it didn't work out in 2006. I think we'll see something more concrete in 2008, and hopefully will see every seat contested.

[Ed Cone]

Thanks, RP. Isn't the 100-county project at BlueNC complementary to the NCDP effort?

[George Pence]

Thanks so much for this cogent analysis... I think your conclusions, and your synopsis of Schaller's arguments are spot on.