After high hopes at the inauguration, Obama finds he can’t break through in the South. Obama's problems in the South

Ever since his national debut at the 2004 Democratic convention, Barack Obama’s calling card has been that he practices consensus-oriented politics that transcend traditional divisions. But four years after his historic presidential election, the country he sought to bring together is even more divided than when he launched his candidacy. And no place is more polarized than the South.

Any hope that the nation’s first black president would usher in a period of reconciliation in the old Confederacy has crashed on the rocks of a harsh reality: African-Americans overwhelmingly support him and whites make up much of the opposition. Far from being a transformational figure in the South, Obama has instead reinforced the region’s oldest and sturdiest divide.


He’s hardly the only one at fault. Republican leaders have opposed him at nearly every turn on policy, and some GOP party activists have pushed a rumor-mongering campaign about his background that is a stand-in for a crude bigotry that’s no longer socially acceptable.

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But it’s not merely racism that explains why the South remains as politically polarized now as it has ever been. The lagging economy, redistricting, changes in the media, long-term political trends, how Obama and Republicans have governed and, indeed, old-fashioned prejudice have all contributed to perpetuating the status quo in Dixie, say over a dozen Democrats and Republicans from the region.

“I worry about where we are,” said Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.), who has written extensively on the politics of race and culture.

Webb recalled talking to Obama on more than one occasion about how to address the racial split, most recently in June.

“I think he wants to do something in this area, and that’s about all I can say,” said the Virginian, not wanting to relate the details of their conversation. “I’ve done my best to put this in front of him.”

Asked what exactly the president wanted to address, Webb paused before responding: “My observation is that, how can it be that in the party of Andrew Jackson, only 28 percent of white working males support the Democratic Party? It’s difficult to talk about these things.”

The South, like the rest of the country, is a complicated place. It’s at once the heart of the Obama resistance but also a region that is crucial to his reelection hopes. If he loses Florida, North Carolina and Virginia, it’s a virtual certainty that he’ll be a one-term president. Look for no further explanation as to why the Democratic convention is being held in Charlotte, the prototypical New South city, than the importance of North Carolina to the Obama White House.

So for political purposes, there are effectively two Souths now. There’s Virginia, North Carolina and Florida, which have become pivotal in presidential races, and there’s the Deep South, which is ignored by both White House candidates.

Politics in the former is not just literally black and white. In the latter, however, that increasingly is the case. Democrats in the Deep South are in danger of now becoming the black party and Republicans effectively the white party. That has both Democrats and Republicans worried.

“I don’t think it’s good for either party, and I certainly don’t think it’s good for politics in the region,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.). “Republicans are going to have to realize that we are going to have to have an ability to connect with minority candidates in larger numbers. History is just not on our side. And Democrats are going to have to realize that it’s probably bad for the Democratic Party to lose 75 percent of the white vote.”

Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), the civil rights hero who bled in Selma, echoed Graham’s concerns.

“It does bother me to see such a division in the South,” Lewis said, adding: “It’s not healthy to have so few white Democratic members from the South.”

Once known as the solid South because it was so reliable for Democrats to carry, much of the region has become a Republican stronghold, and its politics are deeply cleaved by race. These facts have been on vivid display in the Obama era, with Republicans capturing governor’s mansions, statehouses and leaving Southern white Democrats in the U.S. House all but extinct.

Hopeful Obama strategists once mused about competing in Georgia this year, but such talk has long since ended. Even in the three Southern states the president carried in 2008 — Florida, Virginia and North Carolina — he’s facing a far tougher race than he did four years ago and is in danger of losing.

The first explanation for the lingering Mason-Dixon political divide seized upon by Democrats is the sour economy.

“When you have 8 percent-plus unemployment, you’re going to have your share of people that have strong feelings about a presidential candidate,” former South Carolina Gov. Jim Hodges said.

Added Lewis: “When people are hurting and suffering, they take it out on somebody.”

The hope among such Democrats is that if Obama wins reelection, can work with some Republicans and the economy improves, then the sharp edges in the region may be sanded down.

But there are other structural issues perpetuating the polarization that won’t go away even with the unemployment rate going down.

The redistricting system has, in both the U.S. House and in state legislatures, created a system in the South in which black Democrats and white Republicans have every incentive to work with one another to create safe seats for themselves. That means little competition in the general election and a group of homogenous lawmakers in each party with sharply different views.

“When I first went to the Legislature in 1992, a big deal was cut between the black caucus and Republicans on redistricting,” Graham recalled. “We picked up more African-American Senate and House members, but white Democrats have become just about extinct. I just don’t think that’s good, I really don’t.”

Former Rep. Rick Boucher, a Virginia Democrat from the state’s rural southwest who survived nearly 30 years of GOP challenges until being swept out in 2010, said: “I can’t remember a time the country was as polarized as it is now.”

Boucher lamented the impact of partisan gerrymandering on Congress.

