Can the North Rise Again?
By TODD S. PURDUM
Published: February 8, 2004
ASHINGTON â?? He sometimes looks so Lincolnesque that all he lacks is the beard and the stovepipe hat. His Boston Brahmin ancestors moved in the leading antislavery circles of the Civil War. So when John Kerry dared to suggest just before the New Hampshire primary that he could win the presidency without the South, he may simply have been speaking like the bred-in-the-bone Yankee he is.
â??Everybody makes the mistake of looking south,â? Mr. Kerry said at Dartmouth College, Daniel Websterâ??s alma mater, just before the New Hampshire primary. â??Al Gore proved he could have been president of the United States without winning one Southern state, including his own. I think the fight is all over this country. Forget about those red and blue states.â?
Mr. Kerry might better have heeded that classic Southern confession of error: â??Shut my mouth!â? For all the homogenization of modern America, all the commercial communion of Starbucks and Wal-Mart, and all the connective power of Internet and Interstate, presidential politics remain, in many ways, the province of blue highways â?? and pronounced regional differences, pride and votes.
The nominating process, with its quadrennial hopscotch from Iowaâ??s pork tenderloins to New Hampshireâ??s doughnuts and a dozen other local delicacies, amounts to a serial test of candidatesâ?? abilities to prevail across sectional divides. So does the general election. The unforgiving math of the Electoral College means that candidates must win whole states, in different regions, not just the census tracts of their choice.
Mr. Kerry would be the first Northern elected president of either party since another senator from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy, won in the long election night of 1960 with Lyndon B. Johnsonâ??s help. (Kennedy then spent much of his time trying to placate Southern Democrats.) For better or worse, Mr. Kerry is as Boston as brown bread and clam chowder, while his rival John Edwards is as Carolina as hush puppies and she-crab soup. Mr. Edwards argues that he would be a stronger opponent against George Bush in his own backyard.
But Mr. Kerry hopes that his decorated combat service in Vietnam and his neo-populist pledge to take on â??powerful interestsâ? can serve him well throughout the country against the proud Texas Republican in the White House, and he argued as much on the CBS News program â??Face the Nationâ? last month. Asked if he had to win the South Carolina primary to prove his appeal in the region, he said, â??Iâ??m going to do my best to, but I donâ??t have to,â? and added: â??The South is not a foreign country. This is America, and these Americans in the South care about the same things that we care about in New Hampshire and elsewhere.â?
Up to a point. But there are also real differences, even if not precisely the differences of myth and memory. â??Itâ??s not so much a perpetuation of trends as it is new forms of distinctiveness,â? said Bruce J. Schulman, a professor of history and American studies at Boston University, who is at work on a history of the United States from 1896 to 1929. â??A lot of what weâ??re talking about here is a Sun Belt pattern, rather than an Old South pattern of regional distinctions. It has as much to do with strip malls and the defense industry and retired military people as it does with ancient racial and ruralist traditions.â?
To that end, Mr. Kerry has chosen to highlight not only his skills with a hockey stick, which he showed off in New Hampshire, but his ease with a shotgun, his love for Harley-Davidsons, his happiness in a helicopter and the deep loyalty of the â??band of brothers,â? some of them Southern, with whom he served on a swift patrol boat in Vietnam. On every stage, he is surrounded by the heroes of the post-Sept. 11 age: firefighters, whose union has endorsed him, and veterans, whose trials he shared.
Presidential contenders have always had to think globally and act locally, and have paid a price when they did not. Howard Deanâ??s advisers confessed that his standing in Iowa dropped 10 points after the revelation that he had criticized the stateâ??s caucuses four years earlier on Canadian television. James Gimpel, a professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland and the author of â??Patchwork Nation: Sectionalism and Political Change in American Politics,â? noted that presidential candidates not only need a few winning national themes, â??but to some extent need to tailor their stump speech locally a bit.â?
â??It may well be that someone sitting outside Traverse City, Mich., is concerned with the state of the economy as a whole but nevertheless be focused on the auto industry in particular,â? he said. â??Just as if you are moving into Florida and a candidateâ??s not prepared to speak on things like prescription drug coverage and Social Security, then the candidateâ??s not been well prepared.â?
Mr. Kerry is careful in every state to cite the number of jobs lost there, and to portray himself as more fiscally conservative than Mr. Bush. Unlike Al Gore four years ago, he does not shrink from associating himself with the deficit-cutting economic boom of Bill Clintonâ??s presidency, or with other charismatic Democrats of the 20th century.
The historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, herself a Massachusetts liberal who was transplanted from Long Island, said that given the political polarization in the country, Mr. Kerry need not be ashamed of being a Northerner, or even a liberal, so long as he casts himself in the proud tradition of Democrats from Franklin D. Roosevelt to John Kennedy. â??But it means absolutely having to fight back against the idea that thereâ??s something wrong with you,â? she said.
Of the 14 men of both parties who held the presidency from Ulysses S. Grant to Roosevelt, all were from the North, and most were Republicans, while the Democrats held the solid South but not the White House. Bitter battles over race and huge population and power shifts to the South and the West have reversed that geography, with Republicans â?? two from California (Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan) and two from Texas (the Bushes) dominating both the South and the presidency since 1968.
Political behavior may remain more localized than consumer behavior precisely because a McDonaldâ??s restaurant is virtually the same in Texas or California, while the states and their laws, constitutions, reigning establishments and traditions are not. Mr. Bushâ??s political strategist, Karl Rove, keeps hoping that Latino voters in California will behave more like those in Texas in their support of his boss, but so far they have not. Only the Potomac River divides Maryland and Virginia geographically, but culture and history â?? distant and recent â??make Virginia much more conservative.
Mr. Gore won the overall popular vote four years ago, and could have won the Electoral College by carrying any one of a number of states, from New Hampshire to Arkansas or his own Tennessee turf. But population shifts in the 2000 census mean that Republican-leaning states in the South and West have picked up electoral votes, so if Mr. Bush simply carries the states he won in 2000, he would automatically have a leg up.
That means that if Mr. Kerry turns out to be the nominee, he would need to carry not only all the states Mr. Gore won, but also some large state, like Florida or Ohio, that went Republican last time. â??Ohio offsets a lot if they can win that,â? said David Lanoue, chairman of the political science department at the University of Alabama.
So it is no accident that Mr. Bush has paid plenty of attention to Ohio since taking office, or that in the last two weeks he chased after the Democrats in two states that just happen to be very much in play for November: Iowa, where Mr. Bush barely lost to Mr. Gore in 2000, and New Hampshire, where he narrowly won. The president of all the people can never be just a niche player.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/08/weekinreview/08PURD.html?pagewanted=1
