How Democrats lost the South

A National Party No More: The Conscience of a Conservative Democrat

By Sen. Zell Miller

Sen. Zell Miller, Georgia Democrat, chastises his party for chronic failures of leadership in a new book, “A National Party No More: The Conscience of a Conservative Democrat” (Stroud & Hall, Atlanta). Mr. Miller, governor of Georgia from 1991 to 1999, won a special election for the Senate seat after the death of Paul Coverdell, a Republican, in 2000.

First of three parts:

Once upon a time, the most successful Democratic leader of them all, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, looked south and said, “I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.”

Today our national Democratic leaders look south and say, “I see one-third of a nation and it can go to hell.”

Too harsh? I don’t think so. Consider these facts.

In 1960, the state of Georgia gave Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kennedy a higher percentage of its vote than did JFK’s home state of Massachusetts. “You can look it up,” as Casey Stengel used to say. Only the percentage in Rhode Island was greater.

And Georgians were not disappointed in Kennedy’s performance as president. He stared down the Russians over Cuba and cut taxes in a significant way that stimulated the economy. Had he not been assassinated, he could have carried Georgia a second time.

In the last nine presidential elections, except for 1976 when regional pride was a huge factor and native son Jimmy Carter lost only Virginia among the 11 states of the old Confederacy, the scoreboard read like this:

Hubert Humphrey carried Texas in 1968 because of Lyndon Johnson, but no other state of the 11. Carter carried only Georgia in 1980; the others left the incumbent. In 1992, another native son of the South, Bill Clinton, carried Georgia, Arkansas, Louisiana and Tennessee. In 1996, Clinton lost Georgia but picked up Florida and kept Arkansas, Louisiana and Tennessee.

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