“Eighty percent of the House are in safe seats and 20 percent are in what’s considered toss-up seats,” the Virginian said. “When you’ve got 80 percent of people secure within their own party, their own party is basically the electorate. So you can expect them to play to the base of their own party. You’ve got an institutional polarization based on redistricting.”

A move to nonpartisan reapportionment could alter the process, but what’s unlikely to change is the trend toward more openly partisan media outlets.

In the modern era, the old Tip O’Neill maxim that “all politics is local” has been flipped on its head. Politics is now nationalized, the two parties more ideologically pure for it, and that’s in no small part due to how voters receive information. News has now become akin to the childhood “choose your own adventure books,” except it’s adults finding the version of events that corresponds to their political views.

For conservatives that means Fox News, and for liberals it’s MSNBC. And there’s plenty for both to find online, via forwarded emails or blogs, to reinforce preconceived notions.

“It’s, ‘Don’t tell me something I don’t agree with’ and, ‘How can I hear the version of the news that is the version of what I want to hear,’” explained former Rep. Allen Boyd, a Blue Dog Democrat from the Florida Panhandle who lost his seat in the 2010 wave.

Boyd has created a handy rule of thumb when it comes to people’s media consumption habits and their political preferences.

“If you will tell me before I can go into a congressman’s office what TV channel he’s going to have on in his lobby area, I can tell you what party he’s in,” the Floridian said. “And if you’ll tell me the politics of Joe Blow businessman in Panama City, I can tell you what channel he’ll have in his office.”

Boucher made the case that the partisan-media divide has become corrosive to political discourse because it threatens the idea that all citizens operate with the same set of facts.

“It’s led to a situation where it’s even hard to have a reasonable conversation,” he said, citing “an environment where somebody is in his or her home watching cable TV, then goes out the door to their local civic club convinced they have a clear sense of understanding about what’s wrong with the country.”

Lamented former North Carolina Democratic Rep. Bob Etheridge: “People take one tidbit of news from TV or the Internet and it becomes the gospel.”

Obama, of course, is merely an observer of the change in media just as he’s also only the latest political actor in a place that has been shifting toward a strict political-racial divide for decades.

“This is a region of the country that has been growing steadily more Republican since 1980,” noted Robert Gibbs, Obama’s former press secretary and a native of Auburn, Ala. “In 1994, Bill Clinton, a former Southern governor, had a huge wipeout in the congressional elections in the South and some folks like [Alabama Democrat-turned-Republican Sen. Richard] Shelby switched parties.”

Even James Carville, a Democrat who has not been shy about criticizing the president, cites longer-term trends in the region.

“I think you can lay some of this at Obama, but not a majority of it,” Carville said. “It didn’t start with Obama, alright.”

But it’s a source of immense frustration to Southern Democrats, both black and white, that white, lower-income voters who’d directly benefit from measures such as the Affordable Care Act are so resistant to their ancestral party.

“Our message is not appealing in the South to the very people we know our policies will benefit,” said freshman Rep. Terri Sewell (D-Ala.), who was a year behind Michelle Obama at Princeton and in the president’s Harvard Law class. “It’s something that definitely keeps me up at night.”

Webb traced the exodus of so many white Southerners from the Democratic family to the 1960s.

“They don’t feel like the Democratic Party likes them,” Webb said. “When I ran as a Democrat, that was the area I really wanted to focus on, to try to get back to the older definitions of what the Democratic Party, the Andrew Jackson party, the Franklin Roosevelt party, were. The Democratic Party was designed to be the party that embraced everyone. It wasn’t just the economic sense of it. It was like everybody should get a shot. You go back to … both the combination of the civil rights movement and anti-war movement, the ’60s and ’70s, interest group politics rather than focusing on individual opportunity seemed to overwhelm a lot of the Democratic Party.”

Where Southern Democrats will carp about Obama is on his lack of interest in improving the party’s fortunes in the Deep South, a part of the country he rarely travels to unless it’s for some form of crisis management or for a targeted fundraising strike.

“If I could fault the Obama team for anything, they’ve not shown much interest at all in Deep South states,” said Hodges, the former South Carolina governor, lamenting how hard it is now for moderate Democrats to win in the region. “That has been a disappointment to me. For the long-term health of the Democratic Party, I think it’s important that they devote more attention to the Deep South in the second term.”

Lewis said much the same.

“I would like to see the president spend more time in the South,” said the Atlanta congressman, who was raised in a small village in Alabama. “Not just in urban centers but small towns and rural communities. I think he can carry the ball much further down that road toward unifying not just the South but the entire country.”

Looking back at his first term, however, there’s little consensus between the parties about why Obama lost the goodwill he commanded for a brief moment after his victory and Inauguration.

Former North Carolina Gov. Jim Hunt, a Democrat, points the finger at the intransigent opposition.

“The reason you’ve got this polarization is because of politics,” Hunt said. “I give a big credit to the tea party. They have mobilized and organized and made it virtually impossible for moderate Republicans to support anything this president tried to do.”

