Going South: the democrats aren't; their prospects are.

MICHAEL KINSLEY once noted that in Washington, a gaffe is when someone blurts out the truth. Toward the end of his New Hampshire campaign, John Kerry made just this kind of error. Asked whether he could win votes in the South, Kerry responded: "Everybody always makes the mistake of looking South. Al Gore proved he could have been president of the United States without winning one southern state, including his own."

The backpedaling began instantly. In his next words, Kerry said, "I think the fight is all over this country." When southern Democrats complained that the senator was writing off their region, his spokesmen denied the charge.

Republicans will be using Kerry's gaffe against him all year. Ralph Reed, who is helping to run the Bush campaign's southern operations, says, "This is an extraordinary statement for a frontrunner to make. I liken it to when Barry Goldwater said he wished he could cut off the Eastern Seaboard and let it float out to sea." Sen. Zell Miller of Georgia is the Republicans' favorite Democrat in part because he has been willing to accuse his own party of condescension toward the South. Kerry's comments will help Republicans make that case.

But the remarks were not an isolated blunder. Democratic strategists have increasingly taken the view that fighting for the South's electoral votes would be a waste of time and resources. In late December, The New York Times Magazine ran a list of the hot new ideas of 2003--a remarkable number of which were plans for reviving liberalism. One of the ideas: "Forget the South."

There was a time when Democrats obsessed about doing better in the South. They have not elected a president from anywhere else since 1960. By 1992, the conventional wisdom that the Democrats needed help in the South was so solid that the party nominated not only Bill Clinton but also Al Gore.

The new strategy makes a virtue of necessity. The Democrats want to write off the South because it's already written them off. As Kerry noted, Gore lost everywhere in the South (although many Democrats still think he was robbed in Florida). If the Democrats can't win there, the argument runs, they should instead try to win states such as Arizona, Nevada, and Ohio.

The idea has been influential. The big new voter-mobilization group the Democrats have started, America Coming Together, is mostly ignoring the South. Florida and Arkansas are the only southern representatives on the organization's list of 17 targeted states. Howard Dean may seem to be a holdout from this new Democratic consensus: He famously said that he would try to appeal to white guys with Confederate flags in their pickups. But Joe Trippi, who managed Dean's campaign until recently, contended that a Democrat could win the presidency without the South. If a Democrat carried the states Gore did plus New Hampshire, he said, he would win in 2004.

A nice try, but, as a number of commentators have pointed out, Trippi's math is wrong. The latest census gave more electoral votes to Bush's states, so Gore's states plus New Hampshire would leave a Democrat just shy of the finish line.

It is of course true that, in theory, a Democrat could win the White House by adding some non-southern states to Gore's states. But that doesn't mean that it's smart to try for that result; it's even less wise to announce the strategy openly. For five reasons, a party that goes north is likely to go nowhere.

1) Writing off the South means you have to sweep the North. Merle Black, a professor of politics at Emory University, has made the point that a party that gets no southern electoral votes has to get 70 percent of the non-southern ones. Theorists of the non-South strategy often talk as though the Gore states are reliably in the Democratic camp and need only to be supplemented. Why should we believe that? Ken Mehlman, the manager of Bush's re-election campaign, says, "Since Election Day 2000, red America has been getting redder and blue America has been getting purple." He says the campaign will be aggressive in seeking to turn marginal Gore states, especially in the Northwest and Upper Midwest. Sure, the Democrats have a shot at Ohio, Nevada, New Hampshire, and other states. But the Republicans could convert Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and other blue states to red.

2) Not spending resources in the South frees the Republicans, too. Whit Ayres, a Republican consultant based in Georgia, says that to concede the South is "probably a wise allocation of scarce resources for a Democrat as liberal as John Kerry. However, saying you're going to concede the South in so many words does make strategic planning easier for the Republicans." Dollars, and candidate visits, can be redirected to the Midwest.

3) The Democrats aren't totally dead in Dixie. The Clinton-Gore ticket won five southern states in 1992, and five in 1996. A disappointing result in 2000--in the first election after Clinton was impeached--doesn't take these states out of play forever.

4) Writing off the South would hurt Democratic Senate candidates there. There are six Senate races in the South this year: Democratic incumbents are retiring in Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, and both Carolinas, and a Democratic incumbent in Arkansas is up for reelection. If you count Oklahoma as southern, as some people do, there is a seventh race: a Republican senator there is retiring.

The Democratic candidates in these states may not be clamoring for campaign visits by John Kerry, or whomever the Democrats nominate. But they will want the national Democratic party to run advertising and get-out-the-vote operations. And the larger Bush's margin in these states, the more voters the Democrats will have to persuade to split their tickets--at a time when split-ticket voting is already declining.

Ed Kilgore, policy director for the Democratic Leadership Council, is a Kerry supporter, but he worries about the talk of bypassing the South. (Kilgore is from Georgia.) "It would be very, very helpful to have a Democratic [presidential] campaign that is not a big drag on the ticket," he says. "There's a big difference between getting 45 percent and 25 percent in terms of what happens down-ballot. If it's the latter, holding those [Senate] seats is going to be very difficult."

Then there are the South's state legislatures, a majority of which the Democrats still control. Kilgore says, "I've been hearing that the South was about to become a one-party region literally since 1964. It still hasn't happened. It doesn't need to happen. But it could become a self-fulfilling prophecy, especially this year." As bad as it might be for the Democrats to deploy no resources in the South, the damage will be even more severe if they also appear to insult the region by proclaiming its irrelevance.

5) Ignoring the South can be a way of ignoring important issues. There has been a wishful quality to recent Democratic strategic thought: Much of the party took from the 2002 elections the unlikely lesson that their mistake was to be too timid in challenging President Bush and in rallying their liberal base. Howard Dean argued that he could bring new liberal voters to the polls to counteract the existing electorate's unfortunate tendency to reject his politics.

Today's Democrats have a strong impulse to stay inside their comfort zone and talk only to people who already agree with them on national security, the place of religion in public life, emotional social issues such as gay marriage, and the like. As Kilgore puts it, "When people say write off the South, what they often mean is, 'Let's stop worrying about the kind of things that southerners tend to worry about: national security, cultural issues, ambivalence about government.'... 'Let's stop worrying about these troublesome people,' is the undertone of a lot of this commentary."

Viewed in this light, Dean's comments about southern voters were not so much a rejection of the ignore-the-South strategy as a kind of expression of it. His argument was that Republicans had gotten poor southern whites to vote for them on issues of "God, gays, and guns." He would beat this strategy in part by defusing the gun issue. But coming from pro-gun Vermont--where even Bernie Sanders, the declared Socialist who is the state's lone representative in the U.S. House, gets respectable grades from the NRA--Dean had to take a moderate line on guns. His major appeal to southern voters was supposed to be that even crackers need jobs and health insurance.

In other words: The issues that hurt Democrats are phony issues, and the real issues are issues of economics. There is a long and dismal history of such analysis on the left. It is electoral poison. A lot of voters in Ohio--and Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, and other states Democrats have to win to be competitive--share "southern" sentiments on values. A Democrat who carries in his head a mental map of the country from which the South has been excised will end up with a message that skews too far left. "If they write off the South, they're writing off a lot of the Farm Belt too," says South Carolina Republican congressman Jim DeMint.

Even Cliff Schecter and Ruy Teixeira, commending a highly qualified version of writing off the South in The American Prospect, see that danger. Democrats, they write, cannot "relax and be as liberal as they want to be about social issues and cultural sensibilities."

In other words: A "northern strategy" may not even make it in the North.