Following Vice President Al Gore's concession, President-elect Bush announced: "I was not elected to serve one party, but to serve one nation. The President of the United States is the President of every single American, of every race and every background." It was an appropriate speech delivered from the Democratic-controlled Texas House chambers. Referring to the Texas House as "a home to bipartisan cooperation," Bush added, "Republicans and Democrats have worked together to do what is right for the people we represent."
But who are George Bush's bipartisan Democrats?
Texas State Representative Paul Sadler, a Democrat, told the New York Times that Bush "didn't invent bipartisanship in Texas." It "kind of developed over the years because of the nature of the system." Nature of the system? What system? Essentially it is the same "system" around which the rest of the Southern Democratic Party developed.
The Southern Democratic Party was the party of slavery. Conservative Democrats were the Confederates during the Civil War. Democrats either were, or cooperated with, the KKK in resisting Reconstruction. Following Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), conservative Democrats practiced Jim Crow–separate and unequal. And after Brown v. Board of Education (1954), conservative Southern Democrats were the prime resisters of desegregation.
After Brown and the civil rights evolution of the 1960s, and the application of Goldwater's 1964 and Nixon's 1968 "Southern strategy," Southern white males especially began to leave the national Democratic Party in significant numbers. Republicans began to appeal to them with a series of racial themes and code words: "conservatism" during the civil rights struggles in 1964, "law and order" after the riots of 1967-68, "antibusing" in 1972, "welfare queen" in 1980, "Willie Horton" in 1988 and "compassionate conservatism" in 2000. Democrats also played this game: Carter's "ethnic purity" misstep in 1976 almost got him into serious trouble with the party's base; Bill Clinton used "Sister Souljah," and Al Gore emphasized crime ("blanket America in blue")–Democratic Southerners all. And all, Republicans and Democrats alike, are from the same system. Clinton redefined the Democratic Party away from the "special interests" of blacks–symbolized by Jesse L. Jackson Sr.–by politically manipulating a rapper. Because of Jackson's tireless pursuit of racial justice, and because he's a strong and highly visible Democrat, Republicans are now attempting to define and identify him as the symbol of the Democratic Party.
Taking a page from ultraconservative Ronald Reagan–who often referred favorably to the liberal FDR–Bush quoted the ideological founder of the Democratic Party, Thomas Jefferson. But Jefferson, a Virginian, was also the author of a Kentucky resolution and conservative theory of Southern resistance called "nullification," and his Democratic partner, James Madison, developed the theory of "interposition." Both concepts were forms of Southern resistance–first, resistance to ending slavery, and later to ending Jim Crow segregation. Jefferson also provided the ideological foundation for the concept of "local control"–the stepchild of "states' rights." Bull Connor, Jim Clark, Lester Maddox, Orval Faubus and George Wallace were all the products of this "system" and were Democratic advocates of states' rights, local control and an antifederal ideology of less government, lower taxes and a strong military.
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It is this legacy of conservative Southern Democrats that created the "bipartisan system" that State Representative Paul Sadler referred to. It is this legacy of conservative Southern Democrats in Congress with which President-elect Bush intends to work. But the President-elect's problem of governing all of the people cannot be satisfied merely by building bridges to essentially conservative Southern Blue Dog, Yellow Dog, New Dog or DLC Dog Democrats. These conservative dogs already support him. His problem will be in reaching out and building bridges to liberals and progressives who feel like they've been treated like dogs, who represent the dogs who have been left out in the cold and put in the doghouse by a bipartisan coalition of conservative Republicans and Democrats. Indeed, this is the bipartisan pack that consistently bites us.
This conservative bipartisan coalition is generally for denying a woman's right to choose, supports charitable choice and violates the Constitution's mandate of church and state separation by attempting to put parochial prayers and the Ten Commandments in public schools. Out of this bipartisan "system" comes the privatization movement–public vouchers for private schools, privatizing all or part of Social Security, privatizing healthcare through medical savings accounts and much more.
It is this conservative bipartisan coalition that allows Ralph Nader to say that we have one corporate party with two different names. If Democrats go down this bipartisan path it will only strengthen Nader and the Greens for 2002 and 2004. The move down that path has already been aided by Democrats: In 1992 a conservative Democrat, Bill Clinton, selected an even more conservative running mate, Al Gore, who in 2000 selected an even more conservative running mate, Joseph Lieberman. By helping to shift the Democratic Party and the country further right, a very conservative George W. Bush could select an ultraconservative Dick Cheney as his running mate–and win.
The heart and soul of this conservative bipartisan coalition is the South, though by no means do all white Southerners regard themselves as part of it. Most Southern Democratic elected officials would be Republicans above the Mason-Dixon line, and Republican Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine, for example, could not be elected south of the Mason-Dixon line in either party. She would be seen as too liberal, and her views would be considered traitorous to Southern heritage, traditions and values.
More than half of all African-Americans still live in the former Confederacy, and nationally they voted 92 percent for Gore. Yet the entire body of Democratic leadership in the House and Senate are all white men. While Bush got only 8 percent of the African-American vote, Democrats have no visible elected African-American Congressional leaders who compare to the Republican exceptions of Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice or Representative J.C. Watts of Oklahoma.
This system is what President Lyndon Johnson understood on August 6, 1965, when he signed the Voting Rights Act and afterward said privately that national Democrats had probably lost the South for at least a quarter-century. He understood the system that produced Southern politics and the bipartisan white coalition that drove it. His insight has now come home to roost big-time in the 2000 election. Bush won the old Confederacy and the rural states of the West, which have a similar political philosophy–plus Indiana, Ohio and New Hampshire. Gore won the old Union states of the North and Northeast, plus New Mexico, California, Oregon and Washington, which are more in harmony with national Democratic policies.
This system of bipartisan cooperation, social and economic conservatism, and individualistic, personalistic and pietistic religion is rooted in a region that imposes the highest number of death penalties and has the highest crime in the country, the poorest schools, the worst healthcare and housing, the greatest environmental degradation and the greatest poverty–and this conservative Southern system sustains it and is increasingly leading and influencing the nation. As State Representative Garnet Coleman, a Houston Democrat, said, "Even if something is bipartisan, it still often doesn't solve the problems of certain groups of people in Texas. They would be people who don't have health insurance, working families, the vulnerable in our society."
The South, and America, need a progressive bipartisan economic coalition to fight for better jobs and job training, healthcare, affordable housing and a good educational system–for all Americans. However, that is not the agenda of Bush and his Democrats.