Hunt and many other Democrats cited Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s now-famous 2010 statement that the “single most important thing we want to achieve” is to make Obama a one-term president as a sign that Republicans were unwilling to work with him.

But GOP officials reject that narrative and say Obama’s inability to bring people together stems in part from the disconnect between how he ran his campaign and how he’s actually governed.

“He was an excellent candidate,” Graham said. “This was the first serious African-American presidential candidate and that was intriguing and quite frankly pleasing to many white independent voters. I think [white independents] bought the message that he was selling and liked the salesman. Fast-forward four years. Now he’s lost the luster. The guy that ran in 2008 is not even recognizable anymore in terms of a bringing-us-together figure and his policy choices have hurt us a great deal.”

Especially in the South, a region that has benefited from the military and public works but is generally wary of the long arm of Washington, Republicans feel the president has taken aim at them.

“He’s done everything possible to punish us,” said Alabama House Speaker Mike Hubbard, the architect of the GOP’s historic 2010 legislative takeover in Montgomery. “It’s almost been like a planned-out endeavor. Look at what he’s done to the coal industry, on the National Labor Relations Board, trying to make it easier to unionize, and on increasing our Medicaid burden.”

Democrats scoff at the idea that Obama has any sort of grudge against the region, but some in the party acknowledge that the president lost his allure among a segment of the political center during the health care battle.

“A lot of ground was lost in the way the health care debate went forward,” said Webb, who believes the administration should have shaped the legislation from the outset and not let Congress devise differing measures and that the president’s declining fortunes can be traced to that moment in late 2009.

“There was a great deal of goodwill, and people were really looking forward to move forward coming out of the … debates of the Bush years and then the economic downturn,” Webb said. “And there was a big window of opportunity there and I think the manner in which health care [reform was passed] really hurt the perceptions of the president.”

Few in the South are apt to attribute the political division in the region to traditional bigotry, but members of both parties say there are loyalties that are grounded in race. Many African-Americans, prideful about Obama breaking the presidential color line, are unshakable in their allegiance while some whites are uneasy about someone of his political background in the Oval Office.

Hubbard said the opposition to Obama was “philosophical, not racial,” noting that Alabama native Condoleezza Rice is quite popular among Republicans in the state but acknowledging the difficulty his party has attracting African-Americans.

“We’ve had some success with younger blacks, but older blacks, even if they agree with you philosophically, just won’t vote for you,” he said.

At the same time, former Charlotte mayor and two-time Democratic Senate candidate Harvey Gantt noted, “some people are only going to vote Republican because they think Democrats are only interested in ‘the welfare state’ and that means black people.”

Republicans are sensitive to suggestions that Southern opposition to Obama is rooted in race and point to the election of Indian-American Republican governors in Louisiana and South Carolina as well as Rep. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), a freshman African-American from the Charleston area.

Scott said politics in the South would be less divisive if voters took a colorblind approach and acted on principles.

“I would like for us to evolve to a place where philosophy comes to drive the outcome of our elections,” he said. “People have to vote their philosophies, not some emotional connection to history.”

Yet it’s impossible to consider that race is a nonfactor in explaining the white contempt for Obama given the lingering view that he’s some sort of closet Muslim and is not actually born in America. When pressed, most Southerners will concede that the president’s race is a factor among a host of others.

“If you leave the race piece out of it, you’re going to get a misleading analysis,” former national Democratic chairman and South Carolinian Don Fowler said. “I wouldn’t say race at this point is the dominant issue. But what’s happened with Obama has been motivated in some part by that.”

Few Democrats have much optimism that the region’s divide can be bridged in the short term and fret that the next few years will bring even more partisan alignment by race.

“It’s very important to have a multiracial party in the South,” said Hodges, who was South Carolina’s last Democratic governor and was defeated a decade ago. “And we’re worse off than we were a few years ago. I don’t blame Obama for that. But it’s a disturbing trend over the last 20 years that has gotten worse.”

Carville conceded that “the short-term prognosis for Democrats in the South is pretty dismal.”

But the Louisiana native made the case that as more migrants, both from other states and other countries, move to the region, additional states will become as competitive as Virginia and North Carolina.

“We’ve constantly fretted that the party was losing Bubba, the high school-educated white male,” Carville noted. “Well, they’re gone. But the price the Republican Party has paid is with college-educated white women and immigrants. Who is growing faster?”

So for now, the divides that Obama has talked of bridging since his 2004 speech in Boston remain seemingly intractable.

Lewis, 72, said he remains optimistic but that leadership is needed.

Asked if the president could have done more, he said: “There’s always room to do more. We all could’ve done more.”

He cited his annual pilgrimages with members of Congress of both parties and all races to historic civil rights sites in the South as a way to foster relationships and a sense of commonality.

“There must be a deliberate effort on the part of the president and black and white members of Congress to work and pull together,” Lewis said.